The Peasant Marey by Fyodor Dostoevski
"The Peasant Marey" is a thought-provoking short story by Fyodor Dostoevski, reflecting on themes of compassion, memory, and the human condition. Set in a Siberian prison camp during Easter week in the early 1850s, it captures a raw atmosphere of disorder and violence among the inmates. Central to the narrative is Dostoevski's encounter with a fellow prisoner and his subsequent recollection of a formative childhood experience with a peasant named Marey, whom he remembers fondly. This memory contrasts sharply with the brutality surrounding him in the camp, highlighting a moment of tenderness and humanity amidst hardship.
Dostoevski's reflections lead him to a deeper understanding of both his fellow prisoners and the plight of the Russian peasantry. The emotional journey illustrates how a single, poignant memory of kindness can transform one’s perspective on life and suffering. Through his contrasting experiences with Marey and the aggressive inmates, Dostoevski explores the complexities of empathy and the impact of social circumstances on human behavior. The story serves as a profound meditation on the innate capacity for love and understanding that exists even within the most marginalized individuals.
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The Peasant Marey by Fyodor Dostoevski
First published: "Muzhik Marey," 1876 (English translation, 1919)
Type of plot: Autobiographical
Time of work: 1850 or 1851, with a flashback to 1830
Locale: A prison camp in Omsk, Siberia; a country estate near Moscow
Principal Characters:
The narrator (Dostoevski) The peasant Marey
The Story
Fyodor Dostoevski spent the years 1850 to 1854 in a prison camp in Siberia, and in "The Peasant Marey" he recalls an episode in the camp that made him remember a still earlier incident from twenty years before. Thus, "The Peasant Marey" is a story-within-a-story, a recollection of two important experiences in the author's past.
The setting is Easter week in 1850 or 1851, and the prisoners are enjoying a rare holiday. The weather is pleasant, and the inmates are drinking and brawling. Violence and disorder prevail in a brutal atmosphere. A drunken prisoner named Tatar Gazin has been beaten senseless by six of his fellows, and Dostoevski is repelled by the bestiality that confronts him everywhere in the camp. At this point, he meets "a political prisoner called M." (The real M. was a Pole named Mirecki.) M. is as disgusted as Dostoevski is, and he snarls at Dostoevski in French, "I hate these bandits." Dostoevski returns to his bunk and lies down, but he is too agitated to sleep. As he lies there, his mind wanders over his past and fixes vividly on "an unnoticed moment in my early childhood when I was only nine years old."
He remembers a cool autumn day in 1830 on his father's estate in the country, a lovely day that made him dread returning to Moscow and French lessons. He is wandering through a thicket of bushes, close enough to the fields to hear a peasant plowing nearby. He is suddenly terrified by a mysterious shout of "Wolf!" At this, he runs shrieking to the peasant at the plow. "I don't know if there is such a name, but everyone called him Marey—a thick-set, rather well-grown peasant of fifty, with a good many grey hairs in his dark brown, spreading beard." Marey has seen no wolf and heard no shout, and he calms the child and convinces him that there is no wolf. When the reassured child leaves, Marey makes the sign of the cross over him and follows his progress up the ravine to the barn, where the child's dog greets him and makes him feel safe.
Dostoevski recalls that he soon forgot Marey but realizes that the meeting in the field "must have lain hidden in my soul, though I knew nothing of it." He remembers the "timid tenderness" of Marey and the "eyes shining with great love." His judgment of the event twenty years later is profound:
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 has as yet no expectation, no idea even of his freedom, may be filled.
After musing on the Marey experience, Dostoevski sees his brawling companions in a different light: "Suddenly by some miracle all hatred and anger had vanished utterly from my heart." He is overwhelmed with compassion for these unhappy victims of life's vicissitudes, seeing another Marey in each "shaven peasant, branded on his face as a criminal." Meeting Mirecki again that evening, Dostoevski feels sorrow for a man who has only hatred in his heart. What makes the difference between him and Mirecki, Dostoevski realizes, is that the Pole has no memories of Russian peasants to engender in him a love for humanity.