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This chapter depicts and unpacks the nature of production and work, the special skill profile that made paper mills distinct if not unique, and how over time owners and workers forged a mutually acceptable paternalism. It describes paternalism as the glue that made Maine's paper mills both successful businesses and durable communities during the paper industry's halcyon years from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s. It also looks at the situation in the S. D. Warren Company to understand the critical role of skill and the paradox of suffering and success that marked the paper workers' lives. The chapter highlights that paper mill work delivered high wages and benefits, and offered remarkable jobs and economic security with few parallels in Maine's generally lower-wage, blue-collar sectors. It reveals how the lives of paper mill workers demonstrate the crucial place of skills, craft pride, and membership in a high-status industrial community.

This chapter assesses listening and paper making in three stories from Ivan Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter (1852): “Khor' and Kalinych,” “The Singers,” and “Bezhin Meadow.” In all three, Turgenev's hunter-narrator thinks about his tenuous aural access to peasant voice. The first includes the purchase of rags to make paper; the second involves a song contest won by a paper factory vatman; and in the third a paper smoother describes a domovoi (house spirit), who manipulates the tools in a paper factory. The chapter argues that Turgenev's careful descriptions of hand paper making at a time when paper was increasingly being produced through an automated process—in stories about listening to “the people” in the dark—anticipate and respond to the critics' valorization of unmediated listening. In Notes of a Hunter, he finds a different way to justify his transcription of his characters' thoughts and thereby his critique of serfdom: he makes the production of paper and thus writing itself seem a natural part of the countryside.