The Peasant Marey
A Paschal story about becoming the Publican rather than the Pharisee, the wise thief on the cross, rather than the unwise. As a function of wise remembrance - the ultimate Dostoevskian key.
With "A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree" and "A Centenarian", “Muzhik Marey”1 closes the trilogy from the Diary of a Writer that Dostoevsky himself explicitly mentioned, according to his wife, Anna2, in view of a "children's book".
As previously stated:
If we were to pick but one Dostoevsky story, for parents and children, on how to acquire and consolidate the mind of the Publican, rather than that of the Pharisee, it would have to be "The Muzhik Marey."
And if we were to select a story about the discriminating use of recollections for the elderly, perhaps in order to acquire the mind of the good thief on the cross, it would still be "The Muzhik Marey."
We might even say that “Keep thy mind in hell and despair not” (St. Silouan) becomes, in Dostoevsky’s “Peasant Marey”: “Keep thy mind in the hell of fallen human nature, and always rejoice, in the Risen Christ.” How does it happen?
The secret most powerfully revealed in the wonderful story that follows is that of edifying remembrance. And thus, of edifying vision.3 Of seeing in the light of Christ, and of His commandments. Ultimately, of seeing like the Mother of God sees. For, in Marey, the likeness of "wise motherhood"4, and, ultimately, the face and likeness of The Mother of God, are deliberately evoked, by emphasizing the tenderness, and the maternal delicacy of the muzhik, as well as by his unusual name: "Marey", a reference to the name "Mary"5. (The peasant's real name was Mark, according to the memoirs of Andrei, the author's younger brother.)
Here is the art of finely polished writing of the mature writer, and his experience of considerable suffering, external and internal, assumed in the spirit of the wise thief, directing him6 towards the art of arts and the science of sciences. Towards the guarding of thoughts, in the unseen warfare, using the art of wisely cultivated remembrances, along the path of "the beauty that will save the world" (as the main character from The Idiot would say). A tour de force, that is not only literary. An autobiographical story that illuminates and completes Dostoevsky's last word about the building up of souls, that he put in the mouths of the figures intended to be the most exemplary of his work, Alyosha Karamazov, and his mentor, Elder Zosima (by whom the element of choice is not overlooked):
You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days. And if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. (Alyosha)7
…
From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the heart knows how to find what is precious. (Elder Zosima, in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, emphasis added.)8
***
F.M. Dostoevsky
THE PEASANT MAREY9
It was the second day in Easter week. The air was warm, the sky was blue, the sun was high, warm, bright, but my soul was very gloomy. I sauntered behind the prison barracks. I stared at the palings of the stout prison fence, counting the movers; but I had no inclination to count them, though it was my habit to do so. This was the second day of the "holidays" in the prison; the convicts were not taken out to work, there were numbers of men drunk, loud abuse and quarrelling was springing up continually in every corner. There were hideous, disgusting songs and card-parties installed beside the platform-beds. Several of the convicts who had been sentenced by their comrades, for special violence, to be beaten till they were half dead, were lying on the platform-bed, covered with sheepskins till they should recover and come to themselves again; knives had already been drawn several times. For these two days of holiday all this had been torturing me till it made me ill. And indeed I could never endure without repulsion the noise and disorder of drunken people, and especially in this place. On these days even the prison officials did not look into the prison, made no searches, did not look for vodka, understanding that they must allow even these outcasts to enjoy themselves once a year, and that things would be even worse if they did not. At last a sudden fury flamed up in my heart. A political prisoner called M. met me; he looked at me gloomily, his eyes flashed and his lips quivered. "Je haïs ces brigands!" he hissed to me through his teeth, and walked on. I returned to the prison ward, though only a quarter of an hour before I had rushed out of it, as though I were crazy, when six stalwart fellows had all together flung themselves upon the drunken Tatar Gazin to suppress him and had begun beating him; they beat him stupidly, a camel might have been killed by such blows, but they knew that this Hercules was not easy to kill, and so they beat him without uneasiness. Now on returning I noticed on the bed in the furthest corner of the room Gazin lying unconscious, almost without sign of life. He lay covered with a sheepskin, and every one walked round him, without speaking; though they confidently hoped that he would come to himself next morning, yet if luck was against him, maybe from a beating like that, the man would die. I made my way to my own place opposite the window with the iron grating, and lay on my back with my hands behind my head and my eyes shut. I liked to lie like that; a sleeping man is not molested, and meanwhile one can dream and think. But I could not dream, my heart was beating uneasily, and M.'s words, "Je haïs ces brigands!" were echoing in my ears. But why describe my impressions; I sometimes dream even now of those times at night, and I have no dreams more agonising. Perhaps it will be noticed that even to this day I have scarcely once spoken in print of my life in prison. The House of the Dead I wrote fifteen years ago in the character of an imaginary person, a criminal who had killed his wife. I may add by the way that since then, very many persons have supposed, and even now maintain, that I was sent to penal servitude for the murder of my wife.
Gradually I sank into forgetfulness and by degrees was lost in memories. During the whole course of my four years in prison I was continually recalling all my past, and seemed to live over again the whole of my life in recollection. These memories rose up of themselves, it was not often that of my own will I summoned them. It would begin from some point, some little thing, at times unnoticed, and then by degrees there would rise up a complete picture, some vivid and complete impression. I used to analyse these impressions, give new features to what had happened long ago, and best of all, I used to correct it, correct it continually, that was my great amusement. On this occasion, I suddenly for some reason remembered an unnoticed moment in my early childhood when I was only nine years old—a moment which I should have thought I had utterly forgotten; but at that time I was particularly fond of memories of my early childhood.
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. I was interested, too, in beetles and other insects; I used to collect them, some were very ornamental. I was very fond, too, of the little nimble red and yellow lizards with black spots on them, but I was afraid of snakes. Snakes, however, were much more rare than lizards. There were not many mushrooms there. To get mushrooms one had to go to the birch wood, and I was about to set off there. And there was nothing in the world that I loved so much as the wood with its mushrooms and wild berries, with its beetles and its birds, its hedgehogs and squirrels, with its damp smell of dead leaves which I loved so much, and 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 ... some one 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. "Come up!" I heard his call in the distance again, and the little mare pulled at the plough again.
All this I recalled all at once, I don't know why, but with extraordinary minuteness of detail. I suddenly roused myself and sat up on the platform-bed, and, I remember, found myself still smiling quietly at my memories. I brooded over them for another minute.
When I got home that day I told no one of my "adventure" with Marey. And indeed it was hardly an adventure. And in fact I soon forgot Marey. When I met him now and then afterwards, I never even spoke to him about the wolf or anything else; 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 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 civilised 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.
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.
I met M. again that evening. Poor fellow! he could have no memories of Russian peasants, and no other view of these people but: "Je haïs ces brigands!" Yes, the Polish prisoners had more to bear than I.
Accompanied, below, by illustrated pages from the 1885 edition for children available here or here. Readers of Russian will be able to correctly infer from the few lines of Russian text included that, unlike Anna Dostoevskaya, posthumously bringing to completion her beloved husband’s project “for children”, and her late XIXth century editorial assistants, we have not found it timely to “bowdlerize” our selections, nowadays, except for minimal editorial adaptations. Suffice it to say, here, that, in our intention, it is not a matter of “knowing better”. Only of discerning the times, as we feel the original editors would have done. For a real-life example of timely Imperial bowdlerization with parental discernment, see ch. VI in Thirteen years at the Russian court, by Pierre Gilliard. We would definitely encourage our homeschooling readers to use DPC and Dostoevsky in general the Imperial way. Cf. also n.10, here.
As in: “We become what we contemplate” (St. Gregory of Nyssa). But the secret of wise contemplation, and therefore of becoming, is edifying remembrance, according to Dostoevsky. “I remembered God, and rejoiced”, as the Psalm says.
Mutatis mutandis: "Let every abbot become and remain always in his relation to those subject to him as a wise mother." (St. Seraphim of Sarov, translated by Fr. Seraphim Rose). See the Romanian printed edition of Dostoevsky for Parents and Children (RDPC) for further discussion.
Cf. Robert Louis Jackson, “The Triple Vision: Dostoevsky’s ‘The Peasant Marey’”. Also see RDPC, for an “Eastern” Orthodox Christian perspective.
“[T]rials and tribulations at God’s hand… and other such things are a most powerful instrument in our purification. In their effect these experiences are as great a help as a spiritual director, and when a spiritual director is lacking they can and do replace him, provided the person in question has faith and humility. For in such instances it is God Himself who acts as director, and He is certainly wiser than man.” (St. Theophan the Recluse, quoted in Igumen Chariton, The Art of Prayer, Faber & Faber, 1966.)
An idea we already encountered, in A Centenarian.
Here as elsewhere, a quote from St. Isaac the Syrian might be added, for comparison’s sake:
“Hereby it can be understood that those who are near to attaining the stage of purity are deemed worthy always to behold certain of the saints during the vision of the night; and at every moment during the day, the vision of them (which has been engraved upon their souls) produces in these men the food of joy through their intellect's noetic rumination. For this reason they ardently approach the work of virtue, and a great flame of desire for virtue descends upon them. They say that the holy angels take on the likenesses of saints, venerable and good men, and they manifest these likenesses to the soul in the dreams of sleep, when her thoughts wander, to bring her joy and exceeding gladness; and during the day the angels continually stir these likenesses in the contemplation of their thoughts. Thus by their rejoicing over the saints their work is alleviated, and hereby they progress upon their way. So it is also in prolonged warfare. He who is accustomed to meditate on that which is evil will be deluded by the demons through a likeness of evil[…] Therefore, brethren, let us begin henceforth always to discern among the recollections of our meditation, which of them we should converse with, and which of them we should quickly cast out when they approach our thought…” (The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1984, pp. 267-8, translated by Dana R. Miller.)