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were peasant responses to the intolerable mistreatment and injustices this
class customarily suffered at the hands of their superiors. More impor–
tant, perhaps, was that the atrocities of these peasant-criminals had not
obliterated their moral sense. For Dostoevsky describes their behavior at
the Easter services when each "brought his poor farthing," feeling that "in
God's eyes we are all equal." And "when with the chalice in his hands the
priest read the words ' ... accept me, 0 Lord, even as the thief,' almost
all of them bowed down to the ground with the clanking of chains, appar–
ently applying the words literally to themselves."
A transformation thus took place in Dostoevsky's relation to the
peasant-convicts, one that provides the underlying thematic movement
of
House of the Dead.
His feelings gradually evolved from the first
shock of horror to that of a more sympathetic comprehension and even,
at last, admiration.
In
a passage that misled Nietzsche, who thought
Dostoevsky was providing confirmation for his own effort to go beyond
conventional ideas of good and evil, Dostoevsky even wrote: "Perhaps,
indeed, they [the peasant-convicts] were the most highly gifted and the
strongest of all our people." But he never describes his own evolution
from within, never, for reasons that may be both external (censorship)
and artistic (his aim of reporting on prison-camp life), depicts his own
feelings directly.
It
is only seventeen years later, in a famous article of his
Diary of a Writer
(r876), "The Peasant Marey," that he provided a psy–
chological supplement to his prison memoirs.
Here he begins with a sharp and swift evocation of an Easter week
celebration in the camp, when the convicts could drink, carouse, and
quarrel to their hearts' content; and he looked on with a feeling of deep
loathing at the raucous turbulence and brutality unrolling before his
eyes. To escape, he walks outside the barracks and meets a cultivated
Polish prisoner, who tells him disgustedly in French: "I hate these ban–
dits." Returning then to lie down on the plank bed where all the con–
victs slept, he recalls a childhood incident when, frightened by the cry
that a wolf was in the forest where he was strolling, he ran for succor to
a peasant plowing in the fields, a serf owned by his father, named Marey.
The kindly peasant calmed the frightened child with what Dosto–
evsky describes as almost motherly tenderness, reassured him that there
was no wolf, and sent him home after blessing him with the sign of the
cross. As this recollection came flooding back, it also brought about a
complete reversal in Dostoevsky's earlier revulsion against the spectacle
of peasant-convict barbarity:
