Thrones were toppling everywhere in Europe in 1848; new rights were being obtained, new liberties being clamored for. The arrest of Dostoevsky and the entire Petrashevsky Circle occurred as part of the tsar’s endeavor to suppress the slightest manifestation of independent thought that, sympathizing with the revolutions erupting elsewhere, might perhaps lead to similar convulsions closer to home. The last years of Nicholas’s reign froze Russian society into a terrified immobility, and whatever few traces of independent intellectual and cultural life had been allowed to exist earlier were simply wiped away. To take only one example, the new minister of education, Prince Shirinsky-Shakhmatov, eliminated the teaching of philosophy and metaphysics in the universities. “It drives one insane,” Granovsky wrote to a friend in 1850. “Good for Belinsky who died in time.”38
On April 22, the date of the last meeting at Petrashevsky’s, Dostoevsky spent the evening at Grigoryev’s, perhaps talking over plans with him and others for the operation of the handpress. At four in the morning he returned home and went to bed, but shortly thereafter was awakened by a faint metallic sound in the room. Opening his eyes sleepily, he saw standing before him the local police official, and a lieutenant-colonel dressed in the light blue uniform of an officer of the Third Section—the dreaded secret police. Told politely by the officer to rise and dress, he did so while his room was searched and his papers sealed. Finally, Dostoevsky was conducted to a waiting carriage, accompanied by the local police official, the officer, his frightened landlady, and her servant Ivan, who “looked around with an air of stupid solemnity appropriate to the occasion.”39 When Dostoevsky left the room and entered the carriage, he stepped out of the relatively normal life he had been living up to that time—with the exception of his brief apprenticeship as an underground conspirator—and into an extraordinary new and alien world.
This new world would strain Dostoevsky’s emotional and spiritual capacities to the utmost and immeasurably widen the range of his moral and psychological experience. What he had only read about previously in the most extravagant creations of the Romantics would now become for him the very flesh and blood of his existence. He would know the chilling despair of solitude in prison; he would feel the desperate anguish of the hunted; he would live through the terrifying agony of the condemned clinging desperately to the last precious moment of life; he would sink to the lowest depths of society, live with outcasts and criminals, and listen to the talk of sadists and murderers for whom the very notion of morality was a farce; and he would have instants of sublime inner harmony, moments of fusion with the divine principle ruling the universe, in the ecstatic “aura” preceding an epileptic attack. When he returns to society again and begins to rediscover himself as a writer, the horizon of his creations will now be defined by this new world and its overwhelming revelations. And this will enable him to create works of incomparably more profound imaginative scope than had been possible in the 1840s, when his only approach to such a world had been through its Romantic stereotypes.
1 P. S. Schegolev, ed., Petrashevtsy, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1926–1928), 1: 134.
2 Ibid., 75.
3 Ibid., 135.
4 Karl Marx, Frühe Schriften, ed. Hans-Joachim Lieber and Peter Furth, 2 vols. (Darmstadt, 1971), 1: 828.
5 V. I. Semevsky, M. V. Butashevich–Petrashevsky i Petrashevtsy (Moscow, 1922), 192.
6 V. I. Evgrafova, ed., Proizvedeniya Petrashevtsev (Moscow, 1953), 496–497.
7 Schegolev, Petrashevtsy, 3: 60.
8 Semevsky, Butashevich–Petrashevsky, 194.
9 Schegolev, Petrashevtsy, 3: 63.
10 N. F. Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev (Moscow, 1971), 265.
11 Ibid., 271–274.
12 Biografiya, 90.
13 Evgrafova, Proizvedeniya Petrashevtsev, 503–504.
14 DVS, 1: 172.
15 Ibid.
16 Cited by A. S. Dolinin, “Dostoevsky sredi Petrashevtsev,” Zvenya 6 (Moscow–Leningrad, 1936), 533.
17 Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev, 129.
18 Schegolev, Petrashevtsy, 3: 124.
19 “A Soldier’s Conversation” is reprinted in V. R. Leikina, E. A. Korolchuk, and V. A. Desnitsky, eds., Delo Petrashevtsev, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1937–1951), 3: 233–237.
20 Ibid., 250.
21 Schegolev, Petrashevtsy, 3: 200.
22 E. M. Feoktistov, Vospominaniya (Leningrad, 1929), 164; cited in V. R. Leikina-Svirskaya, “Revolutionaya praktika Petrashevtsev,” Istoricheskie Zapiski 47 (1954), 210–211. Feoktistov, later a powerful bureaucrat, was one of the students to whom Pleshcheev spoke.
23 Cited in D. O. Evans, Social Romanticism in France, 1830–1848 (Oxford, 1951), 39.
24 Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev, 141.
25 Schegolev, Petrashevtsy, 3: 385. For the documents and other relevant references, see “Sledstvennoe delo M. M. Dostoevskogo—Petrashevtsa,” in Dostoevsky: materialy i issledovaniya, ed. G. M. Fridlender, 1: 254–265.
26 Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev, 144.
27 Biografiya, 90.
28 Leikina et al., Delo Petrashevtsev, 426.
29 Ibid., 427.
30 Ibid., 435.
31 Schegolev, Petrashevtsy, 3: 201.
32 Both are cited in V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948), 529.
33 Ibid., 506.
34 Ibid., 506–507.
35 Ibid., 504.
36 Leikina et al., Delo Petrashevtsev, 3: 435.
37 Ibid., 436.
38 Quoted in V. I. Cheshikhin, T. N. Granovsky i ego vremya (St. Petersburg, 1905), 317.
39 DVS, 1: 193.
PART II
The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859
CHAPTER 14
The Peter-and-Paul Fortress
“The whole city,” wrote Senator K. N. Lebedev in his diary, “is preoccupied with the detention of some young people (Petrashevsky, Golovinsky, Dostoevsky, Palm, Lamansky, Grigoryev, Mikhailov, and many others), who, it is said, reach the number of 60, and this number will no doubt increase with the uncovering of links with Moscow and other cities.”1 Senator Lebedev, who was well connected and personally acquainted with some of the young men under arrest, spoke to I. P. Liprandi, a seasoned official in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, “about our child-conspirators,” and received one reply: “The affair, in his opinion, is exceedingly important, and should terminate with capital punishment.”2
At the notorious headquarters of the Third Section, close to the Summer Gardens, Dostoevsky found a good deal of bustle and stir: “light-blue gentlemen kept on arriving uninterruptedly with various victims.”3 The prisoners clustered around the official checking the identity of those brought in and could see, marked on the documents he was consulting, the name of the secret agent—P. D. Antonelli. Someone whispered in Dostoevsky’s ear, using a peasant idiom, “Here, grandmother, is your St. George’s Day.”4 April 23 was the spring St. George’s Day in the Russian calendar of saints, but this folk expression was peculiarly appropriate in a deeper sense. It has been traced back to the decree of Boris Godunov in 1597 that abolished the right of peasants to change masters on the fall St. George’s Day.5 This was the effective beginning in Russian history of the total enslavement of the peasantry; and the idiom enshrines in folk speech the woebegone reaction of the Russian people to their loss of any liberty. The arrested Petrashevtsy were now indeed in “a fine fix” for having wished to make permanent the emancipation once enjoyed by the Russian peasant only on St. George’s Day in the fall.
Dostoevsky’s consternation was only heightened when he saw his younger brother, Andrey, brought in among other prisoners.6 All spent the first day, April 23, scattered through various rooms of the headquarters of the Third Section. At midday, Count A. I. Orlov, the head of the secret police, made the rounds of his “guests” and favored them with a little speech. Those assembled had unfortunately not known how to use the rights and freedom
s accorded to them as Russian citizens, and their behavior had forced the government to deprive them of the said freedoms. After investigation of their crimes they would be judged, and the final decision as to their lot would depend on the mercy of the tsar. No accusations were made or other information offered; nor were the prisoners allowed to converse with each other.
10. The Peter-and-Paul Fortress
At about eleven in the evening, each name was called, and one by one the prisoners were taken by carriage to the ill-famed Peter-and-Paul Fortress. Built on an island in the Neva, this formidable citadel had been one of the first buildings to rise in the new city of Sankt Pieter Burkh. Here Peter the Great installed his headquarters while a vast army of serf laborers toiled and died to realize his vaulting dream of a great modern metropolis arising in the midst of the Finnish swamps, and for a few years this miniscule tuft of land became the effective capital of the Russian Empire. Deciding that the island would continue to serve as the bastion of the royal house of the Romanovs and the final resting place of its members, Peter ordered his Swiss-Italian architect, Trezzini, to erect a cathedral within the fortress grounds. Soon a Baroque church began to rise on the spot—a church whose tall and elegant bell tower, crowned with a golden cupola and spire, could be seen from every part of the city.
Less conspicuous but no less essential was a small maximum-security prison within the fortress complex, which Peter used for the seclusion, torture, and, finally, execution of his son, the Tsarevich Ivan. Later tsars also found it convenient for the detention of highly placed personages who had incurred the royal displeasure. It was here that Catherine the Great, before shipping him off to Siberia, had imprisoned Alexander Radishchev, who had dared to expose the horrors of serfdom in his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It was here that the Decembrists had languished after their bungled uprising, while each awaited his turn to be taken to the Winter Palace and personally interrogated by the tsar. The prison very early acquired an evil reputation, and its ill repute only increased with time. No one had ever escaped over its wall, and it was reserved for inmates whose misdeeds were considered a danger to the state.
Even though Dostoevsky did not leave any description of the physical conditions of his incarceration, the memoirs of Andrey, as well as those of other prisoners, allow us to reconstruct them. The cells were ample for one person; most had vaulted ceilings, and all had windows (behind an iron grill) whose glass was smeared over, except at the very top, with a paste that allowed only a diffuse light to filter through. At night, each cell was lit by a small oil lamp, set high on the wall in a window embrasure, whose cotton wick often sputtered and fumed instead of giving off light. The lamp in Andrey’s cell smoked so much that it stung his eyes, but when, during his first night, he made a motion to snuff it out, a voice instantly told him to desist.
All cells had a small judas in the door, and the prisoners were constantly under surveillance by guards walking silently in the corridors. The furniture consisted of a cot, a stove of Dutch tiles, a table, a stool, and, in one corner, what Andrey calls “a necessary piece of furniture,”7 probably a basin and a close-stool. The cot was covered with a straw mattress and a pillow of sacking material without sheets or pillowcase; the only covering was a blanket made of the coarse and heavy woolen cloth used for army overcoats. The walls of Andrey’s cell had recently been scraped to remove the graffiti of previous occupants; other cells still retained traces of the marks made on them by those struggling against apathy and numb dejection.
Most of the accounts of the fortress complain of its dampness, and Andrey writes that “one felt the cold piercing through to the very bones. I never took off the warm overcoat in which I slept.”8 Other prisoners were not so appreciative of the prison garb they were forced to wear. “Cold shivers run all through me,” writes the gently nurtured P. A. Kuzmin, an officer of the General Staff, “when I remember the sensation I felt in putting on my convict’s clothes”—made of the roughest material and stained by previous usage—whose contact with his flesh filled him with uncontrollable repulsion.9 Besides the cold, Andrey was also bothered by the appearance of good-sized rats the moment darkness came on, and he slept only during the daytime for fear of being attacked.
Andrey’s cell was in the Zotov bastion, more dilapidated than other sections of the prison. For he recalled the commandant of the fortress, General I. A. Nabokov (the great-great-uncle of the author of Lolita), looking round him with distaste on his first visit and muttering, “Yes, it’s bad here, very bad, and we’ve got to hurry”—meaning to build new quarters for prisoners.10 Dostoevsky was placed in the Alekseevsky Ravelin, which was reserved for the most important prisoners. We may assume that his living conditions were much the same as those that I. F. Jastrzembski praises (“all the hygienic conditions there were satisfactory; fresh air, cleanliness, good food, etc., everything was fine”)11 and superior to those afforded his brother. Those prisoners who had a little money could have tea brought to them twice a day and could buy cigars, cigarettes, and tobacco. But “no book, not a sheet of paper,” writes Andrey, “was allowed. One could only dream and mull over what might lie ahead.”12
Most trying for the imprisoned was the silence, the isolation, and the sense of being continually under secret observation. “The very thought that I was being held au secret,” writes Jastrzembski, “brought on nervous attacks, fainting, and palpitations of the heart.”13 Akhsharumov, who could hear deep sighs, and sometimes the sound of weeping, from neighboring cells and from the corridor, remarked that these, along with “the silence, the stuffy air, total inactivity . . . exercised a dispiriting effect, which took away courage.”14 Petrashevsky complained that he was being tortured and deprived of sleep by mysterious tappings on the wall and by whispering voices also coming from the wall, which disconcertingly substituted themselves for his own thoughts.
The Commission of Inquiry was headed by General Nabokov and included General P. P. Gagarin, Count V. A. Dolgorukov, General Ya. I. Rostovtsev, and General Dubelt. When it became clear to the commission that the young student Andrey Dostoevsky had been arrested by error, the other members were willing to allow him to languish in his cell until the formalities for his release had been completed, but Nabokov protested and installed Andrey in his own quarters. Both Feodor Dostoevsky and Durov spoke to Milyukov “with particular warmth . . . of the commandant [Nabokov], who had continually concerned himself with them and, so far as he could, eased their condition.”15
Dubelt, representing the Third Section, was sharply attentive to the proceedings and intervened frequently in barbed and sarcastic tones. He had been greatly upset on learning that the surveillance of the Petrashevsky Circle had been carried on for over a year without his knowledge, and he regarded this concealment as a personal insult. It was to satisfy a private vendetta, as well as to protect his bureaucratic interests, that he undertook, at every opportunity, to undermine the importance given to the case by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and by his ex-army comrade Liprandi. Jastrzembski, so severe for everyone else, remarks: “I know several instances in which he did as much as he could to help those accused of political crimes, and I do not know of a single instance in which he destroyed anybody.”16
The commission interviewed the prisoners individually and questioned them on the basis of the information supplied by Antonelli; they were also asked to answer questions in writing touching on their associations with Petrashevsky and other members of the circle. Additional information was being continuously supplied by the group set up to study the papers and documents confiscated at the time of the arrest, and these of course provided some of the crucial evidence. Dostoevsky was called for questioning several times between April 26 and May 16, and later he told only one rather dubious story to Orest Miller about his treatment: that Rostovtsev had offered him a pardon in exchange for telling about “the whole business.”17 Whether true or not, the story indicates that Dostoevsky recalled the interrogation as far more nerve-racking tha
n terrifying.
“When I found myself in the fortress,” Dostoevsky told Vsevolod Solovyev in 1873, “I thought that the end had come, that I would not last three days, and—suddenly I calmed down. Look, what did I do there? I wrote “A Little Hero”—read it, is there any sign of bitterness or torment in it? I dreamed peaceful, fine, good dreams, and then, the longer it lasted, the better it was.”18 Dostoevsky’s state of mind, not to mention the state of his health, was much more precarious than he later recalled. But he did find unexpected reserves of inner strength that enabled him to endure the trials of captivity without losing heart, and it was this sense of mastery that dominated in his recollection of the event.
In his first letter from the fortress, written on June 20, Dostoevsky tells Andrey to write the Kumanins in Moscow requesting help for himself and for Mikhail’s family. Most important, though, he wanted to see the latest issue of Notes of the Fatherland. “The third part of my novel is appearing, but . . . I didn’t even see the galleys . . . haven’t they disfigured my novel?”19 Dostoevsky seems more concerned with this problem than about his personal predicament, and there is as yet no sign of any emotional perturbation. Some of the other Petrashevtsy began to go to pieces in captivity as the months wore on and the interrogations continued.
At the beginning of July, the prisoners were given permission to receive books and to correspond with the outside world. By this time Mikhail had been released, and Dostoevsky’s letters to him inform us about his physical condition and state of mind. “My health is good,” he writes on July 18, “except for the hemorrhoids and my nervous troubles, which go crescendo. I have begun to have nervous spasms as before, my appetite is poor, and I sleep very little, with painful dreams when I do. I sleep about five hours of the twenty-four, and wake up about four times every night.”20 A month later, he writes: “I have been living on castor oil for a whole month now and it is all that keeps me alive. My hemorrhoids are terribly inflamed and I have a pain in my chest I never had before. Moreover, my impressionability increases, especially at night; I have long, ugly dreams, and to top it all, I have recently felt all the time as though the floor were heaving under me, and I sit in my room literally as if in a ship’s cabin. From all this, I conclude that my nerves are giving way.”21 In mid-September, he writes Mikhail that his health has not improved and that he is anticipating the advent of autumn with misgiving, but that he refuses to lose heart: “I only wish to remain healthy,” he writes, “and anyhow, a good disposition depends on myself alone. Man has infinite reserves of toughness and vitality; I really did not think there was so much, but now I know it from experience.”22
Dostoevsky Page 25
