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Figure 1. The administrative districts of the Russian Baltic provinces in 1783: attachment to vol. 8 of Hupel’s Nordische Miscellaneen(1784).
Source. August Wilhelm Hupel, Hg., „Anhang,” Nordische Miscellaneen Bd. 8. (Riga: Hartknoch,1784).
Dostoyevsky’s character Raskolnikov fumes at his sister Dunechka’s betrothal to Mr. Luhzin. Reflecting on their engagement and claiming to have a profoundly subliminal understanding of what he implies to be his sister’s servile and hardworking character, he concludes that she would “rather go and work with the Negroes on some plantation-owner’s estate or with the Latvian peasants of some Baltic German than defile her spirit and her moral sensibility through such a liaison.”11 Changing the status of the Latvian peasantry and the institution of serfdom were among issues considered to be central to the Enlightenment in the Russian Baltic province of Livonia in the latter half of the eighteenth century. A focus on social and political injustice—particularly the working and living conditions—confronting the Latvians was also to become a driving issue of the Enlightenment and reform in Livonia.