It was also in the Pushkin Speech that Dostoevsky gave his most famous exhortation to moral masochism. The context is a discussion of Pushkin’s long poem The Gypsies, in which a world-weary, Byronic hero named Aleko falls in love with a Gypsy girl, lives with her among a group of Gypsies for two years, then kills her when he learns that she has taken a lover. Dostoevsky quotes the words with which the girl’s father sends Aleko away from the Gypsy encampment forever:
According to Dostoevsky, this passage suggests a “Russian solution” to the problem of pride—even though it is a Gypsy who is speaking against pride, and a Russian who is being offensively proud. In any case, disregarding Dostoevsky’s poor logic, we may quote his famous formula for smirenie which he believes is in accord with the faith and the truth of the Russian folk: “Humble thyself [smiris’], proud man; above all, break thy haughtiness! Humble thyself, idle man, and, first of all, labor on thy native land!”122
It is important to keep in mind that this is not some wizened, obscure monk perverting a fresh novice in ancient Rus’, but the great Dostoevsky speaking to the cream of the Russian intelligentsia in 1880. And, to judge from the intensity of the reaction (both positive and negative) by that intelligentsia,123 Dostoevsky must have hit a very sensitive, Russian nerve.
The humiliation which Dostoevsky calls for is essentially the same as what had been advocated by the Slavophiles, namely, a bowing-down to the collective, here designated as the people (“narod,” whereas the Slavophiles had focused on the commune, i.e., the “obshchina” or “mir”). The road to salvation lies in humble communication with the people (“smirennogo obshcheniia s narodom”). Yet, as was also the case with the Slavophiles, the truth lies within oneself: “Truth is within—not without thee. Find thyself within thyself. Subdue thyself; be master of thyself [podchini sebia sebe, ovladei soboi].”124
It may well be that one can find oneself in humbling oneself before the collective, but Dostoevsky does not really explain how this is so. Again, as with the Slavophiles, the self to be found is confused with that collective object toward which one takes a masochistic stance.
And again, as with Losev, that object is maternal. Dostoevsky is being matriotic in these passages. “Narod,” Dostoevsky’s key to achieving a high level of moral masochism, is a suggestive word. It and several other words containing the Russian root morpheme -rod-, which connotes birth and generativity, occur repeatedly in the passage.125 Dostoevsky says Aleko is an “unhappy wanderer in his native land [v rodnoi zemle], that traditional Russian sufferer detached from the people [ot naroda]”—by which he also means such literary characters as Onegin, Pechorin, and Andrei Bolkonsky, as well as real Russians such as those members of the intelligentsia who feel alienated from Russia. This kind of person came into existence (“zarodilsia”) roughly a century after the reforms of Peter the Great, in the midst of an intelligentsia detached from the people, from the people’s might (“ot naroda, ot narodnoi sily”). These “homeless Russian ramblers,” though they may belong to the hereditary nobility (“k rodovomu dvorianstvu”), may seek solace “in the bosom of nature [na lone prirody].” Aleko himself suffered a longing for nature (“toska po prirode”), although he eventually came into conflict with it (“s usloviiami etoi dikoi prirody”).
Elsewhere in the essay on Pushkin there are more clumps of these -rod- words: humble Tat’iana’s childhood past is a “contact with the motherland, with the native people [s rodinoi, s rodnym narodom]”; no writer experienced such a heartfelt union with the Russian people (“rodstvenno s narodom svoim”) as did Pushkin.126
The accumulation of words containing the maternally suggestive root -rod- is remarkable, particularly in the admonition itself to masochism, and in the immediately following words: “‘labor on thy native field [na rodnoi nive]!’—Such is the solution according to the people’s truth and wisdom [po narodnoi pravde i narodnomu razumu].”127
The field (“niva”) too is suggestive, for it is a feminine noun referring specifically to the kind of field one plants and makes fertile.128 Moreover, a related word with clear maternal overtones, “zemlia,” meaning “land” or “earth” also occurs repeatedly in the essay on Pushkin (especially the phrase “rodnaia zemlia,” “native land”; compare Konstantin Aksakov’s equation of “narod” and “zemlia”).129 Here it is also worth keeping in mind that Dostoevsky was one of the pochvenniki or “men of the soil” (from “pochva,” “soil”),130 who encouraged the educated class to find its roots with the folk masses without necessarily rejecting the West as the Slavophiles did. The pochvenniki too were real Russian matriots.131
Dostoevsky’s fantasy of masochistic bondage to a maternal figure flows quite naturally out of an awareness of the agriculturally dependent position of the Russian peasant. As Christine Worobec points out in her book on the peasant in post-emancipation Russia, “Peasant societies are, by definition, built on relations firmly tied to the land. Land generally provides the means for peasant existence, and around that foundation institutions develop in turn to perpetuate peasant society.”132 Although the analysis provided by Worobec is primarily economic and cultural in nature, she recognizes the important psychological backdrop in the peasant’s relationship to the land: “Despite the natural odds against them, Russian peasants concentrated their attention on the land, maintaining a sacred, devotional attachment to it. Mother Earth was all-powerful, providing peasants with sustenance and definition of purpose.”133
The land quite literally fed the peasant, just as a mother feeds a child. The land had a certain degree of control over its inhabitants, much as a mother has control over her child. There was an unavoidable motivation to submit masochistically to that control. Dostoevsky instinctively understood the emotional needs of the peasant.
The most explicit linkage of moral masochism to troubled interaction with the maternal figure of Russia comes in an earlier passage of Dostoevsky’s Diary:
It is we who have to bow before the people [preklonit’sia pered narodom] and await from them everything—both thought and expression; it is we who must bow before the people’s truth [preklonit’sia pered pravdoi narodnoi] and recognize it as such—even in that dreadful event if it has partly emerged out of the Chet’i Minei[a Russian martyrology]. In a word: we must bow like prodigal children [sklonit’sia, kak bludnye deti] who, for two hundred years, have been absent from home, but who nevertheless have returned Russians—which, by the way, is our great merit.134