«Country-estate culture» in the Russian literature of the XIX - beg. XX century. Social and cultural aspects

The country estate of the XIX century as a phenomenon of Russian culture united the parts of the Russian nation - nobility and peasantry, split in the process of Peter's reforms - into a certain wholeness. Both Europeism and «soilness» of the Russian classical literature came from the fact that its creators, the Russian landlords with their European education, within the estate were closely tied with the peasants and thus could express the folk mentality by the European artistic language. The town intellectuals of the «Silver Age», alien to the «country-estate culture», on the opposite, lost the immediate link with the common people and created the literature, which was far from the national religious tradition («legend»), not that of «soil», but of «catastrophy».