Dostoevsky
Page 31
“Tell me, Petrov,” said I, “are they angry with us?”
“Why angry?” he asked as though waking up. . . .
“Because we did not take part in the complaint.”
“But why should you make a complaint?” he asked, as though trying to understand me. “You buy your own food.”
“Good heavens! But some of you who joined in it buy your own food too. We ought to have done the same—as comrades.”
“But . . . but how can you be our comrades?” he asked in perplexity (4: 207).
The social-political implications of this interchange finally sank into the consciousness of the erstwhile revolutionary conspirator who had once hoped to stir up a peasant revolution. The notion that peasants would have accepted the leadership of gentlemen in any struggle to obtain freedom, as he now realized, had been the sheerest delusion.
Elsewhere in the book, Petrov is depicted as a natural revolutionary, exactly the type of peasant to whom the Speshnevites had wished to appeal—those who, as Dostoevsky writes, “are the first to surmount the worst obstacles, facing every danger without reflection, without fear” (4: 87). Such a man, as he now became aware, found it impossible to understand how a gentleman could unite with the peasants as a comrade in a social protest. Never again would Dostoevsky believe that the efforts of the radical intelligentsia could have the slightest effect in stirring the broad masses of the Russian people, and history was to prove him right during his lifetime—if not, to be sure, half a century after his death.
The people would never follow the intelligentsia, and their own leaders can only charge ahead on the road to selfdestruction. For such “agitators and ring-leaders . . . are too ardent to be shrewd and calculating; [and] . . . almost always fail, and are sent to prison and penal servitude in consequence” (4: 201). These are surely some of the melancholy conclusions that Dostoevsky began to draw as he judged his own past “sternly and relentlessly.” Everything that his readers believe they know about the peasants, Dostoevsky tells them, is woefully mistaken. “You may have to do with peasants all your life, you may associate with them every day for forty years . . . you will never know them really. It will all be an optical illusion and nothing more. . . . I have reached this conviction . . . from reality, and I have had plenty of time to verify it” (4: 198–199). He could well have recalled, in these moments of self-judgment, the famous concluding lines of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, a novel set in the midst of the bloody Pugachev uprising in the eighteenth century. Pushkin’s words express the point of view to which Dostoevsky had now come around himself: “God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us are either young and do not know our people, or are hardhearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.”5
Dostoevsky’s previous sympathetic attitude toward the peasants in the role of benefactor had now been replaced by a loathing of everything around him, but most of all of his fellow prisoners. “There were moments,” he confesses in a letter to Mme Fonvizina, “when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself—but you just can’t help it.”6 It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of this destruction of Dostoevsky’s humanitarian faith in the prison camp, but Dostoevsky did manage to find a way out of his torturing psychic entrapment, and, as we shall see a bit later, he went through an experience exhibiting all the characteristics noted in cases of conversion—whether religious or involving questions of political allegiance.
There were twelve other prisoners of the noble class in the Omsk camp while Dostoevsky was serving his sentence. In addition to Durov, three others were Russian, and what Dostoevsky tells us about them indicates abundantly, if obliquely, why he took so little comfort in their presence. One was an ex-officer of the Russian Army whom Dostoevsky calls Akim Akimich—a person so conditioned to subordination that obedience with him had become inclination and second nature. He dwelt on the routine of army life with loving devotion, “and all in the same even, decorous voice like the dripping of water.” At times, Dostoevsky admits, “I . . . cursed the fate which had put me with my head next to his own on the common bed” (4: 208–209).
The second convict is referred to only as a “parricide.” His real name was D. I. Ilyinsky, and he is a figure of some importance in Dostoevsky’s career: his history later furnished the novelist with the main plot of The Brothers Karamazov, and his personality probably also provided some of the character traits for Dimitry Karamazov. Ilyinsky was an ex-officer convicted (but only on circumstantial evidence) of having killed his father to obtain his inheritance. Always “in the liveliest, merriest spirits,” he steadfastly denied his guilt, and Dostoevsky did not give entire credence to his conviction, remarking that “such savage insensibility seems impossible” (4: 16). Years later, while writing the final draft of his prison book, Dostoevsky learned that Ilyinsky had been released: a criminal had confessed to the murder. So Dostoevsky’s psychological intuition, based solely on his observation of Ilyinsky’s character, had been vindicated.
The third Russian noble, mentioned only by the initial A., was Pavel Aristov, “the most revolting example of the depths to which a man can sink and degenerate, and the extent to which he can destroy all moral feeling in himself without difficulty or repentance” (4: 62). Seventy entirely innocent people had been arrested as a result of Aristov’s denunciations while the latter was engaging in riotous orgies with the money furnished by the Third Section, and he continued turning up more “subversive political conspirators” so long as he was supplied with payment. After a certain period, however, even the Third Section became suspicious, and Aristov was eventually sent to prison camp for embezzlement and false denunciations. There he had ingratiated himself with Major Krivtsov and served as a spy and informer on the peasant convicts. Dostoevsky was literally aghast at encountering in the flesh someone of Aristov’s ilk, who surpassed his most livid fantasies of the evil that a human being could knowingly tolerate and perpetrate. “All the while I was in prison,” he declares, “A. seemed to me a lump of flesh with teeth and a stomach and an insatiable thirst for the most sensual and brutish pleasures” (4: 63).
To make matters worse, he was “cunning and clever, good-looking, even rather well educated.” What made Aristov’s presence literally intolerable for Dostoevsky was his manner of glorying in his own infamy: “And how revolting it was to me to look on his everlasting mocking smile! He was a monster; a moral Quasimodo” (4: 63). And just as Dostoevsky did not forget Ilyinsky, so too Aristov remained an ineradicable memory. The first references in Dostoevsky’s notebooks to the character of Svidrigailov, the cynically derisive aristocratic debauchee in Crime and Punishment, are entered under the name of Aristov.7 More immediately, Dostoevsky held Aristov responsible for deepening the crisis of values brought on by prison-camp life. “He poisoned my first days in prison,” Dostoevsky explains, “and made them even more miserable. I was terrified at the awful baseness and degradation into which I had been cast. . . . I imagined that everything here was as base and degraded. But I was mistaken, I judged all by A” (4: 64).
Indeed, Dostoevsky looked on the peasant convicts as simply cruder replicas of Aristov; having lost any sense of the distinction between good and evil, they seemed to belong to another species. Another appalling individual was a bandit chief named Orlov, about whom Dostoevsky had heard “marvelous stories” before he turned up in the army hospital during one of Dostoevsky’s stays. Orlov “was a criminal such as there are few, who had murdered old people and children in cold blood—a man of terrible strength of will and proud consciousness of his strength.” Far from having lost his humanity, like Aristov, because of subjugation by the lusts of the flesh, Orlov for Dostoevsky was “unmistakably the case of a complete triu
mph over the flesh. It was evident that the man’s power of control was unlimited, that he despised every sort of punishment and torture, and was afraid of nothing in the world.” He was, clearly, a person of extraordinary self-possession, and Dostoevsky notes being “struck by his strange haughtiness. He looked down on everything with incredible disdain, though he made no effort to maintain his lofty attitude—it was somehow natural” (4: 47).
Tremendously excited by House of the Dead when he first came across it, Nietzsche could well have seen Orlov as one of the incarnations of his Superman, and what Dostoevsky tells us of his own conversations with the famous brigand remarkably anticipates the Nietzschean distinction between master and slave morality.8 For when Dostoevsky began to question Orlov about his “adventures,” the latter became aware that his interlocutor “was trying to get at his conscience and to discover some sign of penitence in him.” Orlov’s only response was to glance at Dostoevsky “with great contempt and haughtiness, as though I had suddenly in his eyes become a foolish little boy, with whom it was impossible to discuss things as you would with a grown-up person. There was even a sort of pity for me to be seen on his face. A moment later he burst out laughing at me, a perfectly open-hearted laugh free from any hint of irony.” Dostoevsky concludes that “he could not really help despising me, and must have looked upon me as a weak, pitiful, submissive creature, inferior to him in every respect” (4: 48). It is impossible to read these words without thinking of Raskolnikov’s impassioned dialectic in Crime and Punishment, which, although nourished by ideologies that had not yet made their appearance on the Russian social-cultural scene, certainly draws much of its vitality from such a recollection. And Raskolnikov may well be seen as a conscience-stricken member of the intelligentsia—exactly like Dostoevsky himself at this moment—who had tried to whip himself up into behaving like an Orlov, but who ultimately finds it morally impossible to sustain the awful consequences of his deeds.
The Omsk stockade also contained eight Polish nobles, all sent to Siberia for having participated in plots to gain independence for their homeland from the Russian crown. Few other inmates of the House of the Dead are described in the laudatory terms that Dostoevsky lavishes on the Polish prisoners with whom he became friendly. “I never ceased to love him,” Dostoevsky says of B. (Joszef Boguslawski), and these words stand out as a sudden splotch of radiant color in the surrounding darkness. It was largely disagreements over politics that led to their rift with Dostoevsky, for they refused to tolerate the virulent Russian nationalism that Dostoevsky displayed when the talk turned, as it obviously did, to the sacred cause for which the Polish prisoners were suffering their cruel punishment. Tokarzewski records, “How painful it was to listen to this conspirator, this man sentenced to prison for the cause of freedom and progress, when he confessed that he would be happy only when all the nations would fall under Russian rule. . . . He affirmed that [Ukraine, Volynia, Podolia, Lithuania, and Poland] had forever been the property of Russia; that the divine hand of justice had put these provinces and countries under the scepter of the Russian tsar because they would [otherwise] have remained in a state of dark illiteracy, barbarism, and abject poverty. . . . Listening to these arguments we acquired the conviction that Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was affected by insanity.”9
Dostoevsky keeps silent about such political arguments in House of the Dead because of censorship, but he writes that he was greatly upset by the Polish abhorrence of the Russian peasant convicts, whom they looked down on with supreme contempt. “They . . . were elaborately, offensively polite and exceedingly uncommunicative with them. They never could conceal from the convicts their aversion for them, and the latter saw it very clearly and paid the Poles back in the same coin” (4: 26). Tokarzewski relates how he first entered the barracks where Dostoevsky was to join him later: “And these shapes of men or of the damned approached us and extended their hands, hands so many times covered with blood, so many times soiled by offense and crime. . . . I pulled away my hand and, pushing everyone aside, I entered the barracks with my head held proudly aloft.”10
Such was the Polish attitude, and Dostoevsky would have had to be considerably more obtuse than he was not to have realized that it resembled his very own. Yet the intensely patriotic Dostoevsky soon found himself defending his country, and presumably the majority of its inhabitants, against the only educated people in the prison camp whom he personally liked and who had helped to relieve his numbing loneliness. But how could he argue on behalf of Russia without overcoming his violent repugnance for that portion of the Russian people existing all around him in flesh and blood? His disputes with the Polish exiles only intensified his inner crisis—the crisis initially caused by the destruction of his humanitarian faith in the people—to an unbearable pitch of psychic malaise. Nothing was more emotionally necessary for Dostoevsky than to find some way of reconciling his ineradicable love for his native land with his violently negative reactions to the loathsome denizens of the camp.
In the article entitled “The Peasant Marey,” Dostoevsky supplies the missing pages from his prison memoirs that help to pierce the enigma of “the regeneration of [his] convictions.” To counter the disillusion created by a previous article in Diary of a Writer in which he had depicted the people as “coarse and ignorant, addicted to drunkenness and debauch,” and as “barbarians awaiting the light,” he dredges up from memory an incident in the prison camp that had once rescued him from despair under the weight of the same disillusioning impressions.
The incident that Dostoevsky describes took place during “the second day of Easter Week”11 and was motivated by his memory of the peasant Marey, one of his father’s serfs whom he had known as a boy. During Lent the prisoners, relieved of work for one week, went to church two or three times a day. “I very much liked the week of the preparation for the sacrament,” Dostoevsky confirms in House of the Dead. “The Lenten service so familiar to me from the faraway days of my childhood in my father’s house, the solemn prayers, the prostrations—all this stirred in my heart the far, far-away past, bringing back the days of my childhood.” The convicts stood at the back of the church, as the peasants had done in Dostoevsky’s youth, and he remembered how he, from his privileged position, had once watched them “slavishly parting to make way for a thickly epauletted officer, a stout gentleman, or an overdressed but pious lady. . . . I used to fancy then that at the church door they did not pray as we did, but they prayed humbly, zealously, abasing themselves and fully conscious of their humble state” (4: 176).
The Easter preparations thus naturally evoked memories of the days when his faith had been untroubled—and of his sense even then that the peasants were more truly Christian in their devotions than the arrogant ruling class. “The convicts prayed very earnestly and every one of them brought his poor farthing to the church every time to buy a candle, or to put it in the collection. ‘I, too, am a man,’ he thought, and felt perhaps as he gave it, ‘in God’s eyes we are all equal.’ We took the sacrament at the early mass. When with the chalice in his hands the priest read the words ‘accept me, O Lord, even as the thief,’ almost all of them bowed down to the ground with the clanking of chains, apparently applying the words literally to themselves” (4: 177). Such impressions certainly began to weaken Dostoevsky’s notion that the convicts were so many cruder replicas of Aristov; nor should we overlook the possible effects of the Orthodox Easter service itself, which, in celebrating the central mystery of the resurrection of Christ, places strong emphasis on the brotherly love and mutual forgiveness that should unite all the faithful in joy at the miraculous event.
By the second day of Easter week, then, Dostoevsky had gone through a long period in which his most exalted feelings had repeatedly been aroused, and it was thus all the more infuriating to witness the appalling spectacle that he saw all around him. “It was the second day of the ‘holiday’ in the camp; the prisoners were not taken out to work, many were drunk, cursing and quarreling flared up from on
e moment to the next on every side. Ugly, filthy songs; gambling groups squatting underneath the plank bed; convicts beaten half to death, by common consent, because of having been too rowdy, and lying on the plank bed covered with sheepskins until they revive and wake up; knives already drawn several times—all this, on the second day of the holiday, tormented me to the point of illness.”12 What finally impelled him “to run out of [the barracks] like a madman” was that “six robust peasants, all together, threw themselves on the drunken Tartar Gazin, in order to subdue him; they beat him furiously—a camel could have been killed with such blows, but they knew that it was difficult to kill this Hercules, so they beat him without fear.”13
Unable to bear this horrifying sight a moment longer, Dostoevsky rushed outside into the bright, sunlit day, the blue sky radiant overhead. He began to walk, as he often did, in the open space between the stockade and the buildings; but the beauty of the day could not calm the indignation raging in his breast. “Finally,” he recalls, “my heart was inflamed with rancor”; and just at this instant he happened to meet one of the Polish prisoners, Mirecki, strolling in the same isolated walkway and evidently for the same reasons. “He looked at me gloomily, his eyes flashed and his lips began to tremble: ‘Je hais ces brigands [I hate those bandits]!’—he muttered through his clenched teeth, in a half-strangled voice, and passed by.”14
The effect of these words was to make Dostoevsky abruptly turn on his heel and go back to the barracks. Mirecki had voiced the very poisonous thoughts, had exhibited the same anger seething within Dostoevsky himself; and this had given him a terrible jolt. It raised to the surface the extent of his alignment with the Poles against his fellow Russians; and he returned to the barracks as a gesture of solidarity with his countrymen. All the same, still finding it impossible to support the sight of the pandemonium indoors, Dostoevsky lay down on his few inches of plank bed and pretended to be asleep. “But now I could not dream: my heart was beating agitatedly, and I could hear Mirecki’s words ringing in my ears: ‘Je hais ces brigands!’ ”15