Russia under the Old regime

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failed to find him. I found in the villages a stern realist and a man of cunning who - when it suits him - knows very well how to appear a simpleton... He knows that the 'peasant is no fool, but the world is dumb', and that 'the world is strong like water, and stupid like a pig.' He says 'Fear not devils, fear people', 'Beat your own people and others will fear you.' He holds a rather low opinion of truth: 'Truth won't feed you', 'What matter if it's a lie as long as you've got enough to eat', 'An honest man, like a fool, is also harmful'.1* Allowing for the fact that by the end of the nineteenth century, when Gorky was on his quest, the peasant was demoralized by economic difficulties, the fact remains that even before Emancipation had compounded his problems he displayed many of the characteristics with which Gorky credits him. Grigorovich's novels of peasant life brought out in the 1840s and Dai's collection of peasant proverbs, published in 1862, present an unattractive picture by any standard.

One possible resolution of the contradiction between these two images is to assume that the peasant had a very different attitude towards those with whom he had personal dealings and those with whom his relations were, so to say, 'functional'. The 'others' whose tears did not matter, who were stupid, who could be lied to and beaten, were outside his family, village or personal contact. But since they were precisely those who made up 'society' and 'state', the breach of the walls isolating the small peasant mir from the large mir - the world - an event which occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, left the peasant utterly bewildered and at a loss what to do. He was ill-prepared to enter into decent impersonal relations, and, when compelled to do so, revealed promptly his worst, most rapacious characteristics.

In his religious life, the peasant displayed a great deal of external devotion. He crossed himself continually, attended regularly the long church services, observed the fasts. He did all this from a conviction that scrupulous observance of church rituals - fasts, sacraments, and the constant making of the cross - would save his soul. But he seems to have had very little if any understanding of the spiritual meaning of religion or of religion as a way of life. He did not know the Bible or even the Lord's Prayer. He had nothing but contempt for the village priest or pop. His attachment to Christianity was on the whole superficial, resting primarily on the need for formulas and rituals with which to gain access to the nether world. It is difficult to quarrel with Belinskii's judgement as made in his famous Open Letter to Gogol:

According to you the Russian people is the most religious in the world. That is a lie! The basis of religiousness is pietism, reverence, fear of God, whereas the Russian man utters the name of the Lord while scratching himself somewhere. He says of the icon: If it isn't good for praying it's good for covering the pots.