Notes from a Dead House

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  I will add one thing to that: I was always astonished at the extraordinary good-naturedness, the complacency, with which all these beaten men told about how they were beaten and about those who beat them. Often not even the slightest shade of spite or hatred could be heard in such stories, which sometimes shook my heart and made it beat hard and fast. They would tell about it and laugh like children. M—cki, on the other hand, told me about his punishment; he was not a nobleman and got five hundred. I learned of it from others and asked him myself if it was true and how it went. He replied somehow curtly, as if with some inner pain, trying not to look at me, and his face turned red; half a minute later he looked at me, and the fire of hatred flashed in his eyes, his lips trembled with indignation. I felt that he could never forget this page from his past. But the others, almost all of them (I cannot guarantee there were no exceptions), looked at it quite differently. It cannot be, I sometimes thought, that they consider themselves wholly guilty and deserving of punishment, especially if their offense was not against their own, but against the authorities. The majority of them did not blame themselves at all. I’ve already said that I did not notice any pangs of conscience, even in those cases when the crime was against their own kind. To say nothing of crimes against the authorities. It sometimes seemed to me that in this latter case they had their own special, so to speak, practical or, better, factual view of the matter. It took account of fate, the irrefutability of the fact, and it was not so much thought out as unconscious, like a sort of faith. For instance, though a prisoner is always inclined to feel himself justified in his crimes against the authorities, so that the very question of it is unthinkable for him, all the same in practical terms he was aware that the authorities viewed his crimes quite differently, which meant that he had to take his punishment and be quits. Here the struggle was mutual. At the same time the criminal knows and has no doubt that he is vindicated by the court of his own milieu, his own simple folk, who will never (this, too, he knows) condemn him definitively, and for the most part will vindicate him outright, as long as his offense is not against his own, his brothers, his fellow simple folk. His conscience is at peace, which makes him strong and morally untroubled, and that is the main thing. It’s as if he feels that he has something to support him, and therefore he does not hate, but takes what has happened to him as an inescapable fact, which did not begin with him, will not end with him, and will continue for a long, long time amidst the ongoing, passive, but persistent struggle. What soldier personally hates a Turk when he makes war on him? And yet the Turk cuts him down, stabs him, shoots at him. However, not all the stories were so cool-headed and indifferent. The story of Lieutenant Zherebyatnikov, for instance, was told with a certain shade of indignation, though not all that great. I became acquainted with this Lieutenant Zherebyatnikov during my first stay in the hospital—from the prisoners’ stories, naturally. Then one day I saw him in the flesh, when he stood guard over us. He was a man of about thirty, tall, fat, flabby, with ruddy, fat-bloated cheeks, white teeth, and a booming Nozdryovian laugh.3 You could see by his face that this was the most unreflective man in the world. He passionately loved whipping and punishing with rods, when he happened to be appointed the executor. I hasten to add that already then I regarded Lieutenant Zherebyatnikov as a monster among his kind, and so did my fellow prisoners. There were others besides him, in the old days, of course, in those recent old days of which “the memory is fresh, but hard to believe,”4 who loved performing their task zealously and diligently. But for the most part it was done naïvely and with no special enthusiasm. Whereas the lieutenant was something like a refined gourmet in performing the task. He loved, he passionately loved performing his art, and loved it solely for the art’s sake. He took pleasure in it, and, like a jaded Roman patrician, glutted with pleasures, he invented for himself various subtleties, various perversions, in order to arouse and pleasantly tickle his fat-bloated soul at least somewhat. Here they lead out a prisoner for punishment; Zherebyatnikov is the executor; one glance at the long row of people lined up with thick sticks already inspires him. He walks self-contentedly down the rows and insistently repeats that everyone should perform his task zealously, conscientiously, or else … The soldiers know the meaning of this “or else”… But now they bring the criminal himself, and if he is not yet acquainted with Zherebyatnikov, if he has not yet heard all there is to know about him, then here, for example, is the trick he will play on him. (Naturally, this is one of a hundred little tricks; the lieutenant’s inventiveness was inexhaustible.) Every prisoner, at the moment when he is stripped and his arms are tied to the gun stocks, by which the sergeants will then pull him down the whole green street—every prisoner, following the general custom, begins at that moment to beg the executor in a tearful, plaintive voice to soften the punishment and not aggravate it by unnecessary severity: “Your Honor,” the unfortunate man cries, “have mercy, be a father to me, I’ll pray to God for you all my life, don’t destroy me, be merciful!” That is just what Zherebyatnikov would be waiting for; he stops the procedure at once and, also with a sensitive look, starts talking with the prisoner:

  “My friend,” he says, “what am I to do with you? It’s not me, it’s the law that’s punishing you!”

  “Your Honor, everything’s in your hands! Be merciful!”

  “Do you think I don’t feel sorry for you? Do you think it’s a pleasure for me to watch you get beaten? I’m also a human being! Am I a human being or not, in your opinion?”

  “For sure, Your Honor, it’s a known thing; you’re fathers, we’re children. Be a father to me!” cries the prisoner, beginning to hope.

  “But, my friend, judge for yourself; you’ve got a mind to judge with: I myself know that out of humanity I should look upon you, a sinner, indulgently and mercifully …”

  “It’s the veritable truth you’re so kindly speaking, Your Honor!”

  “Yes, to look mercifully, no matter what a sinner you are. But here it’s not me, it’s the law! Think! I serve God and the fatherland; I’ll be taking a heavy sin on myself if I relax the law, think about that!”

  “Your Honor!”

  “Well, all right! So be it, just for you! I know I’m sinning, but so be it … I’ll take pity on you this time, I’ll lighten the punishment. Well, but what if I’m actually doing you harm by it? I show you mercy now, I lighten the punishment, and you count on it being the same the next time and commit another crime—what then? It’ll be on my conscience …”

  “Your Honor! I’ll swear by anything you like! As if before the throne of the Lord in heaven …”

  “Well, enough, enough now! But you swear to me that you’ll behave yourself in the future?”

  “Lord strike me dead, and torment me in the next world, if I …”

  “Don’t swear, it’s a sin. I’ll take your word for it. Do you give me your word?”

  “Your Honor!!!”

  “Well, listen then, I’ll have mercy on you only for the sake of your orphan’s tears. Are you an orphan?”

  “An orphan, Your Honor, alone as could be, no father, no mother …”

  “Well, then, for the sake of your orphan’s tears; but watch out, it’s the last time … Take him,” he adds in such a tender-hearted voice that the prisoner no longer knows what kind of prayers he can pray to God for such mercifulness. But now the dread procession starts, he is led along; the drum thunders, the first rods are raised … “Lay into him!” Zherebyatnikov shouts at the top of his lungs. “Burn him! Thrash, thrash! Scorch him! More, more! Lay into the orphan, lay into the rogue! Roast him, roast him!” And the soldiers thrash with all their might, sparks fly out of the poor man’s eyes, he begins to shout, and Zherebyatnikov runs down the line after him, laughs, laughs his head off, holds his sides splitting with laughter, he can’t straighten up, so that in the end you even pity the dear heart. And he’s delighted, he’s amused, and only rarely does his loud, healthy, resounding laughter break off, and again you hear, “Thrash him, t
hrash him! Scorch the rogue, scorch the orphan!…”

  And here are some other variations he came up with: a prisoner is led out for punishment; again he begins to plead. This time Zherebyatnikov doesn’t play-act, doesn’t mug, but goes in for frankness:

  “You see, my dear fellow,” he says, “I’m going to punish you properly, because you deserve it. But here’s what I’ll do for you, if you like: I won’t tie you to the gun stocks. You’ll go it alone, only in a new way: run through the whole line as fast as you can! Then even if every rod hits you, the thing will be shorter, don’t you think? Want to give it a try?”

  The prisoner listens with perplexity, with mistrust, and reflects. “Why not?” he thinks. “Maybe it really will be easier; I’ll run as hard as I can, and the torture will be five times shorter, and maybe not every rod will hit me.”

  “Very well, Your Honor, I agree.”

  “And I agree, too, so go to it! Watch out, don’t gawk!” he shouts to the soldiers, knowing beforehand, however, that not a single rod will miss the guilty back; the soldier who misses also knows very well what he risks. The prisoner sets off running as fast as he can down the “green street,” but, naturally, doesn’t make it past the fifteenth row; the rods, like drumsticks, like lightning, all at once, suddenly crash down on his back, and the poor man, screaming, falls as if he’s been cut down, as if he’s been hit by a bullet. “No, Your Honor, better stick to the law,” he says, slowly getting up from the ground, pale and frightened, and Zherebyatnikov, who knew the whole trick beforehand and what would come of it, roars with laughter. But it’s impossible to describe all his amusements and all that the prisoners told about him!

  In a somewhat different way, in a different tone and spirit, they told about a certain Lieutenant Smekalov, who fulfilled the duties of commandant in our fortress before our major was appointed to the post. Though they told about Zherebyatnikov rather indifferently, with no special anger, all the same they did not admire his feats, did not praise him, but obviously scorned him. They even somehow haughtily despised him. But Lieutenant Smekalov was remembered among us with joy and delight. The thing was that he was not at all some sort of special enthusiast of whipping; the pure Zherebyatnikovian element was totally lacking in him. But at the same time he had nothing against whipping; the whole point was that his flogging itself was remembered among us with a sort of sweet love—so well the man knew how to please the prisoners. How, though? How did he earn such popularity? True, our people, perhaps like all the Russian people, are ready to forget the whole torture for one kind word; I’m speaking of this as of a fact, without analyzing it this time from one side or the other. It was not difficult to please these people and acquire popularity among them. But Lieutenant Smekalov had acquired a special popularity—so that even the way he whipped was remembered with all but tenderness. “He was more than a father,” the prisoners used to say, and they would even sigh, comparing their memories of their former temporary superior, Smekalov, with the present major. “He’s all heart!” He was a simple man, maybe even kind in his own way. But it can happen that there is not only a kind, but even a magnanimous man among the authorities; and what then?—nobody likes him, and sometimes they simply laugh at him. The thing is that Smekalov was somehow able to do it so that everybody among us took him as their man, and that is a great skill, or, more precisely, an inborn ability, which even those who possess it do not stop to think about. Strangely enough, there are even some among them who are not kind people at all, and yet they sometimes acquire great popularity. They are not squeamish, they are not disgusted by the people under them—there, it seems to me, is where the reason lies! You see nothing of the clean-handed little squire in them, you catch no whiff of the fine lord, but they have a sort of special, inborn, common-folk smell, and, my God, how sensitive the people are to that smell! What won’t they give for it! They are even ready to exchange the most merciful man for the most severe, so long as he gives off their own homespun smell. And what if the man with their smell is also really kindhearted, though in his own way? Then he’s priceless! Lieutenant Smekalov, as I’ve already said, sometimes punished painfully, but he was somehow able to do it so that not only was no one angry, but, on the contrary, even now, in my time, when it was all long past, they remembered his little tricks during the whipping with laughter and delight. However, he had few tricks, for lack of artistic fantasy. In truth, there was just one trick, one only, with which he got by with us for almost a whole year; but maybe it was so dear to them precisely because it was the only one. There was much naïveté in that. For instance, they bring in a guilty prisoner. Smekalov himself comes to the punishment, comes with a smile, with a joke, straightaway asks the guilty man about something, about something irrelevant, about his personal life, his home life, his prison life, and not at all with any sort of aim, not to play up to him, but simply because he really wants to know about these things. The birches are brought, and a chair for Smekalov; he sits down, even lights his pipe. He had a long-stemmed pipe. The prisoner begins to plead … “No, brother, lie down, there’s no point …,” says Smekalov; the prisoner sighs and lies down. “Well, my dear man, so you know the Lord’s Prayer by heart?” “How could I not, Your Honor, I’m a Christian, I learned it as a child.” “Well, recite it, then.” And the prisoner knows what to recite, and knows ahead of time what will come of the recital, because the same trick has already been repeated some thirty times before with other prisoners. And Smekalov himself knows that the prisoner knows it; he knows that even the soldiers standing with raised birches over the prostrate victim have also been hearing about this same trick for a long time, and still he repeats it again—it has pleased him so much once and for all, maybe precisely because he made it up, out of literary vanity. The prisoner begins to recite, the men with the birches stand waiting, while Smekalov even leans forward, raises his arm, and stops smoking his pipe, waiting for a certain little word. After the first line of the well-known prayer, the prisoner finally reaches the words “our daily bread.” No more is needed. “Stop!” cries the inflamed lieutenant, and instantly, with an inspired gesture, addressing the man with the raised birch, cries: “Give him the birch instead!”

  And he dissolves in loud laughter. The soldiers standing around also grin: the flogger grins, even the flogged man all but grins, though at the command “instead” the birch is already whistling through the air, to cut an instant later like a razor into his guilty body. And Smekalov is delighted, delighted precisely because he worked it out so well—and himself composed that “our daily bread” and “birch instead”—it’s apt and it rhymes. And Smekalov goes away after the punishment perfectly pleased with himself, and the whipped man also goes away all but pleased with himself and Smekalov, and, lo and behold, half an hour later he’s already telling the whole prison how, just now, the already thirty times repeated trick was repeated for the thirty-first time. “He’s all heart! A funny man!”

  On occasion the memories of the kindly lieutenant even smacked of a sort of Manilovism.5

  “You’re going along, you know, brothers,” some little prisoner tells, and his whole face smiles at the memory, “you’re going along and he’s sitting by the window in his dressing gown, sipping tea, smoking his pipe. You take your hat off. ‘Where you going, Aksenov?’

  “ ‘To work, Mikhail Vassilyich, to the workshop first off,’ and he laughs to himself … All heart he is! Heart’s the only word!”

  “And try finding the likes of him!” adds one of his listeners.

  * * *

  *1 Literally “catarrhal fever” (Latin). Author.