Originally Posted by
hellsapoppin
For some reason, I forgot to include a note on this incident which appeared in Ch 5.
You know how to British and Americans the dog is regarded as mankind's best friend. To us Hispanics the horse is regarded as such. My understanding is that horses were also held in very high regard among Russians and Ukrainians. This should not come as a surprise since their ancestors were warriors who roamed Central Asia and Europe relying heavily on the horse to provide the means to make capital and conquests.
But in this terrible incident in C & P a horse is tortured by a teamster with members of the unwashed crowd joining in on the "fun" of destroying this noble and utilitarian creature. This incident IIRC was a nightmare that Rascal had and not an actual event. But it likely represents how to his twisted mind (and those of the imaginary, unwashed, and unwise crowd) is because a noble innocent creature is reduced to a play thing, a punching bag, a crash test dummy. They use clubs and iron bars as well as kicks and the drivers whip. Perhaps the dream also foretells Rascal fate as the weight of the world and universe falls upon him for his evil. It also displays the conformity of the crowd which no longer regards old ways taught by Old Order Russia and regards those lessons as useless, frivolous, and deserving of severest retributive punishment. Indeed, one older person asks the driver, "What are you about, are you a Christian, you devil?” shouted an old man in the crowd ... “No mistake about it, you are not a Christian,” many voices were shouting in the crowd." Thus, old order Russians conformed to the traditions values and ways. New order Russians don't as shown by that rowdy and unkempt crowd.
As a child Rascal accepted and conformed to Old Order Russia values and ways. This is why he sympathized with the horse and the nobility it represented. Before it is revealed that he had that dream of the horse, he had another dream about an old church where his sibling and grandmother are buried. It is said that he,
"In the middle of the graveyard stood a stone church with a green cupola where he used to go to mass two or three times a year with his father and mother, when a service was held in memory of his grandmother, who had long been dead, and whom he had never seen. On these occasions they used to take on a white dish tied up in a table napkin a special sort of rice pudding with raisins stuck in it in the shape of a cross. He loved that church, the old-fashioned, unadorned ikons and the old priest with the shaking head ..."
Now as an adult he has no regard for the church, for compliance with the law, no regard for intellectual pursuits, for material rewards in return for hard work and industry. Why are New Order Russians like this? Nihilism, socialism, anarchism, New Thought?
Whatever the cause, these people who destroyed the horse are not Christian. He says he will perform a similar act upon the wretched old woman. Thus, he, too, is not a Christian. He is not a true Russian. His mind corrupted not just by mental deficiency, but, no doubt, from corrupting influences which to this point in the story have not been entirely revealed by the author.
A few posts earlier I may have mentioned that there appear to be Apocalyptic warnings in these great Russian classics. That these authors were telling their society that it is on the verge of a irreversible cataclysm for various reasons - that it is too unjust, that people are under influence of alien thoughts, that Jews have an undue influence over intellectual circles and that they exert corrupting influences over many, and that people are leaving the church and the good things it represents. That when combined all this would lead to the dissipation of Russian society. I feel that this chapter starts to illustrate this in C & P.
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