Poster with Painting of Raskolnikov, for an Exhibition on The 150th Anniversary of "Crime and Punishment"
M. Shemyakin, Raskolnikov's Dream of the Beaten Mare
The scene describing drunken peasants beating a mare to death in Part One of Crime and Punishment is one of the most famous scenes in all of Russian literature. It is the scene that Dostoevsky often chose to read in his public readings of the novel. Coming early in the action, before Raskolnikov commits murder, it foreshadows that murder, while illustrating all the horror of the act in the divided mind of the main hero, and presenting the conflict between good and evil that is at the center of the book.
In the dream Raskolnikov sees himself as a seven-year-old boy, who is much immersed in the Russian Orthodox tradition that becomes so important later in the novel. He is on the way to the graveyard with his father, to visit the graves of his grandmother and little brother.
The mare dream is a kind of preview of the act of violence that Raskolnikov is soon to carry out. In its hideous detail and the horrible effect that it produces on his distraught mind, it is a warning to him to give up his misguided idea. The dream also demonstrates the conflict within him, since he is, in effect, playing two roles in the action. He is the little boy--who defends the beaten horse and cries over it, kissing its muzzle after it is dead--and he is the brutal peasant Mikolka, the murderer, who, as he beats his horse to death, keeps screaming, "My property."
The expression in Russian is "Мое добро." Another meaning for the word "добро (dobro)" is "good," so that Mikolka is also saying, in a way, "My good." This suggests one of Raskolnikov's professed motives for committing his crime. He will kill the old lady, but then he will use the stolen money to alleviate social ills, thereby "doing good."
The name "Mikolka" (a peasant nickname for Nikolai/Nicholas) is significant here, since it is also the name of the fanatical Russian peasant who confesses to the murder later in the novel and whose religious zealotry is the complement to Raskolnikov's atheistic fanaticism. Both Mikolkas are something of doubles, mirror images of Raskolnikov himself. The second Mikolka is used to propagate Dostoevsky's religious idea--that one must accept suffering in order to reunite oneself with one's fellow human beings.
Ruth Mortimer has suggested that the mare dream also is connected with one of the big social issues of the Russian 1860s, the so-called "woman question. The dream relates directly to the suffering of female characters in C and P. We recall that just previous to the scene of the mare dream Raskolnikov had received a letter from his mother, describing how his sister Dunya is, in effect, about to prostitute herself, by making a marriage with the despicable Luzhin.
Dunya is soon to become as much the "property" of Luzhin as that poor mare is the property of Mikolka. The eternally suffering Sonya is also the "property" of all the men who use her for sexual satisfaction. Therefore, it is not by accident that the beaten horse is a female. Raskolnikov himself is soon to murder two helpless females, one of them, Lizaveta, who is much the same saintly suffering type as Sonya is.
The famous dream of the mare has links to events in Dostoevsky's childhood and to his own reading of Russian writers.
A poem by N.A. Nekrasov, "Do sumerek (Before Twilight)" describes a peasant beating a disabled horse on its "weeping, gentle eyes."
As a sixteen-year-old boy, Dostoevsky witnessed something similar, as described in this semi-fictional scene:
Man
Beating Man Beating Horse
(May,
1837)
It was a glorious time for the two Dostoevsky brothers,
Mikhail and Fyodor. Before leaving home they had gone to seek the blessing of
the Iverskaya Mother of God, in her famous little chapel in downtown Moscow.
She had not provided them with any coherent and tangible sign, but they felt
that She, as always, was with them. Now, their brains stuffed with glorious
Romantic dreams, they were riding with their father, the dour Mikhail
Andreevich, military physician, in a droshky (light, four-wheeled carriage), on
their way from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Only recently their beloved mother had
passed on to her reward. Their father had big plans for the boys. They would be
enrolled in a boarding school, where they would prepare to take entrance
examinations for the Academy of Military Engineers, which would prepare them
for a career steeped in bourgeois respectability. Unbeknownst to MA, however,
neither of the brothers had any intention of becoming an engineer. They were
aloft in visions of literary splendor, steeped in “the beautiful and sublime.” Mikhail
wrote poetry throughout the journey, while Fyodor composed in his mind a novel
of Venetian life.
They depended on the same
horses for the whole trip, which would take a week. The roads were muddy, barely
passable at points. In other words, they were Russian roads in spring. The puddles
were enormous, as only puddles in Russia can be, but the weather that day was
glorious, sunny. The boy Fyodor, sixteen years old, looked up from his lucubrations
over Venice to watch the jackdaws and magpies that circled the droshky, cawing
out their odes to vernal rejuvenation. Sticky little green leaves were poking
out on wayside birches, and he feasted on the shrill green and the stickiness
of those leaves, as the sun shone on what could only be the future happiness of
him and his older brother.
The marvelous
Aleksandr Pushkin, poet supreme, had died in a duel only four months ago. The brothers
planned a pilgrimage to the spot outside the city where the duel was held, then
to the apartment where he breathed his last. They cherished his verses,
repeated them aloud, especially his paean to the magnificence of St.
Petersburg. “That young city of the northern lands, from dank of forests and
damp of bogs, rose up in all its grandeur and pride. Today ships swarm from all
earth’s ends to that rich port. Neva has clothed herself in vestments of stone,
bridges span her waters, her isles are blanketed in groves dark-green, and now
before this young and puissant capital, old Moscow dims and fades, as if before
the new Tsarina, Great Peter’s bride.”
Somewhere
in Tver Province the simple droshky in which the brothers rode pulled up at a
wayside posting station. The brothers and their father climbed out, and,
stepping around the huge puddle at the doorway, they went into the inn to drink
tea. Their spirits were high, the tea delicious, all was well in their world.
Looking out the window they saw a government courier come galloping up to the
inn in a three-horse brichka
(one-seater carriage, resembling a European calash). The courier was on
official business, basking in his own self-importance. At this posting station
he would get fresh horses before continuing on his whirl of a journey.
Shouting
something at his driver, the courier strode the edges of the puddle—taking
tiptoe steps, trying not to muddy his magnificent spit-shined boots—and made
his way into the inn. Mikhail Andreevich, as usual, was off somewhere in his
gloomy thoughts, but the brothers exchanged glances, looking with admiration at
this model of masculine strength. He was a large red-faced man, dressed in full
military uniform, which included a black three-cornered hat with plumes.
Seating himself at a nearby table, removing his hat, he called out in a
peremptory voice for a hundred grams of vodka. When the waiter delivered the
carafe he quickly poured it into the dram glass, downed it in one gulp and
banged the glass on the table. Then, taking a sniff at a hunk of black bread,
he bit off one corner. He arose and threw down a coin on the table for payment.
Slowly chewing the bread, he got up and made his way to the exit, walking with
head held high and shoulders squared, as the brothers looked on, fascinated.
Outside the fresh horses
were ready, hitched to a new troika. The brawny courier leaped into the back
and sat down. No sooner was he seated than he rose halfway to his feet and
began beating the driver, a young peasant lad with curly blond hair, on the back
of his head. Frantically applying his whip to the horses, the driver flinched,
squirmed in his seat—trying, failing to soften the blows to his neck and head.
The three horses lurched forward, anxious to please, hoping in their dim equine
brains that the whipping would soon stop.
--Papa,
look, look what he’s doing (cried Fyodor)! He’s beating the man on the head!
Mikhail
Andreevich put on a still more somber frown and turned away.
--Don’t
look at that, boys (he said). Best not to watch such a spectacle.
He
spit on the floor in disgust.
The white, yellow and
green plumes on the three-cornered hat of the courier were waving in the wind, while
the troika rushed off out of the courtyard. As the brichka vanished in the distance, the brothers could still see the
courier’s arm working its way up and down, while the driver’s whip rose and
fell, rose and fell.
Years
later, after he had become a renowned writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky looked back on
that scene with repugnance and abhorrence. He saw it somehow as a metaphor for
all that was wrong with his country. He even imagined an extension of the scene.
The peasant driver Yakim Ponomar, arrives home after the journey, bruises and
scratches all over the back of his neck and head. He drowns his humiliation in
drink, then shouts at his wife Agashka. She responds with a few choice words,
and soon he is beating her, taking relish in smacking her face, punching her
ribs. Russia: the beatings, the beat being beat, the beat perpetuating the
beating by beating others—kicking dogs, lashing horses, striking loved ones.
Russia. My sad, hopeless homeland.
In
his maturity as a writer, the boy in the inn, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
(FMD) was to formulate a creed. Jesus loves us, yes. He never doubted that. But
life is not just reveries of brotherhood and faith in the Lord, not all magpies
in sunshine and little sticky green leaves. Life is brutality and squalor as
well, and you, reader, do not have the right not to look at people beating people or people beating a horse.
Just before he goes to
commit murder in Crime and Punishment,
the protagonist Raskolnikov dreams a horrible dream. Drunken peasants are beating
a mare to death, while a little boy looks on in horror. FMD takes the reader by
the hair and pushes his nose down into the vomit. There, see? Take a sniff of that,
reader. That’s life on this God’s green earth of ours.
“I’ll
make her gallop, she’ll gallop all right,” and Mikolka took the whip, enjoying
the thought of beating the old mare. They all clamored into his wagon, cracking
jokes and roaring with laughter. There were six of them, with room for still
more. They took up with them a fat, red-faced peasant woman in red cotton, in a
headdress trimmed with beads. She was cracking nuts and laughing. Who could
help laughing at the idea that a sorry nag like that was about to pull such a
load, and at a gallop?
“Get
in, everybody, get in,” yelled Mikolka. “She’ll pull you all,” and he lashed
away in a frenzy, hardly aware of his actions.
“Papa,
papa,” cried the boy, “look what they’re doing. They’re beating the poor horse!”
Two
men in the crowd got whips, ran up to the mare, one on each side, and began to
lash at her ribs.
“Hit
her on the nose and across the eyes, beat her on the eyes!” yelled Mikolka. The
fat young peasant woman went on cracking nuts and giggling.
And so on, and so on. Take a look at it, reader. Have a sniff.
[from U.R. Bowie, unpublished semi-fictional biography of Dostoevsky]
In his notebooks for Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky's recalls this episode and remarks, "My first personal insult; the horse, the courier."
See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, p.106 footnote.
Illustrations to "Crime and Punishment" by Fritz Eichenberg, 1938
No comments:
Post a Comment