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| Mikhaïl Nesterov (1862-1942) - Russian boy |
A few weeks
ago, with the character of the humble Sonia, from Crime and Punishment,
I wanted to open a new wing of the "Dostoevsky’s memorial" which I have tried modestly to establish for years. After having presented the humbled, the children, the crazy and
the rejected, I intend now to present some examples of this “deified” humanity towards
which all the work of the great Fyodor leads us. Just this once it will not hurt to break with tradition,
the character whom I would like to evoke today does not appear in one of the
five great novels of his mature years, but in a short story published in February
1876 in the Writer’s Diary. The peasant Marey – it is both the title
of the story and the character's name – recounts a childhood memory of the
writer(1).
(…) I remembered the month of August in our country house: a dry bright
day but rather cold and windy; summer was waning and soon we should have to go
to Moscow to be bored all the winter over French lessons, and I was so sorry to
leave the country. I walked past the threshing-floor and, going down the
ravine, I went up to the dense thicket of bushes that covered the further side
of the ravine as far as the copse. And I plunged right into the midst of the
bushes, and heard a peasant ploughing alone on the clearing about thirty paces
away. I knew that he was ploughing up the steep hill and the horse was moving
with effort, and from time to time the peasant's call "come up!"
floated upwards to me. I knew almost all our peasants, but I did not know which
it was ploughing now, and I did not care who it was, I was absorbed in my own
affairs. I was busy, too; I was breaking off switches from the nut trees to
whip the frogs with. Nut sticks make such fine whips, but they do not last;
while birch twigs are just the opposite (...) Even as I write I smell the fragrance
of our birch wood: these impressions will remain for my whole life. Suddenly in
the midst of the profound stillness I heard a clear and distinct shout,
"Wolf!" I shrieked and, beside myself with terror, calling out at the
top of my voice, ran out into the clearing and straight to the peasant who was
ploughing.
It
was our peasant Marey. I don't know if there is such a name, but every one
called him Marey – a thick-set, rather well-grown peasant of fifty, with a good
many grey hairs in his dark brown, spreading beard. I knew him, but had
scarcely ever happened to speak to him till then. He stopped his horse on
hearing my cry, and when, breathless, I caught with one hand at his plough and
with the other at his sleeve, he saw how frightened I was.
"There
is a wolf!" I cried, panting.
He
flung up his head, and could not help looking round for an instant, almost
believing me.
"Where
is the wolf?"
"A
shout ... someone shouted: 'wolf' ..." I faltered out.
"Nonsense,
nonsense! A wolf? Why, it was your fancy! How could there be a wolf?" he
muttered, reassuring me. But I was trembling all over, and still kept tight
hold of his smock frock, and I must have been quite pale. He looked at me with
an uneasy smile, evidently anxious and troubled over me.
"Why,
you have had a fright, aïe, aïe!" He shook his head. "There,
dear.... Come, little one, aïe!"
He
stretched out his hand, and all at once stroked my cheek.
"Come,
come, there; Christ be with you! Cross yourself!"
But
I did not cross myself. The corners of my mouth were twitching, and I think
that struck him particularly. He put out his thick, black-nailed, earth-stained
finger and softly touched my twitching lips.
"Aïe, there, there," he said to me with a slow, almost
motherly smile. "Dear, dear, what is the
matter? There; come, come!"
I
grasped at last that there was no wolf, and that the shout that I had heard was
my fancy. Yet that shout had been so clear and distinct, but such shouts (not
only about wolves) I had imagined once or twice before, and I was aware of
that. (These hallucinations passed away later as I grew older.)
"Well,
I will go then," I said, looking at him timidly and inquiringly.
"Well,
do, and I'll keep watch on you as you go. I won't let the wolf get at
you," he added, still smiling at me with the same motherly expression.
"Well, Christ be with you! Come, run along then," and he made the
sign of the cross over me and then over himself. I walked away, looking back
almost at every tenth step. Marey stood still with his mare as I walked away,
and looked after me and nodded to me every time I looked round. I must own I
felt a little ashamed at having let him see me so frightened, but I was still
very much afraid of the wolf as I walked away, until I reached the first barn
half-way up the slope of the ravine; there my fright vanished completely, and
all at once our yard-dog Voltchok flew to meet me. With Voltchok I felt quite
safe, and I turned round to Marey for the last time; I could not see his face
distinctly, but I felt that he was still nodding and smiling affectionately to
me. I waved to him; he waved back to me and started his little mare.
In a few lines,
the writer outlines for us a simple and peaceful man. This hard illiterate
peasant is in fact a wise person, a real "Christophoros", a bearer of
Christ. It is in the name of Christ that he soothes the terrified boy, and it
is with Christ that he sends him back home: "... Christ be with you! Come,
run along then..." Such is indeed, for Dostoevsky, the deified man: filled
with the divine-humanity of the Saviour.
The narrative
is inserted into the writer's reflection on the Russian people, of which he
tends to give a somewhat idealized picture. As he writes it, he has just read
an article by Constantine Aksakov (1817-1860), one of the intellectual guides
of the Slavophiles. Dostoevsky is particularly struck by a sentence of this
article. Aksakov writes that "the Russian people have been enlightened and have reached a ‘high degree of culture’ for a long time." Dostoevsky then tells
how the memory of the good peasant Marey came to mind when he was deported to Siberia for having attended a revolutionary group(2).
But I think that all
these professions de foi are very boring to read, so I am going to tell
a story, or rather not, it's not a story, say, just a distant memory that, I do
not know why, I just want to report here and now, in conclusion of my essay on
the people. I was only nine then... but no, I'm going to start when I was
twenty-nine years old. He recalls then an evening
in the penal colony, when, exasperated by brawlers and drunken convicts, he
lies on his bunk, sullen: Gradually I sank into forgetfulness
and by degrees was lost in memories.
Then comes the story of the encounter
between the child and the peasant Marey. Finally, at the conclusion of the
story, the writer returns to the meaning of the event, and especially of this
man who left his mark on his memory.
(…) and all at once now, twenty years afterwards in
Siberia, I remembered this meeting with such distinctness to the smallest
detail. So it must have lain hidden in my soul, though I knew nothing of it,
and rose suddenly to my memory when it was wanted; I remembered the soft
motherly smile of the poor serf, the way he signed me with the cross and shook
his head. "There, there, you have had a fright, little one!" And I
remembered particularly the thick earth-stained finger with which he softly and
with timid tenderness touched my quivering lips. Of course any one would have
reassured a child, but something quite different seemed to have happened in
that solitary meeting; and if I had been his own son, he could not have looked
at me with eyes shining with greater love. And what made him like that? He was
our serf(3) and I was his little master, after all. No one would
know that he had been kind to me and reward him for it. Was he, perhaps, very
fond of little children? Some people are. It was a solitary meeting in the
deserted fields, and only God, perhaps, may have seen from above with what deep
and humane civilized feeling, and with what delicate, almost feminine
tenderness, the heart of a coarse, brutally ignorant Russian serf, who had as
yet no expectation, no idea even of his freedom, may be filled.
And Dostoevsky
concludes his meditation on the people: Was not this,
perhaps, what Konstantin Aksakov meant when he spoke of the high degree of
culture of our peasantry? And when I got down off the bed and looked
around me, I remember I suddenly felt that I could look at these unhappy
creatures with quite different eyes, and that suddenly by some miracle all
hatred and anger had vanished utterly from my heart. I walked about, looking
into the faces that I met. That shaven peasant, branded on his face as a criminal, bawling his hoarse, drunken song, may be that very Marey;
I cannot look into his heart.
May we always find, not too far from us, in a
clearing, a good peasant Marey to comfort us in difficult times: the wolf, real
or imaginary, is never far away.
Fiodor (the
other one)
(2) In 1849, members of the Petrashevsky group, that Dostoevsky attends,
were arrested and sentenced to death. After a mock execution, the condemned
were pardoned and deported to Siberia. Dostoevsky remained there until 1854. He
recounts this experience in Memories of the house of the dead.
(3) The story is set in 1830 (Dostoevsky is nine years old) and serfdom will
be abolished only in 1861.
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