Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  The majority of the prisoners were depraved and perverted, so that calumny and detraction rained amongst them like hail. Our life was a constant hell, a perpetual damnation; but no one would have dared to raise a voice against the internal regulations of the prison or established usage. Accordingly, willingly or unwillingly, they had to be obeyed. Certain indomitable characters yielded with difficulty, but they yielded all the same. Men who had run amok and, urged by overweening pride, had committed the most terrible crimes as it were unconsciously and in delirium, men who had terrorized whole towns, were quickly subdued by our prison system. The ‘new boy,’ taking stock of his surroundings, soon found that he could astonish no one. Insensibly he submitted, took the general tone, and assumed a sort of personal dignity which almost all maintained, as if the denomination of convict were a title of honour. Not the least sign of shame or of repentance, but a kind of external submission which seemed to have been reasoned out as the best line of conduct to pursue. ‘ We are lost men,’ they said to themselves. ‘We were unable to live as free men, and we must now go to Green Street.’1

  ‘You would not obey your father and mother; you will now obey leather thongs.”The man who would not sow must now break stones.’

  These things were said and repeated as moral aphorisms, sentences, and proverbs, but without anyone taking them seriously. They were but words in the air. There was not one man among us who admitted his iniquity. Let a stranger who was not a convict endeavour to reproach one with his crime, and he would meet with an endless storm of abuse. And how refined are convicts in the matter of insults! They insult delicately, like artists; insult with the most delicate science. They endeavour not so much to offend by the expression as by the meaning, the spirit of an envenomed phrase. Their incessant quarrels developed this method into a fine art.

  As they worked only under threat of the big stick, they were idle and depraved. Those who were not already corrupt when they arrived were very soon perverted. Brought together in spite of themselves, they were perfect strangers to one another. ‘The devil wore out three pairs of shoes before he rounded us up,’ they would say. Intrigue, calumny, scandal of all kinds, envy, and hatred reigned above all else. In this slothful life no ordinary spiteful tongue could make headway against these murderers with insults constantly in their mouths.

  As I said before, there were to be found among them men of open character, resolute, intrepid, accustomed to self-command. These were held involuntarily in esteem. Although they were very jealous of their reputation, they endeavoured to annoy no one, and never insulted one another without a motive. Their conduct was on all points full of

  1 An allusion to the two rows of soldiers, armed with green rods, between which convicts condemned to corporal punishment had to pass.

  dignity. They were rational, and almost always obedient, not on principle, or from any respect for duty, but as if in virtue of a mutual convention between themselves and the administration-a convention of which the advantages were plain enough.

  The officials, moreover, behaved prudently towards them. I remember that one prisoner of the resolute and intrepid -type, known to possess the instincts of a wild beast, was summoned one day to be whipped. It was during the summer, and no work was being done. The governor of the prison was in the orderly room near the principal entrance, ready to assist at the punishment. This officer was dreaded by the prisoners, whom he had brought to such a state that they trembled before him. Severe to the point of insanity, ‘he threw himself upon them,’ to use their expression. But it was above all his look, as penetrating as that of a lynx, that was feared. It was impossible to conceal anything from him: he saw, so to say, without looking. On entering the prison, he knew at once what was going on. Accordingly the convicts one and all called him the man with eight eyes. His system was bad, for it had the effect of irritating men who were already irascible. But for the deputy governor, a well-bred and reasonable man who moderated the savage onslaughts of his superior, the latter would have caused sad misfortunes by his incompetent administration. I do not understand how he managed to retire from the service safe and sound. It is true that he left after being called before a court martial.

  A prisoner, though he turned pale when summoned, generally lay down courageously and without uttering a word to receive the terrible rods; then he got up and shook himself. He bore the misfortune calmly, philosophically, it is true, though he was never punished at random, nor before careful inquiries had been made. But this time the victim considered himself innocent. Pale with fear, he walked quietly towards the escort of soldiers, but as he did so he managed to conceal in his sleeve a shoemaker’s awl. Now the prisoners were strictly forbidden to carry sharp instruments about them; examinations were frequently, minutely, and unexpectedly made, and all infractions of the rule were severely punished.

  But as it is difficult to deprive a criminal of what he is determined to conceal, and as, moreover, sharp instruments are necessarily used in the prison, they were never destroyed. If an official managed to confiscate them the convicts very soon procured new ones.

  On the occasion in question all the convicts were pressed against the palisade, with palpitating hearts, peering through the crevices. It was known that this time Petroff would not allow himself to be flogged, that the governor’s end had come. But at the critical moment the latter got into his carriage and departed, leaving the direction of the punishment to a subordinate. ‘God has saved him!’said the convicts. As for Petroff, he underwent his punishment quietly. Once the governor had gone his anger abated. Prisoners are submissive and obedient up to a point, but there is a limit which must not be crossed. Nothing is more curious than these strange outbursts of disobedience and rage. Often a man who has for years endured the cruellest punishment will revolt for a trifle, for a mere nothing. He might pass for a madman; that, in fact, is what is said of him.

  I have already stated that during many years I never remarked the least sign of repentance nor even the slightest uneasiness in a man with regard to his crime, and that most of the convicts considered neither honour nor conscience, holding that they had a right to art as they thought fit. Certainly vanity, bad example, deceitfulness, and false shame were responsible for much. On the other hand, who can claim to have sounded the depths of those hearts given over to perdition, and to have found them closed to all light? It would seem indeed that during all those years I should have been able to detect some indication, however fugitive, of some regret, of some moral suffering. I positively saw nothing of the kind. One cannot judge of crime with ready-made; opinions: its philosophy is a little more complicated than people think. It is acknowledged that neither convict prisons, nor the hulks, nor any system of hard labour ever reformed a criminal. These forms of chastisement only punish him and reassure society against the offences he might commit. Confinement, regulation, and excessive work have no effect but to develop in these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitration. On the other hand I am convinced that the celebrated cellular system gives results which are specious and deceitful. It deprives a criminal of his initiative, of his energy, enervates his soul by weakening and frightening it, and at last exhibits a dried-up mummy as a model of repentance and amendment.

  The criminal who has revolted against society hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes. In spite of different opinions, everyone will acknowledge that there are acts which everywhere and always, under no matter what legal system, are beyond doubt criminal, and should be regarded as such so long as man is man. It is only in prison that I have heard related with childish, unrestrained laughter the strangest, most atrocious offences. I shall never forget a certain parricide, formerly a nobleman and a public functionary. A true prodigal son, he had caused his father great grief. The old man had tried in vain to restrain him by remonstrance on the fatal slope down which he wa
s sliding. But the son was heavily in debt, and as his father was suspected of having, besides an estate, a sum of ready money, he killed him in order to enter more quickly into the inheritance. This crime was not discovered until a month afterwards, during which time the murderer, who meanwhile had informed the police of his father’s disappearance, continued his debauches. At last, during his absence, the police discovered the old man’s corpse in a drain. The grey head was severed from the trunk, but replaced in its original position. The body was entirely dressed. Beneath, as if in derision, the assassin had placed a cushion.

  The young man confessed nothing. He was degraded, deprived of his nobiliary privileges, and condemned to twenty years’ hard labour. As long as I knew him I always found him to be indifferent to his position. He was the most light-minded, inconsiderate man that I ever met, although he was far from being a fool. I never observed in him any strong tendency to cruelty. The other convicts despised him, not on account of his crime, of which there was never any question, but because he was without dignity. He sometimes spoke of his father. One day for instance, boasting of the hereditary good health of his family, he said: ‘My father, for example, until his death was never ill.’

  Animal insensibility carried to such a point is most remarkable-it is, indeed, phenomenal. There must have been in this case some organic defect in the man, some physical and moral monstrosity hitherto unknown to science, and not simply crime. Naturally I did not believe so atrocious a crime; but people from the same town as himself, who knew all the details of his history, told me of it. The facts were so clear that it would have been madness not to accept them. The prisoners once heard him cry out during his sleep: ‘ Hold him! hold him! Cut his head off, his head, his head!’

  Nearly all the convicts dreamed aloud, or were delirious in their sleep. Insults, words of slang, knives, hatchets, seemed constantly present in their dreams. ‘ We are crushed!’ they would say; ‘we are without entrails; that is why we shriek at night.’

  Hard labour in our fortress was not an occupation, but an obligation. The convicts did their job; they worked the number of hours fixed by law, and then returned to the prison. They hated their free time. If a convict did not do some voluntary work, he could not have endured his con finement. How could these men, all strongly constituted who had lived sumptuously and desired so to live again, who had been brought together against their will after society had cast them off-how could they live in a normal and natural manner? Man cannot exist without work, without legal, natural property. Depart from these conditions, and he becomes perverted and changed into a wild beast. Accordingly, every convict, through natural requirements and by the instinct of self-preservation, had a trade-an occupation of some kind.

  The long summer days were occupied almost entirely by hard labour. The night was so short that we had only just time to sleep. It was not the same in winter. According to regulations, prisoners had to be shut up in the barracks at nightfall. What was to be done during these long, sad evenings but work? Consequently each barrack, though locked and bolted, assumed the appearance of a large workshop. That work was not, of course, forbidden in itself; but it was forbidden to have tools, without which work is evidently impossible. But we laboured in secret, and the administration seemed to shut its eyes. Many prisoners arrived without knowing how to make use of their ten fingers; but they learnt a trade from some of their companions, and became excellent workmen.

  We had among us cobblers, bootmakers, tailors, masons, locksmiths, and gilders. A Jew named Esau Boumstein was at the same time a jeweller and a usurer. Everyone worked, and so earned a few pence-for many orders came from the town. Money is a kind of freedom that can be felt and heard; it is an inestimable treasure for a man entirely deprived of true liberty. If he feels some money in his pocket, he consoles himself a little, even though he cannot spend it: but one can always and everywhere spend money, the more so as forbidden fruit is doubly sweet. One can often buy spirits in prison. Although pipes are severely forbidden, everyone smokes. Money and tobacco protect the convicts against scurvy, as work protects them from crime; for without work they would mutually have destroyed one another like spiders shut up in a closed bottle. Work and money were nevertheless forbidden. Often during the night strict searches were made, during which everything that was not legally authorized was confiscated. However successfully the little hoards had been concealed, they were sometimes discovered, which was one of the reasons why they were not kept very long. They were exchanged as soon as possible for drink, and that is how it was that spirits penetrated into the prison. The delinquent was not only deprived of his hoard, but was also cruelly flogged.

  After every search, however, it was not long before the convicts procured again the objects which had been confiscated, and things returned to normal. The administration knew it; and although the condition of the convicts was a good deal like that of the inhabitants of Vesuvius, they never murmured at the punishment inflicted for these peccadilloes. Those who had no manual skill did business somehow or other. The modes of buying and selling were original enough: things changed hands which no one expected a convict would ever have thought of selling or buying, or even of regarding as of any value whatever. The least rag had its value, and might be turned to account. In consequence, however, of the convicts’ poverty, money acquired in their eyes a superior value to that really belonging to it.

  Long and painful tasks, sometimes of a very complicated kind, brought in a few kopecks. Several of the prisoners lent by the week, and did good business that way. The prisoner who was ruined and insolvent carried to the usurer the few things belonging to him and pledged them for some halfpence, which were advanced at a fabulous rate of interest. If he did not redeem them at the fixed time the usurer sold them pitilessly by auction, and without the least delay.

  Usury flourished so well in our prison that money was lent even on Government property: linen, boots, etc.-things that were always in demand. When the lender accepted such pledges the affair might take an unexpected turn. The proprietor would go, immediately after he had received his money, and tell the under-officer in charge that objects belonging to the State were being concealed; upon which everything was taken away from the usurer without even the formality of a report to the higher authority. But never was there any quarrel-and that is very curious indeed-between the usurer and the owner. The first gave up in silence, with a morose air, the things demanded from him, as if he had been waiting for the request. Sometimes, perhaps, he confessed to himself that, in the borrower’s position, he would not have acted differently. Accordingly, if he felt aggrieved after this restitution, it was less from hatred than simply as a matter of conscience.

  The convicts robbed one another without shame. Each prisoner had his little box fitted with a padlock, in which he kept the things entrusted to him by the administration. Although these boxes were authorized, that did not prevent them from being broken into. The reader can easily imagine what clever thieves were found among us. A prisoner who was sincerely devoted to me-I say it without boasting-stole my Bible, the only book allowed in prison. He told me of it the same day, not from repentance, but because he pitied me when he saw me looking for it everywhere. Among our companions in chains there were several convicts known as ’innkeepers,’ who sold spirits and thereby became comparatively rich. I shall speak of this further on, for the liquor traffic deserves special consideration.

  A great number of prisoners had been deported for smuggling, which explains how it was that drink was brought secretly into the prison under so severe a surveillance as ours was. In passing it may be remarked that smuggling is an offence apart. Would it be believed that money, the solid profit from the affair, possesses often only secondary importance for the smuggler? It is none the less true. He works by vocation. In his way he is a poet. He risks all he possesses and exposes himself to terrible dangers; he intrigues, invents, gets out of a scrape, and brings everything to a happy end as it were by inspiration. This passion is
as violent as that of play.

  I knew a prisoner of colossal stature, who was the mildest, the most peaceable, and the most manageable of men. Indeed, we often asked one another why he had been deported. He had such a calm, sociable character that during the whole period of his imprisonment he never quarrelled with anyone. Born in western Russia, where he lived on the frontier, he had been sent to hard labour for smuggling. Naturally, then, he could not resist his desire to smuggle spirits into the prison. He was punished for it time and again, and heaven knows he was terrified of the rods. This dangerous trade brought him in but slender profits: it was the speculator who got rich at his expense. Each time he was punished he wept like an old woman, and swore by all that was holy that he would never be caught at such things again. He kept his vow for a whole month, but ended by yielding once more to his passion. Thanks to these amateur smugglers, spirits were always to be had.

  Another source of income which, without enriching the prisoners, was constantly and beneficently turned to account, was alms-giving. The upper classes of our Russian society do not know to what an extent merchants, shopkeepers, and our people generally commiserate with the ‘Unfortunate.’1 Alms were always forthcoming: they consisted generally of little

  1 Men condemned to hard labour, and exiles generally, were so called by the Russian peasantry.

  white loaves, and sometimes, though very seldom, of money. Without alms, the existence of the convicts, and above all that of those awaiting sentence (who are badly fed) would be too painful. These alms are shared equally between all the prisoners. If they are not sufficient the little loaves are divided into halves, and sometimes into six pieces, so that each man may have his share. I remember the first alms, a small piece of money, that I received. One morning soon after my arrival, as I was returning from work under military escort, I met a woman and her daughter, a child of ten, who was beautiful as an angel. I had already seen them once before. The mother was the widow of a poor soldier who, while still young, had been sentenced by court martial and had died in the prison infirmary while I was there. They wept hot tears when they came to bid him good-bye. On seeing me the little girl blushed, and murmured a few words into her mother’s ear. The woman stopped, and took from a basket a kopeck which she gave to the little girl. The little girl ran after me. ‘ Here, poor man,’ she said, ‘ take this in the name of Christ.’ I took the money which she slipped into my hand. The little girl returned joyfully to her mother. I kept that kopeck for a long time.