Notes from a Dead House

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  And now, as I write this, I vividly recall one dying man, a consumptive, that same Mikhailov, who lay almost opposite me, not far from Ustyantsev, and who died, I remember, four days after my arrival in the ward. Maybe I began talking about consumptives now inadvertently repeating the impressions and thoughts that occurred to me then on the occasion of his death. Mikhailov himself, however, I knew very little. He was still a very young man, of about twenty-five, not more, tall, slender, and of extremely pleasing appearance. He lived in the special section and was strangely taciturn, always somehow quietly, somehow peacefully sad. As if he was “withering away” in prison. So at least the prisoners, among whom he left good memories of himself, put it afterwards. I remember only that he had beautiful eyes, and I truly don’t know why I remember him so distinctly. He died at around three o’clock in the afternoon, on a clear and frosty day. I remember the sun’s strong, slanting rays piercing the green, slightly frosted windows of our ward. A whole stream of them poured onto the unfortunate man. He died unconscious and agonized painfully for a long time, several hours on end. Since morning his eyes had stopped recognizing those who approached him. They wanted to make it somehow easier, seeing that it was very painful for him; he breathed with difficulty, deeply, hoarsely; his chest rose high, as if he could not get enough air. He threw off his blanket, all his clothes, and finally began tearing at his shirt; even that seemed too heavy to him. They helped him to take off his shirt. It was frightening to look at that long, long body with its legs and arms withered to the bone, with its sunken stomach, protruding chest, sharply outlined ribs like a skeleton’s. All that was left on him was a wooden cross with an amulet and the fetters, through which it seemed he could now have drawn his withered leg. Half an hour before his death, we all became as if hushed, began talking almost in whispers. Those who walked, stepped inaudibly. We talked little, about unrelated things, and only glanced every once in a while at the dying man, who was wheezing more and more. Finally, his wandering and shaky hand found the amulet on his chest and began tearing it off, as if it, too, was a burden to him, bothered him, weighed him down. We took the amulet off as well. About ten minutes later he died. We knocked on the door to let the guard know. A watchman came in, looked dully at the dead man, and went for the medical attendant. The medical attendant, a kindly young fellow, somewhat excessively preoccupied with his appearance, which, by the way, was rather pleasing, came soon; with rapid steps, which rang out loudly in the hushed ward, he went up to the dead man, and with a particularly casual air, as if purposely devised for the occasion, took his pulse, waved his hand, and went out. The guard was informed at once: the criminal was an important one, from the special section; even his death had to be acknowledged with special ceremony. While waiting for the guard, one of the prisoners, in a quiet voice, expressed the thought that it would not be a bad thing to close the dead man’s eyes. Another listened to him attentively, silently went to the dead man, and closed his eyes. Seeing the cross lying there on the pillow, he picked it up, looked at it, and silently put it back on Mikhailov’s neck; put it back and crossed himself. Meanwhile the dead face was stiffening; a ray of light played over it; the mouth was half open, two rows of white young teeth gleamed from under the thin lips stuck to the gums. Finally the sergeant of the watch came, wearing a saber and a helmet, followed by two guards. He approached, stepping more and more slowly, looking in perplexity at the hushed prisoners gazing at him sternly from all sides. A step away from the dead man, he stopped in his tracks, as if frightened. The completely naked, withered corpse, with nothing on it but fetters, shocked him, and he suddenly undid the chin strap, took off his helmet, which was by no means called for, and made a large sign of the cross. He had a stern, gray, old soldier’s face. I remember at that same moment Chekunov was standing there, also a gray-haired old man. All this time he had been looking silently and fixedly at the sergeant’s face and studying his every gesture with some strange attention. But their eyes met, and for some reason Chekunov’s lower lip suddenly trembled. He twisted it somehow strangely, bared his teeth, and nodding quickly, as if accidentally, towards the dead man, said to the sergeant:

  “He had a mother, too!”—and walked away.

  I remember it was as if those words pierced me … And what made him speak them and how did they enter his head? But here they started lifting the body, lifted it together with the cot; the straw crunched, the fetters, amidst the general silence, clanked loudly against the floor … They were picked up. The body was carried out. Suddenly everybody started talking loudly. The sergeant, already in the corridor, was heard sending someone for the blacksmith. The dead man had to be unfettered …

  But I’ve strayed from my subject …

  II

  Continuation

  The doctors made the round of the wards in the morning; between ten and eleven they all appeared together in our ward, accompanying the head doctor, and an hour and a half before them we were visited by our intern. At that time our intern was a knowledgeable young doctor, gentle, affable, whom the prisoners liked very much, and in whom they found only one shortcoming: “much too meek.” He was indeed somehow untalkative, even as if embarrassed with us, all but blushing, changing doses at the patient’s first request, and he even seemed ready to prescribe medicines for them at their own request. However, he was a nice young man. It must be admitted that in Russia many doctors enjoyed the love and respect of simple folk, and that, as far as I have observed, is perfectly true. I know that my words will seem paradoxical, especially considering the universal mistrust all simple Russian folk have for medicine and for foreign drugs. Indeed, a simple man suffering for several years from a very grave illness will sooner be treated by a wise woman or his own homemade folk remedies (which are by no means to be scorned) than go to a doctor or lie in a hospital. But, besides that, there is one extremely important circumstance here that has no relation to medicine: namely, the universal mistrust among all simple folk of everything that bears the stamp of the administrative, the official; besides that, people are frightened and prejudiced against hospitals by various fears, by tall tales, often absurd, but occasionally based on some reality. But above all they are frightened by the German rules in hospitals,1 by having strangers around during the whole course of an illness, the strictness concerning food, stories of the persistent severity of medical attendants and doctors, of the dissecting and disemboweling of corpses, and so on. Then, too, simple folk reason, the treatment will be done by gentlefolk, because doctors are gentlefolk all the same. But on closer acquaintance with doctors (not without exceptions, but for the most part), all these fears disappear very quickly, which, in my opinion, redounds directly to the credit of our doctors, predominantly the young ones. The greater part of them are able to earn the respect and even the love of simple folk. I am writing at least of what I myself saw and experienced more than once and in many places, and I have no grounds for thinking it should differ all that often in other places. Of course, in some little corners doctors do take bribes, profit greatly from their hospitals, all but ignore their patients, even forget about medicine altogether. That is still so; but I’m talking about the majority or, rather, about the spirit, the tendency, that is being realized in medicine now, in our day. Those others, apostates from the cause, wolves in a flock of sheep, whatever justification they offer, however they try to justify themselves, say, for example, by the environment, to which they, too, are prey in their turn, they will always be wrong, especially if, along with that, they have also lost their humanity. Humanity, kindness, brotherly compassion for a sick man are sometimes more necessary to him than any medicine. It is time we stopped complaining apathetically that we are prey to the environment. Granted, it does prey on us in many ways, but not in all ways, and often some clever swindler who knows his business skillfully conceals and justifies not only his weakness, but often simply his baseness, by the influence of the environment, especially if he has a gift for fine talk or writing. However, I’ve wandere
d from my theme again; I only wanted to say that simple folk are mistrustful, and more hostile to medical administration than to doctors. Learning how they are in reality, they quickly lose many of their prejudices. To this day other circumstances in our clinics are in many ways not in keeping with the spirit of simple folk, to this day they are hostile in their rules to the habits of our people and are unable to gain their full trust and respect. So at least it seems to me from some of my own impressions.

  Our intern usually stopped before each patient, examined him and talked with him seriously and extremely attentively, prescribed medicines, doses. Sometimes he himself noticed that the sick man was not sick at all; but since the prisoner had come to rest from work or to lie on a mattress instead of bare boards, and, finally, at least in a warm room, not in the damp guardhouse, where dense crowds of the accused, pale and haggard, were kept in a cramped space (the accused, all over Russia, are almost always pale and haggard—a sign that their conditions and their inner state are almost always worse than with the condemned), our intern calmly wrote them down as having some sort of febris catarrhalis*1 and let them stay there sometimes even for a week. We all laughed at this febris catarrhalis. We knew very well that it was adopted among us, by a sort of mutual agreement between doctor and patient, as a formula for designating a feigned illness—“spare cramps,” as the prisoners themselves translated it. Sometimes a sick man abused the doctor’s softheartedness and prolonged his stay until he was driven out by force. You should have seen our intern then: he seemed to grow timid, as if he were ashamed to tell the patient directly to get well and ask to be discharged, though he had full right to discharge him without any discussion or cajoling, quite simply by writing on his chart: Sanat est.*2 At first he would hint to him, then he would all but plead: “Isn’t it time? You’re nearly well, the ward is crowded,” and so on and so forth, until the sick man became ashamed of himself and finally asked to be discharged. The head doctor, though a humane and honest man (the patients also liked him very much), was incomparably more stern and resolute than the intern, even on occasion displayed a stern severity, and for that he was somehow particularly respected among us. He would appear after the intern, in the company of all the hospital doctors; he also examined each man individually, lingered particularly over the gravely ill, was always able to give them a kind, encouraging, often even heartfelt word, and generally made a good impression. He never rejected or sent away those who came with “spare cramps”; but if the patient persisted, he quite simply discharged him: “Well, brother, you’ve stayed here a good while, rested up, off you go now, enough’s enough.” Those who persisted were usually lazy men, unwilling to work, especially during the work-filled summertime, or accused men awaiting punishment. I remember they had to use particular severity, even cruelty, on one of these persistent ones to persuade him to get discharged. He had come with an eye infection; his eyes were red, he complained of a sharp, stinging pain in them. They started treating him with Spanish flies, leeches, sprayed his eyes with some caustic liquid, and so on, but the infection still did not go away, his eyes would not clear. The doctors gradually realized that the infection was feigned: there was a persistent slight inflammation, which did not get worse, but would not be cured, it remained the same, the case looked suspicious. The prisoners had all long known that he was pretending and deceiving people, though he never admitted it himself. He was a young fellow, even a handsome one, but he made an unpleasant impression on us all: secretive, suspicious, frowning, never talked to anyone, glanced about furtively, shied away from everyone, as if he suspected everyone. I remember it even occurred to some of us that he might get up to something. He had been a soldier, had been caught stealing a large sum, and was to be given a thousand strokes and sent to a prisoners’ company. To put off the moment of punishment, as I’ve mentioned before, condemned men sometimes resorted to horrible escapades: they would stick a knife into one of their superiors or their own fellow prisoners on the eve of the punishment, there would be a new trial, the punishment would be put off for a month or two, and their goal would be achieved. Never mind that in two months they will be punished two or three times more severely; if only the terrible moment has now been put off for at least a few days, then come what may—so dispirited the unfortunate men sometimes are. It was already being whispered among us that we should be wary of him; he might just stab somebody during the night. However, that was only talk; nobody took any special precautions, not even those whose cots were next to his. They saw, however, that at night he rubbed his eyes with lime from the plaster and with something else, so that in the morning they were red again. Finally, the head doctor threatened him with a seton. When a stubborn eye infection lasts for a long time, and all medical resources have already been tried, doctors resort to a strong and painful treatment to save vision: they give the patient a seton, as with horses. But even then the poor fellow would not agree to recover. His character was either stubborn or all too cowardly: a seton is not as painful as the gauntlet, but still it is very painful. You gather up the skin on the back of the patient’s neck, as much as you can hold, pierce the gathered flesh through with a knife, producing a wide and long wound across the entire nape, and pass a linen tape through this wound, a rather wide one, almost a finger’s breadth; then each day, at an appointed time, you draw this tape through the wound, as if cutting it once again, so that it goes on festering and doesn’t heal. The poor man stubbornly endured this torture for several days, though with terrible suffering, and only then finally agreed to be discharged. His eyes became perfectly well overnight, and, as soon as his neck healed, he went to the guardhouse, so as to go the next day and get his thousand strokes.

  Of course, the moment before punishment is hard, so hard that I may sin in calling this fear fainthearted and cowardly. It must be hard, if a man will accept a double or triple punishment, only not carried out at once. However, I have also mentioned those who asked to be discharged sooner, their backs still not healed from the first rods, so as to run through the remaining strokes and be finally done with their sentence; being kept under sentence in the guardhouse is, of course, incomparably worse than prison. But, besides the difference of temperaments, a great role in the resoluteness and fearlessness of some men is played by an ingrained habit of receiving blows and punishments. Manifold beatings somehow strengthen a man’s spirit and back, and he comes to look upon punishment skeptically, almost as a minor inconvenience, and no longer fears it. Generally speaking, that is true. One of our prisoners from the special section, a baptized Kalmyk,2 Alexander, or Alexandra, as he was called among us, a strange fellow, wily, fearless, and at the same time very good-natured, told me about how he went through his four thousand, laughed and joked as he told it, but at once swore seriously that if, from childhood, from the most tender childhood, he had not grown up under the lash, the scars from which literally never left his back during all his life in the horde, he would not have survived those four thousand. He told it as if he blessed this upbringing under the lash. “I was beaten for everything, Alexander Petrovich,” he told me once, sitting on my cot in the evening before the lights were brought in, “for everything and anything, whatever it might be, beaten for fifteen years on end, from the first day I can remember, several times a day; anybody who liked beat me; so in the end I got pretty used to it.” How he ended up a soldier, I don’t know; I don’t remember, though he may have told me; he was an eternal runaway and tramp. I only remember his story of how terribly frightened he was when they sentenced him to four thousand rods for murdering an officer. “I knew I’d be badly punished and that I might not survive the gauntlet, and though I was used to the lash, four thousand was no joke! And with all the officers angry besides! I knew, I knew for sure, that I wouldn’t get off lightly, that I wouldn’t make it; they wouldn’t let me go through. At first I tried getting baptized, I thought maybe they’d pardon me, and though my people told me then that nothing would come of it, that they wouldn’t pardon me, I thought
: All the same I’ll try it, all the same they may take pity on a Christian. So I got myself baptized and at the holy baptism I was named Alexander, but the strokes stayed the same; they didn’t take a single one away; I even got offended. So I thought to myself: just wait, I’ll dupe you all well and good. And guess what, Alexander Petrovich—I duped them! I was terribly good at pretending to be dead, that is, not really dead, but as if my soul was about to leave my body. They led me out; they took me through a thousand: it burns, I shout; they led me through another; well, I think, this is the end of me, the wits have all been knocked out of me, my legs are giving way; I collapse on the ground: my eyes go dead, my face is blue, no breath, foam at the mouth. The doctor came over: he’s dying, he says. They carried me to the hospital, and I revived at once. So then they led me out two more times, and they were angry, very angry at me, but I duped them two more times: I’d only just gone through the third thousand, played dead, but when I started through the fourth, each blow pierced me like a knife through the heart, each blow felt like three, they beat so painfully! They were ferocious with me. That measly last thousand (blast it!…) was worth the first three, and if I hadn’t died before the end (there were only two hundred left), they’d have beaten me to death right there, but I stuck up for myself: I duped them and played dead again, and again they believed it, and how could they not believe it, even the doctor believed it, so for those last two hundred they put all their rage into it, they beat me so that another time two thousand would be easier, but no, tough luck, they didn’t finish me off, and why didn’t they? Again, because I grew up under the lash since childhood. That’s why I’m alive today. Oh, I’ve been beaten, beaten in my lifetime!” he added at the end of his story, as if in sorrowful reflection, as if trying to remember and count up how many times he had been beaten. “Ah, no,” he added, interrupting the momentary silence, “there’s no counting all my beatings; and how could they be counted! There aren’t enough numbers.” He glanced at me and laughed, but so good-naturedly that I couldn’t help smiling back. “You know, Alexander Petrovich, even now when I dream at night, it’s always of being beaten: I don’t have any other dreams.” In fact, he often shouted at night, shouted at the top of his lungs, so that the prisoners shook him awake at once: “What are you shouting for, you devil!” He was a strapping fellow, short, fidgety and cheerful, about forty-five years old, got along well with everybody, and though he was very fond of stealing and was very often beaten for it, who among us did not get caught stealing and get beaten for it?