The Pesants

While reading the short story "The Peasants" I learned a lot of how these people got to live their lives and what were their conditions of living during this modernizing but not so good time in the history of Russia. Thanks to the story I learned that Peasants, after being emancipated, some left the commons to find better jobs in Moscow. But as in the story, we see that moving to Moscow did not necessarily mean that they could get a good job and a better life. Nikolai, the character that we meet at the beginning gives us the example of this since we learn that he moved to the city to work but now he has to come back to the countryside because he is sick and medicine costs too much in the city. Unfortunately for the peasant, getting a job in the city did not mean a lot of money because most of the time, the jobs they got were working at a factory where they got paid very little per hour.

When it comes to the life of the peasant who stayed in the countryside, we learn the most about them. The story shows how poverty and starvation are very big problems in the countryside. This is because, these people do not make that much money selling the little crops they have and even if they do, the men spend most of it on alcohol. Unfortunately, the peasant man are not very efficient, in fact, most of them are drunk a lot of the time. Thanks to this, the men were violent and useless people in the villages and we get very good examples of this in the story with the case of the burning hut and the case of Marya's beating.

Many, if not all of the peasants in the countryside were in debt, which is why there was a lot of poverty. What happens is that, every time they earn some money they have to spend it on food and what is left is spent in alcohol, which since a few months before was being taxed by the tsar. As a result, whenever the peasant needed something, they had to borrow money, which put them into even greater debt. This is why, after reading