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competent camp commandant, fully vested with tsarist authority,
and during which the only real friends with whom he could hold
discourse were Polish political prisoners - how could such an ex–
perience have effected such a change? Some scholars have resorted
to the Freud essay and answered "masochism" or "repressed homo–
sexuality ." Frank is far more persuasive.
Dostoevsky was shocked by the brutality and ferocity of the
peasant-convicts. At the same time, he was "greatly upset by the
Polish abhorrence of the Russian peasant-convicts, whom they looked
down upon with supreme contempt and refused to regard as anything
but criminal riffraff." The attitude reminded him of his previous
con–
descension
to the "backward" peasant, just as, in the prison camp, he
was becoming aware that in spite of their exclusion of him from their
midst as an alien nobleman, the peasants had certain virtues of stead–
fastness, skill, endurance , and a basic sense of justice . For Dostoev–
sky , it was never faith in God or in Christ that was in question, but
rather a faith in the Russian common people as "the human image of
Christ." Much later, he wrote in
The Diary of a Writer
a piece called
"The Peasant Marey," in which he recalled a childhood experience in
which a peasant out of Christian sympathy and responsiveness com–
forted his panicky, childish fears.
It
was this image of the peasant
Marey that rose between him and his Polish companions with regard
to the peasants. He and the peasants shared a common, Orthodox,
conception of Christ. The peasant faith was more important, more
fundamental, than the peasant brutality. Dostoevsky turned against
the notion that the peasants could be helped to rise from barbarism
by liberal condescension from above. Dostoevsky therefore aban–
doned the intelligentsia rebellion, through a regeneration of his faith
in the peasant, which was a faith in the peasant's Christianity. He
did not, in the process, like the Slavophiles, reject the Petrine
reforms, or like them glorify or sentimentalize the Russian past . I
have here greatly simplified what in Frank is a long and subtle ac–
count.
Curiously, however, Frank sees an analogous shift toward iden–
tification of Russian national characteristics with the peasant, his
ways and institutions, an upsurge in nationalism and national feel–
ing taking place far from the prison-camp experience, among Dos–
toevsky's former Westernizer friends, including even the basically
cosmopolitan Turgenev. And he sees this as typical of the 1850s.
While defeatism in the Crimean War had been rife, even among the
Slavophiles, the death of Nicholas I and the advent of a new tsar who
