Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  The severity of his inner conflict was reaching a peak; this was why he found it so difficult to blot out the present, as he had so often been accustomed to do, and allow his subconscious to wander freely in the past via involuntary associations. “I used to analyze these impressions, adding new touches to things long ago outlived, and—what is more important—I used to correct, continually to correct them.”16 What emerged now was the memory of an incident of his childhood—a period of his life just revived in his subconscious by the Easter preparations and ceremonies. And the experience had involved the same emotions of shock, fright, and fear that had been aroused by the prison-camp orgy. Wandering through the forest one day on his father’s scruffy little “estate,” the nine-year-old Dostoevsky suddenly thought he heard a shout that a wolf was roaming in the vicinity. The wood was criss-crossed with ravines, in which wolves sometimes appeared, and Dostoevsky’s mother had warned him to be careful. The frightened boy ran out of the wood and toward a peasant plowing in a nearby field, one of his father’s serfs, whom he knew only as “Marey.” The surprised Marey halted work to soothe the white-faced and trembling child, and assured him that no one had shouted and no wolf was near. Dostoevsky recalled Marey smiling at him gently “like a mother,” blessing him with the sign of the cross and crossing himself, and then sending him home with the reassurance that he would be kept in sight. “All this came back suddenly, I do not know why,” Dostoevsky writes, “with surprising clarity and in full detail. I suddenly opened my eyes, straightened up on the plank bed and, I recall, my face still retained its gentle smile of recollection.”17

  Dostoevsky never spoke to Marey again after this single contact, and he insists that he had completely lost consciousness of the incident. “And suddenly now—twenty years later, in Siberia—I was recalling that meeting so distinctly, in every detail.” He is certain that “[Marey] could not have looked at me with an expression gleaming with more genuine love if I had been his only son. And who forced him to do so? He was our peasant serf, and I, after all, the son of his owner; no one would know how kind he had been and reward him for it. . . . The encounter was isolated, in an empty field, and only God, perhaps, saw from above what deep and enlightened human feeling, what delicate, almost womanly tenderness, could fill the heart of a coarse, bestially ignorant Russian peasant serf not yet expecting, nor even suspecting, that he might be free.”18

  And abruptly, as a result of this comforting memory, Dostoevsky finds that his whole attitude toward his fellow convicts has undergone a transformation. “I remember, when I got off the plank bed and gazed around, that I suddenly felt I could look on these unfortunates with quite different eyes, and suddenly, as if by a miracle, all hatred and rancor had vanished from my heart. I walked around, looking attentively at the faces that I met. That despised peasant with shaven head and brand marks on his face, reeling with drink, bawling out his hoarse, drunken song—why, he may be that very Marey; after all, I am not able to look into his heart.” The same evening Dostoevsky met Mirecki again; and by this time he felt inwardly secure, capable now of facing the earlier indictment with a twinge of superior pity for the poor, unhappy Pole. “He could not have had any memories of any Mareys, and any other opinions about these people other than: ‘Je hais ces brigands.’ No, these Poles had much more to endure than we did!”19

  In his still unsurpassed Varieties of Religious Experience,20 William James speaks of the inner peace, harmony, and tranquility that result from a conversion experience. Even though nothing is changed externally, the subject distinctly has the sense of perceiving a truth that, if perhaps glimpsed dimly before, had never been so lucid and so momentous. The memory of the peasant Marey had this effect on Dostoevsky, who believed he could at last see through the abhorrent surface of the world to a beauty hitherto concealed from the eyes of his moral sensibility. “Owing to circumstances,” he writes, “almost throughout the whole history of Russia, the people have been . . . subjected to so much depravity and seduction, to so much torture, that it is really surprising how they have managed to succeed in preserving the human image, not to speak of its beauty. Yet they did preserve also the beauty of their image.” It was this “beautiful image” that Dostoevsky could now discern; he had finally learned how to seprate “[its] beauty from the barbarism” and “to discover diamonds in this filth.”21

  What occurred to Dostoevsky, then, bears all the earmarks of a genuine conversion experience; it also involves, as we see, a recovery of faith in the Russian common people as, in some sense, the human image of Christ. And this aspect of Dostoevsky’s regeneration—that it centers primarily on his relations with the people—must be stressed. It was only from the people that Dostoevsky sought absolution, both because of the immediate sense of guilt engendered by the complexities of his prison-camp sentiments and, further back, because of his acceptance of a share of the guilt in his father’s presumed murder. Since it was against the people that Dostoevsky had doubly sinned, it is by them that he wished to be forgiven, and the memory of the peasant Marey fulfilled this precise function.

  In this way, under conditions of nervous tension, psychic division, and physical exhaustion similar to those in which sudden alterations of belief frequently occur, Dostoevsky underwent a striking change of heart. His recovery of faith in the people was also a rediscovery of Orthodoxy, or at least an estrangement from his previous “progressive” Christianity, whose doctrines he could well castigate as the fatal source of all his old illusions. An essential feature of such doctrines had been a naïvely optimistic glorification of the people as an inexhaustible fount of moral virtue, but such an image could hardly be valid for Dostoevsky in its old sentimental, idyllic, quasi-Rousseauian form. Yet Dostoevsky persisted in believing in the sterling moral essence of precisely this peasant, in violation of the evidence of his senses and rational faculties. And to sustain this belief required the support of a faith that did not shrink back from the paradoxical, the irrational, the impossible; a faith that was willing unblinkingly to accept both the ugliness and the savagery and, at the same time, to search for—and find—the saving mark of humanity concealed beneath the hideous exterior. One might say that, just as Dostoevsky’s faith in the miracle of the Resurrection had been quickened and revived by the Easter ceremonies, so his faith in the Russian people had been renewed by the “miracle” of Marey’s resurrection in his consciousness. No doubt the leap required to accept Christ’s triumph over death played its part in stimulating the similar leap that transformed his vision of the peasant convicts. The feature of the two, in any case, would remain blended together forever in Dostoevsky’s sensibility and eventually lead to that literal “divinization” of the Russian people he was one day to proclaim.

  In House of the Dead, Dostoevsky continually offers examples of how the Christian faith, pervading camp life, helped to mitigate some of its inhumanity. Of Christmas, Dostoevsky writes: “The great festivals of the church make a vivid impression on the minds of the peasants from childhood upwards. . . . Respect for the solemn day had passed into a custom strictly observed among the convicts; very few caroused, all . . . tried to keep up a certain dignity” (4: 105). The religious holidays usually brought forth an outpouring of moral solidarity with the convicts in the form of charity. “An immense quantity of provisions were brought, such as rolls, cheesecakes, pastries, scones, and similar good things. I believe there was not a housewife of the middle and lower class of the town who did not send something of her baking by way of Christmas greetings to the ‘unfortunates’ and the captives” (4: 108). Dostoevsky excludes the upper, educated class from such participation in the Christmas spirit, and he remarks elsewhere that “the higher classes in Russia have no idea how deeply our merchants, tradespeople and peasants concern themselves about ‘the unfortunates’ ” (4: 18).

  Dostoevsky stresses the mollifying effect on the behavior of the peasant convicts of their acceptance of the Christian moral code. “All [the gifts] were accepted with equal gratitude.
. . . The convicts took off their caps as they received them, bowed, gave their Christmas greetings and took the offering into the kitchen. When the offerings were piled up in heaps, the senior convicts were sent for, and they divided all equally among the wards. There was no scolding or quarreling; it was honestly and equitably done” (4: 108). What a contrast with the usual bickering and perpetual pilfering of each other’s belongings!

  Alms-giving from the population reached a peak during the religious holidays, but it was continual all through the year, and sometimes took the form of money handed to the convicts as they shuffled through the streets of Omsk in a work convoy. The first time Dostoevsky received alms in this way was “soon after my arrival in prison.” A ten-year-old girl passed him walking under escort and ran back to give him a coin. “ ‘There, poor unfortunate, take a kopek, for Christ’s sake,’ she cried, overtaking me and thrusting the coin in my hand. . . . I treasured that kopek for a long time” (4: 19). What this incident came to mean to him may be seen in Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov cuts off his ties with humanity, and indicates his rejection of all impulses of sympathy and pity by the symbolic gesture of throwing into the Neva a twenty-kopek piece given to him as charity by a little girl.

  These Christian aspects of Russian lower-class life suggested that the humanitarian, philanthropic ideals of his earlier work, which he had once attributed to the progressive ideology of the Russian Westernizers, were actually embodied in the instinctive moral reflexes of the much-despised and denigrated Russian peasant. It is little wonder that Dostoevsky was later to become such a virulent opponent of all those who aspired to replace Christian values with other notions of morality. To do so, he was passionately convinced, would undermine the basic moral foundations of Russian life as he had come to know them—under circumstances where the survival of any kind of morality could only be considered a miracle! The most vicious man in the camp was the well-educated Aristov, who was entirely free of any trace of the traditional moral restraints.

  One episode in particular took on a crucial symbolic significance for Dostoevsky as he leaned on his faith to penetrate to the moral essence of the peasant convict. During the Christmas theatricals, on entering the military ward that served as a theater, Dostoevsky was astonished by the respect and even deference he received; a front-row seat was immediately provided, although the crush in the small space was “incredible.” Interpreting the subconscious behavior of the convicts, Dostoevsky attributes it to the fact that he had helped in the staging. “They looked upon me as to some extent a theatre-goer, a connoisseur . . . so on this occasion I had the honor of a front place” (4: 121–122).

  This incident reveals the ability of the peasant convicts to overcome their instinctive vindictiveness against their former masters for the sake of a higher value. And the moral drawn by Dostoevsky was that “the highest and most striking characteristic of our people is just their sense of justice and their eagerness for it. There is no trace in the common people of the desire to be the cock of the walk on all occasions and at all costs, whether they deserve to be or not. One has but to take off the outer superimposed husk and look at the kernel more closely, more attentively and without prejudice. . . . There is not much our wise men could teach them. On the contrary, I think it is the wise men who ought to learn from the people” (4: 122).

  Once again we are at the source of what was to become one of the most deeply held convictions of the post-Siberian Dostoevsky. For was he not later to proclaim, with accents of prophetic passion, that the Russian peasantry was imbued with a sense of moral rectitude that could serve as a shining example to its “betters”? And while such an idea was often ridiculed by his opponents, it was too firmly rooted in the redemptive emotions of these prison years for Dostoevsky ever to question its validity.

  All this was added to the growing awareness that, the more Dostoevsky came to know some of his fellow convicts, the more he came to understand that some crimes had been prompted by reasons he could not fully condemn. One daring passage in House of the Dead even contains a general exculpation of prisoners whose personal histories he does not spell out in detail: “There are men who commit crimes on purpose to be sent to penal servitude, in order to escape from a far more penal life of labor outside. There he lived in the deepest degradation, never had enough to eat and worked from morning to night for his exploiter” (4: 43). Dostoevsky says nothing to indicate any disapproval of such a choice.

  Dostoevsky’s increasingly acute awareness of the moral difference between one crime and another also became the cause of a “thought which haunted me persistently all the time I was in prison, a difficulty that cannot be fully solved.” Identical crimes, under the law, received much the same punishment; yet the reasons for which they had been committed, morally speaking, were infinitely varied. “One may have committed a murder for nothing, for an onion; he murdered a peasant on the high road, who turned out to have nothing but an onion.” (As the prison proverb had it, “A hundred murders and a hundred onions [each worth a kopek] and you’ve got a ruble.”) “Another murders a sensual tyrant in defense of the honor of his betrothed, his sister or his child. Another is a fugitive [a runaway serf], hemmed in by a regiment of trackers, who commits a murder in defense of his freedom, his life, often dying of hunger; and another murders little children for the pleasure of killing, of feeling their warm blood on his hands, of enjoying their terror, and their last dove-like flutter under the knife. Yet all of these are sent to penal servitude.” Variations in the length of sentences do not cope with the problem because “there are as many shades of differences as there are characters,” and Dostoevsky, admitting defeat, finally resigns himself to the impossibility of an answer: “It is in its own way an insoluble problem, like squaring the circle” (4: 42–43).

  Such words anticipate Dostoevsky’s later pronounced distaste for legal formalities of any kind, which stick to the letter of the law and rarely leave room for any probing of the heart and mind of the individual criminal. He was eventually to pour all his anguish over this issue into the portrayal of the investigation of the putative crime of Dimitry Karamazov, with its regard only for the “facts” and its total neglect of Dimitry’s own responses. This growing apprehension of human diversity among his fellow convicts enormously increased the range of Dostoevsky’s philanthropic convictions of the 1840s—but without causing him to blur the distinction between good and evil. What had been a pitying sentimentalism toward weak and basically unassertive characters now took on a tragic complexity as Dostoevsky’s sympathies with the unsubjugated peasant convicts stretched the boundaries of official morality to the breaking point. More important than the crime itself were the motives, the human situation, from which it emerged. It is in the context of such considerations that we must place one of the most famous passages in the book. “After all,” Dostoevsky declares, “one must tell the whole truth; these men were exceptional men. Perhaps they were the most gifted, the strongest of our people” (4: 231). Their crimes sprang from a strength of character and, frequently, a defense of instinctive moral principles, exhibited under circumstances where others would have been completely crushed.

  Dostoevsky’s years in the house of the dead exposed him to an extraordinary range of personalities, among whom genuine saintliness rubbed elbows with the basest depravity. Nearly everyone had, at some crucial instant, stepped outside the bounds of normal social life to commit a violent act that had decided his destiny once and for all. The effect of such exposure on Dostoevsky’s imaginative grasp of human experience was considerable, and his portrayal of character was later to take a qualitative leap in depth and scale that may be directly attributed to this cause.

  There was one particular aspect of camp life that became the most distinctive hallmark of his genius. House of the Dead contains a remarkable series of analyses that, focusing on the unconscious urges of the human psyche, describe its irresistible need to assert itself and affirm its native dignity. This need was so imperiou
s that, unable to find normal outlets under the repressive conditions of the prison camp, it burst forth in all sorts of irrational, absurd, and even self-destructive forms. Always preoccupied with the deformations of character caused by lack of freedom, Dostoevsky had explored this theme in his early stories, but there he had barely scratched the surface. Life in prison camp gave him the unique vantage point from which to study human beings living under extreme psychic pressure, and responding to such pressure with the most frenzied behavior. Once Dostoevsky had mastered himself sufficiently to be able to contemplate his environment with lucidity, he began to understand even such sensedefying conduct as the product of a genuine human need—no longer as the monstrous perversities of a collection of moral Quasimodos wholly beyond the human pale.

  We cannot truly understand Dostoevsky’s later worldview if we separate his perceptions and values too sharply from the context of psychic constraint in which they were remolded. For Dostoevsky was persuaded that no human order could ultimately prove viable unless it acknowledged—and offered some relief for—these irrepressible demands of the human spirit. House of the Dead is so rich in illustrations of this power of the irrational, and they are so varied in their nature and importance, that one scarcely knows where to begin. But let us start with Dostoevsky’s remarks on the psychically unsettling effects of the communal life imposed on the convicts. He was convinced that this closeness contributed to their excessive restlessness and irritability. “I am certain,” he affirms, “that every convict felt this torture, though of course in most cases unconsciously.” As for himself, perhaps the worst “torture in prison life, almost more terrible than any other . . . [was] compulsory life in common” (4: 20–22). Elsewhere, he repeats: “I could never have imagined, for instance, how terrible and agonizing it would be never once for a single minute to be alone for the [four] years of my imprisonment” (4: 11).