Skorodno

Skorodno is a village in the Krapivinskia district of the Toula Government, the home village of the peasant Simeon Kartinkin, one of the three prisoners tried alongside Katerina Maslova for the poisoning of the merchant Therapont Emelianovich Smelkoff. It appears in the novel as a geographical marker of Kartinkin's origin and as a place name that recurs in the peasants' talk about their own land and labor, anchoring the story's rural world in a specific, impoverished locality.

Identity and Location

Skorodno is identified in the trial proceedings as the village of the peasant Simeon Kartinkin, who is accused of stealing from the merchant Smelkoff and of supplying the poison that caused his death. When the president of the court asks Kartinkin for his class, government, district, and parish, Kartinkin answers: "Toula Government, Krapivinskia district, Koupianovski parish, the village Borki." Skorodno is not his own village but a neighboring place name that appears in the peasants' conversations about their land and labor. It is a place where the peasants of the region work the fields, as when Taras, Theodosia's husband, recalls that after his wife's attempted poisoning was forgiven, his father said: "Now is not the time for all that; there's the harvest to be gathered in down at Skorodino." The name thus marks a specific, hard-working rural landscape within the novel's geography.

Narrative Significance

Skorodno functions as a synecdoche for the peasant world that Nekhludoff encounters when he visits his estates. It is a place where the land is worked by peasants who are poor, overworked, and dependent on the landlord's will. The name appears in the context of Taras's story of reconciliation with his wife Theodosia, after she had tried to poison him. The father's instruction to go to Skorodino to reap the rye signals the return to ordinary, demanding agricultural labor after a crisis. The village thus represents the relentless cycle of peasant work that continues regardless of personal drama or legal punishment.

Connection to the Wider World

Skorodno is also linked to the broader theme of peasant migration and the search for work. The isvostchik who drives Nekhludoff to the prison in Moscow tells him that peasants are flocking to the towns because there is no land for them in the villages. He mentions a Frenchman, Dufour, who bought an estate from a former landlord and now "rides on us as he pleases." This Frenchman's estate is not named, but the pattern of land alienation that drives peasants from places like Skorodno into the cities is a central concern of the novel. Skorodno, like Borki and other villages, is a place from which peasants are pushed by landlessness and poverty, and to which they return only for the harvest, if they can.

Thematic Resonance

The name Skorodno, though mentioned only briefly, carries the weight of the novel's critique of land ownership and rural exploitation. It is a place where the land is worked by peasants who are at the mercy of landlords and their agents, and where the fruits of their labor are taken from them. The village is a concrete instance of the abstract injustice that Nekhludoff comes to recognize: that the people who work the land are not its owners, and that this dispossession is the root of their misery. Skorodno, like the other villages in the novel, is a place where the fundamental law of human life—that men should live by the sweat of their brow on land that is theirs—is violated.