Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/tolstoevsky-on-peasant-mentality/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18438

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.

https://languagehat.com/tolstoevsky-on-peasant-mentality/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18438