Donald Fanger, in an essay on the representation of the peasantry in classical Russian literature, contends that the peasant

In this chapter I shall apply a similar thesis more broadly to the corpus of classical Russian thought, which may be said to include imaginative literature. That is to say, I shall argue that the Russian common people, or narod, as conceived by the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, constituted not so much a clearly definable social entity as a construct fashioned in the minds of the intelligentsia. The function of this construct was to assist the intelligentsia in the urgent tasks of defining the identity and mission of Russia as a nation and of clarifying its own role within the nation. The emergence of the construct was one manifestation of the intelligentsia's attempt to solve the riddle of Russia's relationship with the West.