Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  1 Pis’ma, 1: 134; February 22, 1854.

  2 Ibid., 135.

  3 Miller, Biografiya, 126.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid., 126–127.

  6 DW (1873), 9.

  7 M. D. Frantseva, “Vospominaniya,” Istorichesky Vestnik 6 (1886), 628–629.

  8 ZT, 66.

  9 Pis’ma, 1: 135–137.

  10 Ibid., 138–139.

  11 Ibid., 135.

  12 Ibid.

  13 P. K. Martyanov, “V perelome veka,” Istorichesky Vestnik 10–11 (1895), 11: 453.

  14 Szymon Tokarzewski, Siedem lat katorgi (Warsaw, 1907), 127.

  15 Pis’ma, 1: 166; January 13, 1856.

  16 The letter is included in the article by V. Lyubimova-Dorotovskaya, “Dostoevsky v Siberii,” Ogonek 46–47 (1946), 27–28.

  CHAPTER 16

  “Monsters in Their Misery”

  Dostoevsky’s views of his fellow convicts changed dramatically between his first days in prison camp and his last. Dostoevsky, the great psychologist, never analyzes his inner state of mind, never discusses the specific modality of his ideological evolution, his transformation from a philanthropic radical with Christian socialist leanings into a resolute believer in the Russian people as the unique national embodiment of the moral ideals he had found so appealing in Utopian Socialism. Reminiscing, in his Diary of a Writer (1873), “on the regeneration of my convictions,” Dostoevsky simply remarks, “It did not occur so quickly, but gradually—and after a long, long time.”1 He thus did not emerge from prison camp with a firmly defined set of new convictions to replace those he had abandoned. Rather, he tried to make sense out of his exposure to a range of new impressions that had clashed with his preconceived notions, and only subsequently came to understand in a more self-conscious fashion how this experience had changed his ideas. Such “ideas” would have begun to take shape when Dostoevsky, making contact once again with Russian life in the mid-1850s and early 1860s, found it necessary to define an ideological position amid the abrupt transformations of these agitated years.

  Notes from the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma) first appeared in the pages of Dostoevsky’s journal Time during 1861–1862, and it is one of the anomalies of the text that it does not include an account of his conversion experience. However, since the focus of the text is impersonal and collective rather than confessional and personal, the process of re-education is never depicted directly. It must be inferred from suggestions and side remarks—such as reactions of surprise on the part of the narrator, and his occasional injunctions to the reader to pay special attention to one or another observation. It was only twenty-six years later, in an article in the February 1876 issue of his Diary of a Writer entitled “The Peasant Marey,” that Dostoevsky supplied the missing pages from his prison memoirs that help to pierce the enigma of “the regeneration of [his] convictions.”

  The importance of this article has long been recognized, but no one has examined it in the light of our knowledge of the psychology of conversion to explore all the physical, mental, and emotive pressures that converged on Dostoevsky at this critical time. Only by doing so, however, may we hope to supplement his own reticence and advance a step further in understanding this mysterious and decisive episode. Here we shall take up House of the Dead and “The Peasant Marey” as documents that record the experiences of his prison-camp years. Reference to this text will be made again later, corresponding to the time of composition and publication.

  To begin with, Dostoevsky rearranged his experiences in House of the Dead in order to communicate the objective correlatives of what he knew to be the inner “truth” of his own moral-spiritual mutation. No matter how much Dostoevsky may have embellished his memories of the past, such “improvements” all went in the direction of imparting as much artistic and symbolic pregnancy as possible to this profound alteration of his sensibility. And he provides clues that help us to grasp the underlying motives of his regeneration.

  It was not, Dostoevsky asserted years later, the hardships of exile and forced labor that had altered his ideas: “No, something different . . . changed our outlook, our convictions and our hearts . . . the direct contact with the people, the brotherly merger with them in a common misfortune, the realization that [we had] become even as they, that we had been made equal to them, and even to their lowest stratum.”2 Such words idealize a “merger” that was far from having been as “brotherly” as Dostoevsky wished his readers to believe, but he is pointing to something crucial in the process of his transformation all the same. For he highlights the end product of the process he went through, stressing that it was only when forced to live cheek-by-jowl with the peasant convicts that he came to realize to what extent he had been a dupe of illusions about the Russian peasant and the nature of Russian social-political reality. It was this encounter with the Russian people that led to the collapse of his entire psychic-emotive equilibrium and called for a desperate effort to adjust to the unsettling truths that assailed him on every side. Dostoevsky’s remarkable response to this challenge constitutes the hinge on which his regeneration turned, and once this response was made, his convictions were gradually altered to conform to the new vision he had acquired of his companions in misfortune.

  The first period of Dostoevsky’s life in katorga, extending perhaps for over a year or longer, plunged him into a mood that may be considered one of traumatic shock. And, despite Dostoevsky’s denial, the physical rigors of the prison regime could hardly have failed to affect his general psychic state. Nor should one forget either the constant terror of Major Krivtsov in which Dostoevsky lived. This constant anxiety accounts for the morbid curiosity with which he questioned others about their sensations on being flogged. “I wanted to know with precision in certain cases,” he writes, “how great it [the pain] was, to what, finally, it could be compared. I do not really know why I wanted so much to know. I recall only one thing: it was not a vain curiosity. I repeat, I was terribly upset and shaken.” And he could not listen to the information he solicited without “my heart leaping into my throat, and beating strongly and violently” (4: 153–154). The specter of being subjected to such indignity, and the gnawing doubt as to whether he would be capable of conducting himself bravely, is enough to account for the symptoms of nervous excitement invariably stimulated by such conversations. Dostoevsky was now living under the frightening shadow of what he had always found so intolerable for others, and of what, in the past, he could never even hear spoken of without an outburst of rage.

  One of the first incidents that Dostoevsky records in House of the Dead proved to him that it was not only Krivtsov who might do violence to his person. He and Durov, having arrived the day before, had gone into the prison kitchen to buy a glass of tea. As the two sipped their tea, surrounded by others busily eating what they too had bought, they pretended not to notice the baleful glances cast in their direction by the peasant convicts. Suddenly, they were accosted by the drunken Tartar Gazin. A giant of a man, he sneeringly asked the two “gentlemen” whether they had been sent to Siberia to enjoy themselves by drinking tea. When both remained silent, Gazin seized a huge bread tray and held it menacingly over their heads. It might have come crashing down at the next moment, but whether by accident or design someone rushed in to tell Gazin, a large-scale vodka smuggler, that his stock had been stolen, and the Tartar hurried off with no damage being done.

  The menace to life and limb was always palpable; and Dostoevsky was given ample proof, in the way the prisoners treated each other, that the menace could turn into mayhem at any moment. He writes that beatings were customary when convicts became drunk and unruly to a degree that might have provoked “eight-eyes” to discipline the barracks as a whole. Gazin was a serious offender of this kind, and sometimes lunged at people with a knife when inflamed by vodka. What would happen next was witnessed by Dostoevsky many times: “A dozen men from his barracks rush at him all together and begin to beat him. One cannot imagine anything more te
rrible than this rain of blows: he is beaten tirelessly and brutally, and one stops only when he is unconscious and resembles a corpse” (4: 41). It seemed to him—from the oaths, insults, menaces, and threats that flew back and forth—as if some bloody brawl was always about to break loose, though in most cases, to his initial surprise, matters would end after a volley of the most scurrilous abuse. All the same, there was no escape, as he wrote in his letter, from “the eternal hostility and quarreling around one, the wrangling, shouting, uproar, din.” A flight to the hospital carried the risk of infection and meant confinement in a fetid ward, but we have already seen that this was one of Dostoevsky’s places of refuge. “I was fleeing from the prison. Life was unbearable there; more unbearable than the hospital, morally unbearable” (4: 164–165).

  Such moral revulsion was increased by what Dostoevsky quickly learned of the appalling depravity that reigned among the convicts. “I was astonished and upset, as if until then I had not suspected or heard anything about all that, and yet I knew it and had learned about it. But the reality makes quite a different impression than what one learns from books and hearsay” (4: 65). Censorship would not permit him, of course, to speak too plainly about the mores of the convicts, but there is little that he does not manage to convey. The drunken sprees on illegal vodka are described in detail. Prostitution, both female and male, is clearly alluded to, explicitly in the case of the former (women were available in Omsk, and guards could be bribed to overlook absences from work parties in town), more circuitously, though still unmistakably, for the latter. Nothing astonished Dostoevsky more, however, than the universal prevalence of thievery. And no wonder he was astonished, having written a touching little story, “An Honest Thief,” in which a hopeless drunkard, to obtain a bit of vodka, steals a pair of breeches from a friend almost as destitute as himself, and dies of remorse for having done so. No such remorse could be observed in the prison camp. “They began making up to me at once,” he writes, “got me—for money, of course—a box with a lock on it for me to put away precious belongings . . . as well as some underclothes I had brought with me to prison. Next day they stole it from me and sold it for drink” (4: 25). “In the course of several years,” Dostoevsky observes, “I never saw a sign of repentance among these people; not a trace of despondent brooding over their crimes, and the majority of them inwardly considered themselves absolutely in the right. This is a fact” (4: 15).

  In a passage describing the long winter evenings, when the convicts were locked in early and had several hours to spend together before being overcome by sleep, he gives vent to the bitter misanthropy that assailed him in these early days: “noise, uproar, laughter, swearing, the clank of chains, smoke and grime, shaven heads, branded faces, ragged clothes, everything defiled and degraded. . . . Man is a creature that can become accustomed to anything, and I think this is the best definition of him” (4: 10). Even aside from all this, matters were made much worse because of the ingrained hostility displayed by the peasant convicts against “gentlemen” like Dostoevsky.

  One of the first things that Dostoevsky was told, by a prisoner who had once been an army officer, was that the peasant convicts “do not like the gentlemen, especially political prisoners, they will eat them alive, and that’s understandable. First of all, you are another breed, different from what they are, and then, they were all serfs or soldiers. Judge for yourself if they can like you” (4: 28). Elsewhere, Dostoevsky remarks that “If I had begun to try and win their good-will by making up to them, being familiar with them . . . they would at once have supposed that I did it out of fear and cowardice and would have treated me with contempt” (4: 77). Dostoevsky did not seek any closer contact with the peasant convicts and decided to remain aloof; but nothing appears to have taken him more by surprise than the discovery of their innate and instinctive hostility.

  Like other members of his class, Dostoevsky had probably thought that, while the peasant would certainly strike back at personal injury, he was too primitive and intellectually undeveloped to take any conscious objection to his own status and condition. In a famous article on Peter the Great, which may be considered a manifesto of the ideology of the Russian Westernizers, Belinsky had written in 1841 that “the Russian muzhik is still semi-Asiatic. . . . For men in their natural state, apart from satisfying their hunger and similar wants, are incapable of thinking.”3 If Dostoevsky held some such opinion of the muzhik, we can understand why the evidence of a certain social-political consciousness among them should have come as such a jolt. What affected him most was the reflection of this self-consciousness in the implacable enmity of the peasant convicts toward the nobles in general, and himself in particular.

  “Not one word in our defense!” Dostoevsky observes about the incident in the prison kitchen with Gazin. “Not one shout at Gazin, so intense was their hatred of us!” This is only the first of many occasions when Dostoevsky learned the truth of the words uttered by one of the Polish political prisoners, whom Dostoevsky had naïvely asked why peasant convicts seemed to resent his tea even though many of them were eating their own food. The prison-hardened Polish noble replied, “It is not because of your tea. They are ill-disposed to you because you were once gentlemen and not like them. Many of them would dearly like to insult you, to humiliate you. You will meet with a lot of unpleasantness here” (4: 32).

  Such predictions were borne out a few days later, when Dostoevsky was sent on his first assignment with a work party. He found that “everywhere I was pushed aside almost with abuse. The lowest ragamuffin, himself a wretched workman, . . . thought himself entitled to shout at me on the pretext that I hindered him if I stood beside him. At last one of the smarter ones said to me plainly and coarsely: ‘Where are you shoving? Get away! Why do you poke yourself in where you are not wanted!’ ” As a result, Dostoevsky continues, “I had to stand apart, and to stand apart when all are working makes one feel ashamed. But when it happened that I did walk away and stood at the end of the barge, they shouted at once: ‘Fine workmen they’ve given us; what can one get done with them?’ ” (4: 76). The thin-skinned and excruciatingly vulnerable Dostoevsky, ready to flare up at the slightest pinprick to his self-esteem, was now caught in a nightmare of humiliation from which there was no escape, and which he simply had to learn how to endure.

  Over and over again in House of the Dead he returns to confirm the heartache inflicted by this relentless class hatred. Indeed, he came to consider, as the most agonizing of all the torments of camp life, this awareness of being eternally ringed by enemies, eternally alienated from the vast majority by a wall of animosity that nothing he could do would ever cause to crumble. An ordinary peasant convict, he explains, “within two hours after his arrival . . . is on the same footing as all the rest, is at home, has the same rights in the community as the rest, is understood by everyone, and is looked on by everyone as a comrade. It is very different with the gentleman, the man of a different class. However straightforward, good-natured and clever he is, he will for years be hated and despised” (4: 198).

  A peasant convict named Petrov, an ex-soldier reputed to be the most dangerous man in prison, was one of the few men of his class to seek an acquaintance with Dostoevsky. He pumped Dostoevsky for all sorts of information—sometimes concerning French politics, sometimes whether the people in the antipodes really walked on their heads. “But,” writes Dostoevsky, “I had the impression that in general he considered me . . . almost as a new-born baby, incapable of understanding the simplest matters. . . . [H]e had decided . . . that outside of books I understood nothing and was even incapable of understanding anything” (4: 86). Dostoevsky was certain that, even when stealing from him, Petrov pitied him because he was not able to defend his own belongings. “He said to me himself one day,” Dostoevsky recalls, “that I was ‘a man with a good heart,’ and ‘so simple, so simple, that it makes one feel sorry for you’ ” (4: 87).

  An outside observer portrays Dostoevsky, during the first year in prison camp, as
looking like “a wolf in a trap.” “His cap was pulled down over his forehead to his eyebrows; he looked fierce, withdrawn, unfriendly; his head drooped and his eyes remained fixed on the ground.”4 This time of withdrawal marked the beginning of a searching revision of all his earlier ideas and convictions. “In my spiritual solitude,” Dostoevsky writes, “I reviewed all my past life, went over it all to the smallest detail, . . . judged myself sternly and relentlessly, and even sometimes blessed fate for sending me this solitude, without which I would not have judged myself like this, nor viewed my past so sternly” (4: 220). Dostoevsky tells us nothing about the contents of these self-accusatory musings, but some pages in his prison memoirs hardly can be read except as an Aesopian exposure of his folly as an apprentice revolutionary conspirator.

  One day, Dostoevsky noticed that the other convicts had assembled in the courtyard of the prison at an unusual time. He immediately fell in as if for a roll call, but was jeered at and told to leave the group. Hesitating to obey the shouts coming at him from all directions, he was finally taken by the arm and led away to the camp kitchen. There, looking on at the rumpus, were gathered a handful of peasant convicts and all the other gentlemen, who told him that a “complaint” had been organized against Major Krivtsov because of the quality of the food. What had happened then became clear: the peasant convicts had spontaneously and unanimously refused to let a gentleman join their protest.

  The complaint was easily crushed by the infuriated major, who ordered some of the protestors to be flogged at random, but the treatment that Dostoevsky had received remained as a rankling and admonitory recollection. “I had never before been so insulted in prison,” he writes, despite all the humiliations inflicted upon him otherwise, “and this time I felt it very bitterly” (4: 203). That very afternoon, he spoke about it to Petrov: