“It’s in Some of Our Nation...”: Customs and rituals of the Kashirsky District Peasants According to the Ethnographic Descriptions of Dostoevsky’s Neighbors

Abstract

The article is devoted to the influence of the folk environment, in which the future writer found himself during the summer holidays in his parents’ Darovoe estate (Kashirsky district, Tula province) in 1832–1836, on the formation of F. M. Dostoevsky’s views about the Russian people. The work is a continuation of the previous publication on this topic, which introduced into scientific circulation an ethnographic document stored in the scientific archive of the Russian Geographical Society (RGS), compiled by the priest P. V. Proferansov, rector of the Holy Spirit Church in the village of Monogarovo, Kashirsky district. The Dostoevsky, landowners of Darovoe, were among the parishioners of this church. The present study aims to significantly expand and clarify the ethnographic context of the “village” period of F. M. Dostoevsky’s life, since the materials of P. V. Proferansov contain multiple information gaps, which can be filled in by the data sent to the RGS in the late 1840s by the landowners of the Kashirsky district A. E. Meshchersky and A. B. Freireis. Their descriptions are interesting not only because they contain rich ethnographic material, but also because of the revealed connection of the RGO informants to the personality and creativity of F. M. Dostoevsky. A. E. Meshchersky was a noble assessor of the Kashirsky Zemsky court in the 1830s, during the litigation of F. M. Dostoevsky’s parents with P. P. Khotyaintsev about cross-strip land ownership in Darovoe, and in 1839–1840 he took part in the hearings on the death of M. A. Dostoevsky, the writer’s father. A. B. Freireis can serve as an example of “the best people,” which F. M. Dostoevsky reflected on in the “A Writer’s Diary.” The new archival materials not only allow us to hypothetically recreate the folk environment of Darovoe, as F. M. Dostoevsky could have known it in childhood, but also confirm the writer’s visionary ideas about the national character and the “binding idea” of the nation.