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THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO LOOK BRIEFLY AT SOME UNCONSCIOUS mechanisms operative in Dostoevsky's little-known story "The Peasant Marey." My thesis is that the idyllic and idealized memory of a childhood episode in that story serves not only as a protective wall between the author and the unbearable reality of the Siberian prison but also as a screen memory covering some other, repressed, earlier experience or experiences.
In 1849, 28-year-old Dostoevsky was arrested and tried as a member of a clandestine radical organization. The young writer and his fellow conspirators were first sentenced to death, then the verdict was commuted to 9 years in Siberia, but the prisoners did not learn of the reprieve until a mock execution had been staged and they had actually faced a firing squad. This event and the years spent in Siberia changed the course of Dostoevsky's life and powerfully affected his beliefs.
In 1862, he described this harrowing period in the memoirs from The House of the Dead, a remarkably accurate rendition of his prison-camp experiences thinly disguised as memoirs of a fictitious convict. Some 15 years later Dostoevsky embarked on another largely nonfictional venture: a one-man monthly, The Diary of a Writer, which was filled with an amazing variety of