Indeed, it is Dostoevsky’s piercing sense of the awful fragility and transiency of human existence that will soon enable him to depict, with a powerful urgency unrivaled by any other modern writer, the unconditional and absolute Christian commandment of mutual, all-forgiving, and all-embracing love. For Dostoevsky’s morality is similar to what some theologians, speaking of the early Christians, have called an “interim ethics,” that is, an ethics whose uncompromising extremism springs from the lurking imminence of the Day of Judgment and the Final Reckoning: there is no time for anything but the last kiss of reconciliation because, quite literally, there is no “time.” The strength (as well as some of the weakness) of Dostoevsky’s work may ultimately be traced to the stabbing acuity with which, above all, he wished to communicate the saving power of this eschatological core of the Christian faith.70
On December 24, 1849, two days after the grisly pageant enacted in Semenovsky Square, Mikhail was informed that his brother would begin his long and hazardous journey to Siberia that very night. Mikhail hastened to convey the information to Alexander Milyukov, and both went to the fortress to say farewell. When Dostoevsky, accompanied by Durov, was ushered into the room where Mikhail and Milyukov were waiting, the latter was struck by Dostoevsky’s unshakable conviction of his ability to survive. “Looking at the farewell of the brothers Dostoevsky,” he observes, “everyone would have remarked that the one suffering the most was remaining in freedom in Petersburg, not the one who was just on the point of traveling to Siberian katorga. Tears rose in the eyes of the older brother, his lips trembled, but Feodor Mikhailovich remained calm and consoled him.”71
“Stop, brother,” Dostoevsky said at one point, “you know me, I am not going to my grave, you are not accompanying my burial—and there are not wild beasts in katorga but people, perhaps better than I am, perhaps worthier than I am.”72 Such words are the only documentation we have so far as Dosoevsky is concerned; but other evidence throws light on the question of what he, as well as the other Petrashevtsy, expected to encounter among the people with whom they would share their captivity. In the documents that Petrashevsky wrote for the Commission of Inquiry, we find the following remarkable and touching reverie:
Perhaps fate . . . will place me side by side with a hardened evildoer, who has ten murders on his soul. . . . Resting at a way station and dining on a piece of stale bread . . . we begin to talk—I tell him how, and for what reason, I suffered misfortune. . . . I tell him about Fourier . . . about the phalanstery—what and why things are that way there, and so forth. . . . I explain why people become evildoers . . . and he, sighing deeply, tells me about his life. . . . From his story I see that circumstances crushed much that was good in this man, a strong soul fell under the weight of misfortune. . . . Perhaps, at the end of the story, he will say: ‘Yes, if things were arranged your way, if people lived like that, I would not be an evildoer’ . . . and I, if the weight of my shackles allows me, extend a hand to him—and I say—‘let’s be brothers’—and, breaking my piece of bread, I give it to him, saying: ‘I am not used to eating very much, you need it more, take it and eat.’ With this, a tear appears on his roughened cheek and . . . before me appears . . . not an evildoer, but my equal in misfortune, perhaps also in the beginning a person badly misunderstood. . . . The act of humanization is completed, and the evildoer no longer exists.73
Such “philanthropic, Utopian dreams of Petrashevsky,” as a Soviet Russian critic has remarked, “expressed the general state of mind and convictions of the circle. And Dostoevsky . . . too, despite instinctive doubts and forebodings, must have imagined something similar.”74 All the more so since Dostoevsky’s early writings had led to the rise of “sentimental Naturalism,” whose creations stressed the human worth hidden in the lives of the most downtrodden elements of society.
Dostoevsky’s farewell may thus be taken as a more laconic expression of the same roseate fantasies articulated by Petrashevsky, a reaffirmation of the philanthropic aspect of his moral-social conviction of the time. Nonetheless, in the suggestion that the convicts might even perhaps be “worthier” than himself, Dostoevsky was unconsciously speaking better than he knew. For what was uttered only as a consolatory possibility in 1849, and was surely not accepted literally either by Dostoevsky or by those he was attempting to reassure, would one day become the basis of a view of the Russian people that he would not hesitate to proclaim to the entire world.
1 Quoted in P. S. Schegolev, ed., Petrashevtsy, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1926–1928), 1: 127.
2 Ibid.
3 DVS, 1: 193.
4 Ibid.
5 I. Pawlowski, Russisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1974), 2: 1766.
6 A. M. Dostoevsky, Vospominaniya (Leningrad, 1930), 192–193.
7 Ibid., 196.
8 Ibid.
9 M. N. Gernet, Istoriya tsarskoi tyurmy, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1961), 2: 220.
10 A. M. Dostoevsky, Vospominaniya, 197.
11 Schlegolev, Petrashevtsy, 1: 149.
12 A. M. Dostoevsky, Vospominaniya, 197.
13 Schlegolev, Petrashevtsy, 1: 149.
14 N. F. Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev (Moscow, 1971), 244.
15 DVS, 1: 191.
16 Schlegolev, Petrashevtsy, 1: 160–161.
17 Biografiya, 106–107.
18 DVS, 2: 199.
19 Pis’ma, 4: 258–259; June 20, 1849.
20 Ibid., 1: 124; July 18, 1849.
21 Ibid., 126; August 27, 1849.
22 Ibid., 127; September 14, 1849.
23 P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 243.
24 Pis’ma, 1: 124; July 18, 1849.
25 Ibid., 126; August 27, 1849.
26 Ibid., 178; March 24, 1856.
27 Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev, 98.
28 Ibid., 100.
29 Ibid., 101.
30 Ibid., 100.
31 Ibid., 101.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid. Annenkov writes of the 1840s: “Literature and our cultivated minds had long ago relinquished the notion of the people as a human entity ordained to live without rights of citizenship and to serve the interests of others only, but they had not relinquished the notion of the people as a brutish mass without any ideas and with never a thought in its head.” Annenkov, Decade, 134.
35 Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev, 105.
36 Ibid., 105–106.
37 Ibid., 106.
38 Ibid., 109.
39 Ibid., 111–112.
40 Ibid., 86.
41 Schlegolev, Petrashevtsy, 3: 164.
42 Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev, 176.
43 PSS, 11: 189–190.
44 V. I. Semevsky, “Sledstvie i sud po delu Petrashevtsev,” Russkie Zapiski, 9–11 (1916), 11: 31.
45 Miller, Biografiya, 115.
46 DVS, 1: 223.
47 Biografiya, 117.
48 DVS, 1: 226.
49 Ibid., 226–227.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 229.
53 Miller, Biografiya, 118.
54 DVS, 1: 229.
55 DW, 152.
56 F. N. Lvov, “Zapiska o dele Petrashevtsev,” LN 63 (Moscow, 1956), 188.
57 Biografiya, 119.
58 Lvov, “Zapiska,” 188.
59 DVS, 1: 230.
60 Ibid., 231.
61 Pis’ma, 1: 128; December 22, 1849.
62 Ibid., 130.
63 Ibid., 129.
64 Ibid., 131.
65 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 22.
66 Pis’ma, 1: 129; December 22, 1849.
67 Ibid., 130–131.
68 Ibid., 129.
69 Ibid., 130.
70 The eschatological importance of the presumably brief “interim” between the First and Second Coming for the
interpretation of the ethics of Jesus was brought into prominence by Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus. For a penetrating discussion of its thesis, see Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. in 1 (New York, 1955), 2: 47–52.
71 DVS, 1: 191.
72 Ibid., 192.
73 V. R. Leikina, E. A. Korolchuk, and V. A. Desnitsky, eds., Delo Petrashevtsev, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1937–1951), 1: 84–85.
74 V. A. Tunimanov, Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo, 1854–1862 (Leningrad, 1980), 149–150.
CHAPTER 15
Katorga
In the four years he spent in prison camp, Dostoevsky had not received a single word from his family, and the complete loss of contact inspired him to compose a lengthy letter to Mikhail on February 22, 1854, just a week after being released. Picking up the thread of his life at the moment of departure for Siberia, it begins by recounting the impressions gathered on the eighteen-day journey and the major incidents marking his arrival at the first way station, Tobolsk. “It was a sad moment when we crossed the Urals,” Dostoevsky recalls. “The horses and sledges had foundered in the drifts. A snowstorm was raging. We got out of the sledges—it was night—and stood waiting while they were dragged out. All around us was the snow and storm; it was the frontier of Europe; ahead was Siberia and our unknown fate, while all the past lay behind us—it was so depressing that I was moved to tears.”1
On January 9, the party reached Tobolsk, once the capital city of Western Siberia and, at that time, the main distribution center in which prisoners arriving from European Russia were sorted out and dispatched to their final destinations. The prison was set inside a fortress complex, and as Dostoevsky’s party climbed the road up to it, one of the first sights to greet their eyes was the town’s most ancient and notorious exile, the famous Uglich bell, located just off the road along which they were proceeding. Its story was known to all: At the discovery of the death of Crown Prince Dimitry, suspected of having been murdered by his guardian, Boris Godunov, the bell had rung to summon the inhabitants of Uglich to avenge the boy’s death. The new tsar, Boris, later ordered the offending bell to be publicly flogged and mutilated, and it was exiled to Siberia in perpetuity with the injunction that it never ring again. But the people of Tobolsk had long since housed the Uglich bell in a small belfry, and its deep-voiced sonority called them to prayer. There it stood along the roadside, a constant reminder to later exiles of the despotic, capricious, and all-encompassing authority of the Russian tsars, as well as of the ultimate futility of many of their sternest ukazy.
Dostoevsky’s reception in Tobolsk illustrates some of the moral incorporated in the subversive survival of the Uglich bell. “I will only say,” Dostoevsky writes to Mikhail, “that the sympathy and lively concern we met with blessed us with almost complete happiness. The exiles of the old days (that is, not they themselves but their wives) looked after us as though we were their own flesh and blood. What wonderful people, tried by twenty-five years of sorrow and self-sacrifice! We had only a glimpse of them, for we were strictly confined. But they sent us food and clothing, they consoled us and gave us courage.”2
Jastrzembski also left a description of their arrival in Tobolsk and of his first glimpse of convict clerks, branded on cheeks and forehead. “We were taken into a room. A narrow, dark, cold dirty room. . . . Here there were plank beds, and on them three sacks filled with straw instead of mattresses and three pillows of the same kind. It was pitch-black. Outside the door, on the threshold, could be heard the heavy tread of the sentinel, walking back and forth in a 40 degree frost.” Their room was separated only by a partition from another, which held other prisoners awaiting trial, and they could hear “the exclamations of people playing cards and other games, and what insults, what curses.”3
All three travelers were in a lamentable state after their weeks on the road. “Durov’s fingers and toes were frostbitten,” recalls Jastrzembski, “and his feet had been badly damaged by the shackles. Dostoevsky, moreover, had broken out with scrofulous sores on his face and in his mouth while still in the Alekseevsky Ravelin.”4 Utterly dejected by the prospect of even further suffering looming ahead, Jastrzembski decided to commit suicide—a decision, he says, for which his solitary imprisonment in the Ravelin had been an excellent preparation. As it turned out, one of the officers of gendarmes at Tobolsk was an old acquaintance, who provided him and his friends with a candle, matches, and some hot tea, “which seemed to us sweeter than nectar. Some excellent cigars suddenly turned up in Dostoevsky’s possession. . . . We spent a good part of the remainder of the night in friendly conversation. The sympathetic, gentle voice of Dostoevsky, his tenderness and delicacy of feeling, even some of his capricious sallies, quite like a woman, had a soothing effect on me. I gave up any extreme decision. Dostoevsky, Durov, and I were separated in the Tobolsk prison, we wept, embraced, and never saw each other again.”5
If Dostoevsky was instrumental in bringing solace to Jastrzembski, the same function was performed for Dostoevsky by the wives of “the exiles of the old days,” who helped so much to ease the lot of political prisoners, whether Russian or Polish, during the last years of the regime of Nicholas I. One hundred and twenty Decembrists, all of good (and some of the very best) families, had been sent into exile in 1825. All had long since served their sentences at hard labor. Not allowed to reside in European Russia, they had remained in Siberia and formed part of the very small educated and cultivated society composed of the higher ranks in the army and the bureaucracy. Many of them had relations at court, some were independently wealthy, and all were treated with marked consideration by the officials coming from Petersburg. New arrivals were only too happy to mix with people of their own class and breeding in this still wild frontier territory, otherwise peopled only by uncouth and enterprising freebooters out to make a fortune and by a mixture of Asiatic nomads, still living their age-old tribal existence. The Decembrists, through their connections, were thus able to exercise a considerable influence despite their suspect status as ex-rebels, and their wives and children were unceasingly active in charitable work among the convicts.
On the last day that Dostoevsky and Durov spent in Tobolsk, three Decembrist wives arranged to visit them in the quarters of one of the officers. It was a moment he was to remember all his life, and one that he refers to again, in the same grateful and reverential tone, years later in his Diary of a Writer (1873): “We saw these sublime sufferers, who had voluntarily followed their husbands to Siberia. They gave up everything, position, wealth, family ties, sacrificed everything for the highest moral duty, a duty which nothing could impose on them except themselves. Completely innocent, during twenty-five years they bore everything to which their husbands had been condemned. The meeting lasted an hour. They blessed us as we entered on a new life, made the sign of the cross, and gave us a New Testament—the only book allowed in prison. It lay under my pillow for four years during penal servitude. I read it sometimes, and read it to others. With it, I taught one convict to read.”6 Each copy of the holy book contained, in its binding, ten rubles in bank notes.
The three women who came in to talk with Dostoevsky were Mme Muravyeva, Mme Annenkova, and Mme Fonvizina. The only native Russian of the three, and the most important of all for Dostoevsky, was Natalya Fonvizina, a remarkable woman of considerable intellectual culture and profound religious faith. Mme Fonvizina was related to Count Gorchakov, the governor-general of Siberia, and promised to speak to him on Dostoevsky’s behalf. Letters were sent to the three daughters of Count Gorchakov, then on a visit to their father, enlisting their intercession on behalf of the Petrashevtsy. It was also during this hour-long meeting that Dostoevsky first heard about the terrible Major Krivtsov, the commandant of the prison camp at Omsk, and was warned to be on his guard against him.
On the morning of the departure of Dostoevsky and Durov for Omsk, Natalya Fonvizina and another Decembrist wife, Marie Frantseva, rode out in advance to meet them on the way. “Havi
ng gone out in a sledge very early,” writes the latter in her memoirs, “we got out of our vehicle and walked ahead on purpose up the road for a verst because we did not want the coachman to be a witness to our farewells; particularly since I had to give in secret to the gendarme a letter for my close friend, Lieutenant Colonel Zhdan-Pushkin, in which I asked him to look after Dostoevsky and Durov. . . . At last we heard the distant tinkle of bells. Quickly, a troika appeared out of the edge of the forest [and] . . . Dostoevsky and Durov leaped out of their Siberian sledge. The first was a thin, not very tall, not very good-looking young man. . . . They were dressed in convict half-coats and fur hats with earflaps; heavy shackles made a resounding noise on their feet. We . . . had time only to tell them not to lose heart, and that kind people would look after them even where they were going. I gave the letter I had ready for Pushkin to the gendarme, who conscientiously delivered it to him in Omsk.”7
Unfortunately, the gendarme also carried another letter, which he delivered just as conscientiously—a secret letter from the commandant at Tobolsk to the one at Omsk. It contained instructions, originating from the tsar himself, that the two deportees were to be treated as “prisoners in the full sense of the word; according to their sentence, the improvement of their condition in the future should depend on their conduct, on the clemency of the monarch, and by no means on the indulgence of those in immediate authority over them; a trustworthy official should be appointed to maintain a strict and unceasing vigilance.”8 In these faraway outposts of the Russian Empire, such instructions were more apt to be honored in the breach than in the observance, and there is no evidence that any such petty bureaucrat was ever appointed. All the same, such orders made it more difficult to come to the aid of the political prisoners; there was always the chance that some zealous underling, eager to gain advancement, would denounce any favoritism to the headquarters of the governor-general.
Dostoevsky’s letter to Mikhail contains an unvarnished description of his years in prison:
Dostoevsky Page 28
