I’m only on the first chapter of Gary Thurston’s The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia: 1862-1919, which I can already tell is going to be endlessly informative and thought-provoking (thanks, NWU Press!), and the section “Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy Weigh the Two Cultures” is so interesting I thought I’d quote some chunks of it:
While incarcerated in Omsk from 1850 to 1854, Dostoevsky had experienced a range of behavior generally unknown to Russian writers or readers of the cultured classes. He presented House of the Dead as fragments of a manuscript left by a recently deceased landowner who had spent ten years in penal servitude in Siberia. The chapters, written in the first person, purport to be selections from a larger text made by an editor who introduced the work. The memoir rests squarely on the premise that the Westernized classes have no idea how abysmal their ignorance of the peasant is.
[The gentry] are divided from the peasants by the deepest abyss, and this is fully evident only when a member of the privileged class suddenly finds himself, due to the action of powerful external circumstances, completely deprived of his former rights, and turns to the common people. It does not matter if you have dealt with peasants all your life, if you have associated with them every day for forty years in a businesslike way, for instance in regularly prescribed administrative transactions, or even simply in a friendly way, as a benefactor, or, in a certain sense, a father-you will never really know them.
The narrator repeatedly emphasizes that it took imprisonment at close quarters with peasant convicts to make him see how much he took accustomed social roles and privileges for granted. He experienced the greatest difficulty in being treated by the peasants as a person. “The hatred which I as a member of the gentry, continually experienced from the convicts during my first few years became intolerable, poisoning my whole life” (176).
He found his value system to be almost completely alien to that of the peasant prisoners. As he observed them closely he discovered that they were intemperate, blasphemous, and irreverent. Not only were they unrepentant of the crimes that had put them in prison: they seemed immoral beings at heart! To be sure, he found some appealing characteristics, like their shrewdness at sizing people up, and their essential personal dignity. But there was no possibility of abandoning enough of his own cultural sensibilities to merge into the peasant community that welcomed and integrated each new peasant within hours of arrival.
The narrator found association with peasants in the prison so loathsome and debilitating that he regularly retreated into the neutral space of the prison hospital. […]
The prison theatricals function momentarily as a bridge between the peasant actors and the narrator, who has seen professionals perform one of the plays on the bill, Filatka and Miroshka, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Because of their innate sense of quality and the narrator’s expertise, for once the peasant convicts seek his approval.
They recognized that in this [theatregoing] I was better able to judge than they, that I had seen and knew more than they. Even those who were least well disposed toward me were (I know for a fact) anxious now for my approval of their theatre, and without the least sacrifice of dignity they put me in the best place. I see that now, recalling my impressions at the time. It seemed to me at the time–I remember–that in their correct estimate of themselves there was no deprecation whatever, but a feeling of their own worth. The highest and most salient characteristic feature of our people is their sense of justice and their thirst for it. (121)
His judgment on the peasant who played Filatka (“magnificent … a born actor with great talent”) contains a criticism of the professional actors he had seen in the part: “By comparison with him they were too much paysans, and not real Russian peasants. They were too anxious to impersonate the Russian peasant” (124). Even more than the acting, he was interested in the reactions of the audience, who were transported and in complete rapture over one of their own dressing up and playing a gentleman. As he watched the spectacle he could not help pondering how much power and talent in Russia were sometimes wasted in servitude and poverty. He saved his most optimistic conclusion for his summing up of the theatrical: “These poor people were only rarely permitted to live on their own, to enjoy themselves in a human fashion, to live for an hour without care-yet the person was morally changed, if only for a few minutes.” […]
By the summer of 1858 Tolstoy had adopted the dress and gestures of local peasants. He also read the recently published correspondence of Nikolai Stankevich, and conceived a great admiration for this humanitarian who rejected role-playing of any kind and cultivated simplicity and authenticity. Among other things, Stankevich’s example inspired Tolstoy to struggle to break his habit of resorting to physical violence in dealing with peasants. Tolstoy opened his second Iasnaia Poliana school in the autumn of 1859, but interrupted his teaching to accompany his ailing brother to western Europe, where he traveled from May 1860 to March 1861. While abroad he investigated the latest pedagogical theories, inspecting schools and interviewing educators in England, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and several Italian and German states. […]
The reasoning behind Tolstoy’s decision to drop everything and run a school for peasant children was simple. Rapid strides in science and technology at midcentury were widening the gap between the native and Westernized cultures in Russia. In a letter to E. P. Kovalevskii concerning popular education Tolstoy said the signs of progress in Russia, like telegraphs and academies of art, were premature and misleading, when only one percent of her seventy million people could read. “Marfutka and Taraska,” he opined, “must learn at least a little bit of what we know.” Bridging this gap was vital to the national interest. Educated society did not understand the mentality of the people, and existing educational theories that called for molding the child provoked great resistance from peasants and made real learning impossible. Nobody knew how to teach the people. He could perform a brilliant feat by discovering the way.
Tolstoy conceived his school as a laboratory, for he regarded pedagogy as an experimental science (he had earlier spoken of his estate as a laboratory for the study of management). He found works on chemistry, biology, zoology, and geology to be superior to those in all other disciplines in the West. In his diary he expressed his powerful faith in science to achieve his great goal of cultural unification: “We know nothing. The only hope for knowing is for all to know together–to merge all classes in the knowledge of science.” […]
To establish an environment conducive to learning, the Iasnaia Poliana school functioned without corporal punishment. Visitors were astonished at how much learning could be accomplished without beatings. Realizing that peasants had their own body language and gestures, Tolstoy adjusted to his young charges: “Everybody who knows anything about peasant children has noticed that they are not accustomed to any kind of caresses–tender words, kisses, being touched with a hand, and so forth–and that they cannot bear these caresses.” Understanding that they had their own time sense, he refused to structure the school day in fixed periods demarcated by the ringing of a bell. The class would study a given subject only as long as its interest remained high. When attention flagged they would move on to another. Even the length of the class day should remain flexible. If the pupils became restless and nothing was being accomplished, they were cheerfully dismissed.
Yet despite his solicitude for their learning environment, he found to his dismay that his pupils could assimilate almost no science! Tolstoy concluded that it would take them a long time to outgrow the conceptions of the physical world they had learned at home and adopt a scientific worldview. They could absorb no geography at all. Abstractions of all kinds gave them difficulty. Three weeks after Tolstoy worked with them for hours explaining the concept of law not one of them could tell him what law was. They had no historical interest whatever. Lacking autonomy, they had no reason to situate themselves in historical time or any larger world. He made excuses, relating their deficiencies with regard to geography and history to their never having traveled beyond the village that was their universe and to lacking any sense of participation in politics without newspapers or opinions. And he redoubled his efforts to coax his pupils to leap the chasm to his cultural heritage.
One of Tolstoy’s most instructive misadventures involved his choice of an English literary classic for reading to his charges. As a reflective European he found it perfectly natural to turn to a literary work to sharpen thinking on how one faces the world. But they found the adventures of Robinson Crusoe virtually incomprehensible. He dragged them through the work by paraphrasing, but it took a month, and they left it in disgust. Some of the boys wept because they could not understand and retell the story in their own words. […]
Remarkably, Tolstoy’s failure to teach Robinson Crusoe led in an indirect way to his one major breakthrough in the school. In requiring the children to retell the story in their own words he concluded that it was the literary language of the (translated) original that impeded comprehension. To demonstrate his hypothesis that the peasants were as adroit, creative, and original in their own colloquial Russian as the educated were in literary Russian, he found it useful to shift the focus of teaching back to the content of peasant culture. It occurred to him that folk proverbs expressed the tensions felt by peasants in everyday life, and he decided to choose one at random from his copy of Snegirev’s collection and ask his class to “compose a little drama on it.” The results astounded him. When it came to making a narrative faithful to the details of peasant life, each of the students concocted a story superior to the one he himself produced on the theme. Two of the boys stayed late and together with Tolstoy they crafted a story he considered to have real artistic merit, by virtue of its simplicity, its action, and its trueness-to-life. He declared victory, publicized the talent and ability of the best pupils–and closed the school.
It’s easy (and almost obligatory these days) to sneer at aristocrats trying to understand the темные люди (‘dark people’), as they were routinely called at the time — Thurston says in a footnote:
Temnie liudi presents difficulties for translators. […] The phrase can be translated simply as “ignorant,” but I usually prefer “simple folk,” since the Russian indicates more than a lack of knowledge or information.
But I sympathize with their strongly felt desire to cross the gulf that divided them from the vast majority of their fellow Russians, and I’m always interested in such accounts. (I remember a story I read long ago — was it by John Berger? — about a foreigner, perhaps an Englishman, living in a remote French village, who gets checks from abroad and cashes them at the bank in town; a group of villagers, convinced that the checks are magic tokens that will give them all the money they could ever want, kill him and take the checkbook into town — we last see them heading for the bank. Gives me chills just thinking about it.)
I posted about Записки из мёртвого дома (Notes from the House of the Dead or Notes from the Dead House) here and here, and in the latter I mention “the wonderful chapter on Christmas” that includes the prison theatricals mentioned above. I really should reread that book now that my Russian is better and I’ve read more Dostoevsky.
‘He [the narrator of the story] experienced the greatest difficulty in being treated by the peasants as a person. “The hatred which I as a member of the gentry, continually experienced from the convicts during my first few years became intolerable, poisoning my whole life”’
And
‘Among other things, Stankevich’s example inspired Tolstoy to struggle to break his habit of resorting to physical violence in dealing with peasants.’
Perhaps the second explains the first.
@Michael vnuk
Yes indeed.
It would be interesting to know more about the social conventions that made the younger Tolstoy think that corporal punishment was okay, and whether it was normal, and in what circumstances he used it.
I am not any sort of an expert, but physical violence was a norm of peasant life. Not only landlords used it toward peasants, but peasants themselves used it to establish dominance within households.
Apart from peasants and aristocrats, Russia did have some townsfolk who naturally were somewhat more educated than peasants. Maybe, it would be a more productive idea to educate them (or their children) a bit more and then try to raise teachers for peasant schools from that class and not from intelligentsia.
I had an unusual experience in college. I had a crush on a girl who worked in the cafeteria, not a student, though some did that work and I had as a freshman. But a local girl probably my age so a couple years out of high school, not college-bound, from South Boston.
At the end of the year, I got up the courage to ask her out. We went on a double date, with a friend of hers and her boyfriend, to the movie Back to the Future. They spent the drive there reveling in the insurance scam that had allowed the guy to get a sunroof in his car, billed as repair of a non-existent accident. It was appalling to me as a moralistic and judgmental 19 year old, and I couldn’t find my emotional way back into the situation. I think I was more or less silent on the way home.
For years that experience lived in my brain as an unassimilated counter-narrative to my native and customary liberalism.
I didn’t really integrate it into my map of the world till almost a decade later, dating a woman from a fairly similar though not so ethnically homogenous background on the SW Side of Chicago who never spoke of cheating on anything. It gave me context to integrate the experience without making it entirely about class and judging the class.
An early near-miss at contextualizing it was when I worked at the end of senior year picking up rental mini-fridges from vacated dorms with a couple erstwhile teammates, both from wealthy backgrounds.
There was utterly no oversight, and both of them decided to steal a fridge. Based on the timing, one of them may well have stolen Barack Obama’s rental fridge.
But mentally I didn’t blame it on their upper class background, though it was in the same cellblock of my brain as the insurance scam. I just thought of them as tarnished.
I’m not convinced I have a well-rounded understanding of any part of America’s working class. But I have enough awareness to laugh at Tolstoy for thinking he had gained such an understanding of Russian peasants based on how the men in prison treated him.
I don’t remember Seven Samurai very well, but Toshiro Mifune’s character Kikuchiyo’s exasperated speech toward the end comes to mind—the poor peasants you are trying to save are not as noble as you would like to think. Kikuchiyo was the one actual peasant among the seven, who understood the situation fully.
In other words, like average prison inmates — career criminals — all over the world. To generalize from them to the whole peasant class is rather dubious.
I think ulr hits one key difficulty here, that it is dubious to think that prisoners of peasant background are in fact a representative cross-sample of the peasant population as a whole, most of whom managed to avoid being convicted of serious crimes, quite possibly by the expedient of not committing such crimes in the first place. But that leads to another question which is where else (if anywhere) outside of prison might a Russian from an elite social background have had the chance to interact with Russians of peasant background on a metaphorical level playing field, without the interaction being dominated and skewed by the usual hierarchical context?
Kikuchiyo was the one actual peasant among the seven, who understood the situation fully.
An excellent parallel.
where else (if anywhere) outside of prison might a Russian from an elite social background have had the chance to interact with Russians of peasant background on a metaphorical level playing field, without the interaction being dominated and skewed by the usual hierarchical context?
I’m pretty sure the answer is “nowhere” (hence the despair of the intelligentsia), but Dostoevsky thought the theater was the best available option, hence the presence of the section in the book.
The post got me thinking about Orwell’s essay on Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Lear. As I recall Orwell doesn’t deal directly with Tolstoy and the peasants, but the whole gist of the piece seemed to underline his other-worldliness, not to mention a certain rancour. Not the best disposition perhaps for an objective view of the peasant mentality.
I’m not sure how good a grasp Orwell could have had of Tolstoy and his relation to peasants.
declared victory, publicized the talent and ability of the best pupils – and closed the school.
this seems to me to sum up the entirety of the man’s relationship to “peasants”*.
.
* itself a telling word choice to deploy for people who were treated as chattel during the period covered in these passages (in practice even after the beginning of nominal legal emancipation).
Yes, Tolstoy is a tragic case of someone who desperately wanted to Do the Right Thing but was endlessly sabotaged by his being an aristocratic male (with a gambling problem and a strong and self-defeating personality).
Good point — what word did D and T use, Englished as “peasant”? What specific pragmatic baggage did it carry?
After Tolstoy’s death Boris Tomashevsky visited Yasnaya Polyana. He tried to get the peasants to talk about Lev Nikolayevich, but they only wanted to talk about Sofya Andreyevna. Finally one peasant told him: “Да что о нем вспоминать! Мусорный был старик”. (source: Lidiya Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoy, t.1, entry for June 8, 1940. I guess Chukovskaya heard this from Tomashevsky himself)
what word did D and T use, Englished as “peasant”?
Excellent question. In the first quote, D uses простонародье, literally ‘simple people’ but rendered in my Russian-English dictionaries as “the common people”; Makaroff’s 1908 Russian-French dictionary has “le vulgaire, la populace, le bas peuple.” In the second, about Filatka, he uses мужик, ‘peasant’ with a connotation of ‘rough, hardworking man of the people’; it’s become a slang term for “(UK) bloke, (US) dude, fella, guy.” The Tolstoy quote on peasant children is “Всякий замечал, кто немного знает крестьянских детей, что они не привыкли и терпеть не могут всяких ласк,” so he’s using крестьянин, the official term for ‘peasant.’
In other words, like average prison inmates — career criminals — all over the world. To generalize from them to the whole peasant class is rather dubious.
You in turn are making the questionable assumption that the Tsarist justice system did a decent job sorting the “career criminals” out from the large number of peasants who simply committed an infraction through bad luck, had landlords making them an example for the others, been denounced through spite, or had commited a random act of excessive violence within an abusive world where violence was part of daily life, etc. Incarceration was used as a form of discipline as much as punishment. Much like “criminals” who were transported to Australia, Tsarist prisoners probably included a lot of intelligent stubborn men who simply wouldn’t submit to arbitrary authority.
What I find interesting about Dostoyevsky’s attitude is how similar it is to the way some of my contemporary exiled well educated Westernized Russian friends living in London feel about their provincial proletarian countrymen back in Ivanovo or Saransk. (It’s also similar to the way a lot of Ukrainians describe Russians). In fact, JD Vance in his prior pre-Trumpist incarnation was also telling a similar story.
Does крестьянин carry much of its etymology of ‘christian’? It would surprise me if that had negative valence. Although looking it up in wiktionary, I discovered that English cretin is not the slur on people from a large Mediterranean island that I’d thought it was, so maybe my instinct is wrong.
To Vanya’s point, you needn’t think the Czarist system was substantively just or perfectly competent in assessing individual cases to still conclude that it wasn’t random in the sort of usefully-random way you would need to get a good statistical cross-section of the source population. If for example you think it selected for stubbornness or defiance more than for criminality-as-such, that’s still going to skew the sample (and perhaps predictably affect how those prisoners then treat prisoners from more elite origins with something other than solidarity and fellow-feeling).
To Ryan’s query and reference to “cretin,” consider the American Wild West etc. sense of “pilgrim,” meaning greenhorn, tenderfoot, newcomer who may be too nice and naive to survive and thrive in a tough environment.
Does крестьянин carry much of its etymology of ‘christian’? It would surprise me if that had negative valence.
Etymology is not destiny, and “cretin” is a good example. Any word that references the lower classes is going to wind up with negative valence.
Compare the fate of “secretary” once it went from referencing well-paid males to ill-paid females.
Secretary must have made the leap to ornithology before its human referent lost prestige? (Like the prothonotary we were discussing a while ago.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarybird
…and the (probably long extinct) Viennese sense, meaning thief, fraudster, huckster or something in that area.
An interesting quote I just saw that’s perhaps not unrelated to Tolstoevyan matters: “The world is still so sentimental about Russia’s great cultural heritage,” says Oleksandr Mykhed, a Ukrainian writer and literary scholar. “It makes it so easy for Russians to say: we will kill you and then we will ask for sorrow and forgiveness, and then we will kill another people in another country, but what can you do, our soul is just a mystery.”
This, however, from a Grauniad story about the bizarre phenomenon of people who have dubiously decided that the best way they can act on their dislike for the Putin regime is by taking it out on Pushkin. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/07/the-pushkin-job-unmasking-the-thieves-behind-an-international-rare-books-heist
tolstoy’s account very explicitly shows that there was plenty of “solidarity and fellow-feeling” among his fellow-prisoners. he’s just upset that “the peasant community that welcomed and integrated each new peasant within hours of arrival” [thurston] related to him with “hatred… as a member of the gentry” [tolstoy]. the only difference that incarceration made was to ensure the count wasn’t in a position to take revenge on these particular serfs, allowing them to make their opinion of him felt – i can’t imagine that opinion being particularly different from that of his own human property at yasnaya polyana, where he could have you, or your children, beaten to death for expressing it.
his gloss on the situation is rather good sleight-of-pen (as one would expect from an excellent writer) for “i, the hereditary legal owner of dozens or hundreds of human beings, was treated as an enemy by enslaved people, formerly enslaved people, and relatives of enslaved or formerly enslaved people”. it’s all a certain kind of anticipatory paraphrase of abe osheroff (via martín espada) on ezra pound: if i knew a slaveowner was a great novelist, i’d poison his whole life anyway.
Wasn’t that Dostoyevsky, rather than Tolstoy? I don’t think Dostoyevsky had much of a peasant-whipping history. He seems to have been raised mostly in Moscow, though his father did have a country estate.
D was no angel (as he’d certainly have agreed), but he surely rates a much lower mark on the hypocritometer than T.
I’m still continually astounded by how a man with such insight into human nature as Tolstoy could be so extraordinarily hopeless at applying that insight to his actual human relationships. It’s not like the familiar horrid-person-but-great-artist thing you get with say, Céline (or Pound); it seems outright paradoxical, somehow. Tolstoy really did try to be good (much harder than most people.) He was just very bad at it. Some essential ingredient missing …
(Dostoyevsky’s novels, on the other hand, seem entirely consonant with his own character. For good or ill …)
Yeah, what DE said. D was technically an aristo but he never had any serfs (or extra estates to sell to cover his gambling debts, like T).
o! dammit – apologies to all concerned: that oughta teach me to comment when i’m still recovering my wits after a two-day road trip!
I’ve said it before. There are far too many of these authors anyway. They should be merged.
D was technically an aristo but he never had any serfs
The men he was imprisoned with certainly didn’t care. D was still from the class/estate/caste that enslaved and owned other men, and that would have been quite obvious.
It sounds like Dostoyevsky had a lot of exposure to the Moscow urban poor growing up but a lot less to actual peasants. Maybe the cultural gulf was greater than he expected. I remember in college that historians like Richard Pipes loved to talk about how backward, violent and just plain weird (to our Western 20th century sensibilities) 19th century Russian peasants were, even compared to the urban proletariat. I wonder if he actually got that notion partially from reading Dostoyevsky. Of course, Pipes had his own Polish axes to grind.
Maybe the cultural gulf was greater than he expected.
Well, duh, that’s what he was writing about.
I remember in college that historians like Richard Pipes loved to talk about how backward, violent and just plain weird (to our Western 20th century sensibilities) 19th century Russian peasants were, even compared to the urban proletariat. I wonder if he actually got that notion partially from reading Dostoyevsky.
Or maybe he got it from actual facts? To be clear, are you claiming Russian peasants were not backward (from an urban/educated point of view) and violent? If so, I’ll want to see some backup. Everything I have read about peasant life suggests that it was hard and brutal (and not only in Russia), and it certainly wasn’t only Dostoyevsky who said so.
Did you have bad coffee this morning? What are you even on about? sheesh. Just delete the post if it annoys you that much.
Sorry, I see I was unnecessarily sharp. Just ignore the other stuff; my question is what makes you think D was wrong about the peasants?
I don’t think he was. I was really responding to the posters who think the sample size D was exposed to was too small to generalize from, a position I mostly disagree with. Hence my request you delete my post. Clearly I wrote it very sloppily if I gave you that impression.
What I actually find interesting about Pipes’ depiction is not the backwardness or the violence. Plenty of that exists in the modern world, it’s the weirdness. Pipes seemed to think the mindset of the pre-industrialized Russian peasant was deeply alien to us moderns, a vast gulf that defied understanding. You do get that impression from D. Less from Tolstoy interestingly. But Platonov is another writer whose writings suggest that the pre-Soviet peasant had a worldview completely alien to ours (“us” being the sort of overeducated person likely to read Platonov).
bizarre phenomenon of people who have dubiously decided that the best way they can act on their dislike for the Putin regime is by taking it out on Pushkin
Taking it out on Pushkin is Obviously Wrong, but it’s not bizarre, if you get what I mean. It is hard to live in a shadow of a much more internationally recognized culture, especially if people who “inherited” this culture are bombing you. There is a “correct” response to this situation, but it is a bit hard to come up with in the best of times, harder still during a war.
I happen to like Pushkin (and almost complete list of what you get in “Russian classics”), but there are people out there who are indifferent at best. They really cannot see beyond thinking that it is nothing more than a tool of colonization. I guess, we can all find examples of similar attitudes much closer to home…
P.S. Stealing rare books from libraries is indeed bizarre..
Once the legal situation changed with the abolition of serfdom and other subsequent reforms, a subset of the old peasantry quite rapidly became the new kulaks, who were so adept at adapting to more modern conditions and incentive structures that they rapidly became an allegedly exploitative alleged class enemy of the more traditionally proletarian sort of peasant who were beloved of crackpot-to-dangerous urban intelligentsia. I wonder how the rapid emergence of this new variety is reconciled with this Pipesian notion of an apparently homogenous group of deeply-weird brutalized brutes, stuck in incomprehensible medieval torpor where nothing ever changed.
It would be interesting to know whether the subset of the old peasantry that got imprisoned (for whatever reasons, just or unjust) was overweight or underweight future kulaks as compared with the peasantry as a whole.
I don’t think he was. I was really responding to the posters who think the sample size D was exposed to was too small to generalize from, a position I mostly disagree with.
My apologies — I completely misunderstood you! Must… have… more… coffee..
a subset of the old peasantry quite rapidly became the new kulaks
I wouldn’t take uncritically Stalin’s view about kulaks as a separate class etc. And especially won’t project it back into late 19c. In general, my baseline assumption is that Russian peasants were well-adapted to their lifestyle and economic opportunities. The fact that they were unaware of recent discoveries in theology, physics, and ethnography, is neither here nor there. And likewise with upper-class moral sensibilities. The huge number of reports about America’s heartland and what makes it vote Trump, which doesn’t explain anything to an (over) educated large city dweller, should give us a good example of the fact that sometimes explanations do not make sense in a framework that we find most relevant.
>Must… have… more… coffee..
Vanya’s suggestion was actually better coffee.
Which seems like an evergreen bit of advice.