Private property and settler colonialism: Edyta M. Bojanowska, ‘Was Tolstoi a Colonial Landlord? The Dilemmas of Private Property and Settler Colonialism on the Bashkir Steppe’, Slavic Review, 81, 2, 2022, pp. 324-348 | settler colonial studies blog

Private property and settler colonialism: Edyta M. Bojanowska, ‘Was Tolstoi a Colonial Landlord? The Dilemmas of Private Property and Settler Colonialism on the Bashkir Steppe’, Slavic Review, 81, 2, 2022, pp. 324-348

25Oct22

Excerpt: A peasant named Pakhom leaves his cramped Russian village in search of more land. He grows increasingly greedy, buying ever more of it, and ultimately perishes during his most spectacular transaction in the faraway imperial periphery of Bashkiria, famed for fire-sale prices. Pakhom stakes 1,000 rubles on a land parcel as large as he can walk around in a day, agreeing to the condition that he must return to his departure point by sundown. He does, but dies of exhaustion that very moment. In this 1886 moral parable for the common reader by the title “Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno?” (How Much Land Does a Man Need?), Lev Tolstoi answers the question from his own title in the following way: the three arshins, or roughly six feet, that it takes to bury Pakhom, is exactly how much land anyone needs.

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