Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  I had already become acquainted with convicts in Tobolsk, and here in Omsk I settled down to living with them for four years. They were coarse, ill-natured, cross-grained people. Their hatred for the gentry knew no bounds, and therefore they received us, the gentlemen, with hostility and malicious joy in our troubles. They would have eaten us alive, given the chance. Judge, moreover, how much protection we had, having to live, to eat and drink and sleep with these men for several years, without even the chance of complaining of the innumerable affronts of every possible kind. ‘You are noblemen, iron beaks that used to peck us to death. Before, the master used to torment the people, but now he is lower than the lowest, has become one of us’—that’s the theme on which they played variations for four years. One hundred and fifty enemies never tired of persecuting us; it was a pleasure for them, an amusement, something to do, and if anything at all saved us, it was indifference, moral superiority (which they could not but recognize and respect), and unyielding resistance to their will. They always acknowledged that we were superior to them. They had no understanding of our crime. We ourselves were silent on the subject, and so we could not understand each other, and we had to endure all the persecution and vindictiveness toward the gentry class for which they lived and breathed.

  Things were very bad for us. A military prison is much worse than a civilian one. I spent the whole four years in the prison behind walls and never went out except to work. The work they found for us was heavy (not always, of course), and I was sometimes completely exhausted in foul weather, in damp and rain and sleet, and in the unendurable cold of winter. Once I spent four hours on urgent work, when the mercury froze and there was perhaps about 40 degrees of frost. My foot became frostbitten.

  We lived on top of each other, all together in one barrack. Imagine an old, dilapidated, wooden construction, which was supposed to have been pulled down long ago, and which was no longer fit for use. In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall. The little windows were so covered with frost that it was almost impossible to read at any time of the day. An inch of ice on the panes. Drips from the ceiling, draughts everywhere. We were packed like herrings in a barrel. The stove took six logs at once, but there was no warmth (the ice in the room barely thawed), only unendurable fumes—and this, all winter long. There in the barracks the convicts washed their clothes and the whole space was splashed with water. There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs, for after all, ‘we’re live human beings.’ We slept on bare boards and were allowed only a pillow. We spread our sheepskin coats over us, and our feet were always uncovered all night. We shivered all night. Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel. In winter we wore short sheepskin coats, often of the most wretched quality, which hardly gave any warmth, and on our feet half-boots—just try to walk around with them in the freezing cold.

  The food they gave us was bread and cabbage soup with a quarter of a pound of beef in it; but the meat was minced up and I never saw any of it. On holidays, thin porridge almost without fat. On fast days, boiled cabbage and hardly anything else. I suffered unbearably from indigestion and was ill several times. You may judge whether we could have lived without money, and if I had had none I should certainly have died; and nobody, no convict, whoever he was, could have borne such a life without it. But everybody worked at something, sold it, and thus had a kopek or two. I drank tea and sometimes bought a piece of meat to eat, and this was my salvation. It was impossible not to smoke tobacco as well, for one might have choked in that atmosphere. All this was done by stealth.

  I often lay ill in the hospital. Disordered nerves have given me epilepsy, but the fits occur only rarely. I have rheumatism in the legs besides. Apart from this I feel fairly well. Add to all theses amenities the almost complete impossibility of possessing a book (and if you get one you read it on the sly), the eternal hostility and quarreling around one, the wrangling, shouting, uproar, din, always under escort, never alone, and all this for four years without change—really, one may be pardoned for saying that things were bad. Besides all this, the eternal threat of punishment hanging over one, shackles, the total stifling of the soul, there you have an image of my existence.9

  Dostoevsky then gives a greatly modified version of the convicts who had initially appeared to him as hateful creatures almost of another species.

  Men, however, are everywhere men. In four years in prison I came at last to distinguish men among criminals. Believe me, there are deep, strong, beautiful characters among them, and what a joy it was to discover the gold under the coarse, hard surface. And not one, not two, but several. It is impossible not to respect some of them, and some are positively splendid. I taught a young Circassian (sent to hard labor for highway robbery) reading and writing in Russian. What gratitude he heaped on me! Another convict wept at parting from me. I used to give him money—but was it very much? His gratitude, on the other hand, was unbounded. And meanwhile my own character became worse; I was capricious and impatient with them. They respected the condition of my soul and bore all without a murmur. And by the way: What a store of types and characters from the people I have carried out of the prison camp! . . . Enough for whole volumes! What a wonderful people.10

  Dostoevsky’s letter evokes the physical conditions of his imprisonment more honestly than he would be allowed to do later by the censorship in House of the Dead, the book that directly emerged from his prison-camp days. And the seeming contradiction between the two views of his fellow convicts illustrates the process of discovery that took place between the beginning of his imprisonment and the end—by which time he had succeeded in penetrating beneath the shocking and abhorrent surface to an understanding of the psychic and moral depths. Indeed, the transition from one to the other view already furnishes the ground plan that he will later use to structure his prison memoirs.

  On arriving in Omsk, Dostoevsky obtained his first glimpse of the fearsome Major Krivtsov. “He began by roundly abusing the two of us,” he says in his letter, “Durov and myself, as fools because of our crimes, and promised . . . corporal punishment at the first offense.”11 This incident is later recounted in House of the Dead: “His spiteful, purple, pimply face made a very depressing impression: it was as though a malicious spider had run out to pounce on some poor fly that had fallen into its web.” After ordering the heads of the newly arrived prisoners to be shaved and confiscating all their property and personal clothing (except, for some reason, white underlinen), he concluded with the threat: “Mind you behave yourselves! Don’t let me hear of you! Or . . . corporal punishment. For the least misdemeanor—the lash!” (4: 214).

  Whether Dostoevsky ever was flogged as a convict has been a subject of unceasing speculation. Dostoevsky himself says of Krivtsov: “God saved me from him.”12 According to an incident recounted in the memoirs of P. K. Martyanov, one of the few reliable sources of information about Dostoevsky’s prison years, Krivtsov did issue an order for Dostoevsky to be punished by the lash. Making one of his impromptu inspections of the prison (he was nicknamed “eight-eyes” by the convicts, because he seemed to see and know everything that went on), Krivtsov discovered Dostoevsky lying on a pallet in the barracks at a time when he should have been at work. Dostoevsky had been excused because of illness and allowed a day of rest; this was explained to Krivtsov by the noncommissioned officer on guard duty, one of a group of ex-naval cadets, all of good family, who had been demoted because of minor acts of insubordination and exiled to Siberia as punishment. But the furious Krivstov, livid with rage, shouted that Dostoevsky was being protected and commanded that he be flogged immediately.13 Preparations were being made to carry out the order when the commandant of the fortress, General de Grave, hurriedly arrived. He had been summoned by a messenger from the ex-naval cadet, who, like his fellows, was lenient toward the convicts in general and the political prisoners in particular. Not only
did the general countermand Krivtsov’s order on the spot, he also gave him a dressing down in public for having illegally tried to punish a sick convict.

  The entire sequence of events beginning with Dostoevsky’s mock execution, followed by the exposure to prison camp conditions and the constant terror of being at the mercy of Krivtsov’s drunken rages, certainly contributed to the outbreak of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy. The first genuine attack, as far as can be determined, occurred sometime in 1850, and was characterized seven years later in a medical report as having been marked by shrieks, loss of consciousness, convulsive movements of the face and limbs, foam at the mouth, raucous breathing, and a feeble, rapid, and irregular pulse. The same report states that a similar attack recurred in 1853; since then, the seizures had continued on the average of once a month. Dostoevsky’s letter to Mikhail is the only firsthand document available, and he speaks of his epilepsy as an entirely new phase of his old ailment (“disordered nerves”)—the worsening of a condition whose initial symptoms may have shown up in Petersburg but only became epileptic in Siberia. Dostoevsky always alludes to his Siberian seizures as an affliction of which he had had no previous experience.

  Major Krivtsov unquestionably enjoyed torturing the convicts simply to display his authority. As Dostoevsky recounts and as his Polish fellow prisoner, Szymon Tokarzewski, confirms, he frequently invaded the barracks at night and awoke the convicts, exhausted after a day of hard labor, because they were lying on their right sides or their backs and he decreed that the only permissible sleeping position was on the left side. “Whoever . . . slept on the right side was flogged,” writes Tokarzewski. “[Krivtsov] justified this punishment by saying that Christ always slept on his left side, consequently everybody was required to follow his example.”14 His savage anger at what he considered Dostoevsky’s malingering was strengthened by his awareness that Dostoevsky was being “protected.” Konstantin Ivanov, son-in-law of Mme Annenkova, and adjutant to the general of the Engineering Corps, arranged for Dostoevsky, so far as possible, to be assigned only the lightest kind of labor—painting, turning the wheel of a lathe, pounding alabaster, shoveling snow.

  Dostoevsky, however, felt that taxing labor outdoors was necessary to combat the noxious effects of the pestilential atmosphere in the barracks, and he sought it out after a time. “Being constantly in the open air, working every day until I was tired, learning to carry heavy weights—at any rate I shall save myself,” he writes in House of the Dead. “I thought: I shall make myself strong, I shall leave the prison healthy, vigorous, hearty and not old. I was not mistaken; the work and exercise were very good for me” (4: 80). Sergey Durov, on the other hand, apparently avoided manual labor; and though scarcely older than Dostoevsky, he emerged four years later an ailing and broken old man barely able to stand on his feet.

  All the same, Dostoevsky’s health would probably have suffered more if not for the kindness of the head of the fortress hospital, Dr. Troitsky, toward the political prisoners. Dostoevsky’s first stay in the hospital may have been caused by his epileptic attack, or because he collapsed from exhaustion while clearing snow, but he returned there frequently, even when not ailing from any specific complaint. Dr. Troitsky would pass the word along through the ex-naval cadets that space was available. Dostoevsky would then show up to be entered on the books as “convalescing,” and take a respite from the incessant noise and turmoil of the barracks. The hospital afforded him relative quiet, the luxury of a bed, and nourishing food, tea, and wine supplied either from hospital rations or from the doctor’s own kitchen. Krivtsov certainly knew about Troitsky’s favors to the “politicals,” but since the hospital was an army installation, not part of the prison, there was little he could do. And while both the general of engineers and General de Grave were well aware that the doctor was playing fast and loose with the application of the sentence passed on the Petrashevtsy, they preferred to close their eyes to such infractions, with a warning to the doctor to be careful.

  Such a warning was by no means superfluous; one of the physicians in the hospital finally denounced his superior’s favoritism toward the political prisoners in a letter to Petersburg. An investigation was ordered, and an official dispatched from Tobolsk to carry on the inquiry. But since he received no cooperation from the local authorities, the informer could not produce any witnesses to substantiate the charges he had made. In desperation, the investigator decided to search the convicts’ quarters. Since this required the permission of the commandant, General de Grave had time secretly to pass the word along to the prisoners, who, hastening to remove everything illegal and forbidden, obligingly left a few items to reward the searcher. He turned up a pot of pomade, a bottle of eau de cologne, women’s stockings, and some children’s toys. The prize, however, consisted of a few sheets of writing paper, on which he pounced in the hope of having at last unearthed some incriminating evidence of forbidden literary composition. The sheets did, in fact, contain a literary work—but not of a kind he had anticipated. It turned out to be a prayer, addressed to the Almighty, pleading for divine intercession to exorcise the presence of Satan, who had, it would appear, returned to earth from the nether world in the shape of Major Krivtsov. Dostoevsky’s literary talents would hardly have gone unused in this bit of gallows humor.

  As a matter of fact, Dostoevsky kept a notebook in the hospital in which he jotted down phrases and expressions typical of the convict’s salty and picturesque peasant language. These precious pages he confided to the care of the medical assistant, A. I. Ivanov, and Dostoevsky kept the scribbled sheets, sewn together by hand into a little notebook, until his dying day. Besides noting phrases and proverbs, he also preserved the texts of songs. Dostoevsky made ample use of all this material in the book that directly emerged from his prison-camp days, as well as in many of his novels, where locutions first noted in Siberia are incorporated to enliven the text.

  The existence of the Siberian Notebooks reveals Dostoevsky’s grim determination to one day resume his literary career. “I cannot find the expression to tell you,” he wrote his friend Apollon Maikov after his release from prison camp, “what torture I suffered because I was not able to write.”15 In the one encounter during these years where he could speak freely to someone from the metropolis, what he inquired about most eagerly was the literary scene from which he had been so forcibly torn away. This conversation took place in the winter of 1853 with Evgeny Yakushkin, the son of an exiled Decembrist family who, after completing his studies in Russia, had returned on a mission to Siberia as a land surveyor.

  Passing through Omsk, Yakushkin asked an officer friend to arrange a meeting with Dostoevsky. “I remember,” Yakushkin writes many years later, “that Dostoevsky’s appearance made a terribly painful impression on me when he walked into the room in his convict clothes, wearing shackles, and with his sickly face bearing the traces of a serious illness.” Relations were quickly established after the first moment, and the two eagerly spoke “of what was going on in Russia, of current Russian literature. He asked me about some of the new writers who had just appeared and spoke of his difficult situation in a convict battalion.”16 Pressing a small sum of money on Dostoevsky, Yakushkin also willingly agreed to take a letter back to Mikhail that was written on the spot, and he was delighted when Dostoevsky said that the meeting had brought him back to life. This manifestation of interest and sympathy reassured the erstwhile writer that he was still remembered, and had not, like the heroine of his own Poor Folk, vanished into the steppe without leaving a trace.

  Dostoevsky’s last two years in prison camp were painful enough, but less of a hardship than those preceding. Major Krivtsov was arrested, tried for misconduct, and forced to resign from government service; with him went the reign of terror he had established. Dostoevsky had the satisfaction of seeing the ex-major in town, “a civilian wearing a shabby coat and a cap with a cockade in it” (4: 218). Once Krivtsov was gone, “everyone seemed to breathe more freely and to be more confident” (4: 219)
. Governor-General Gorchakov too, whose mistress (the wife of a well-rewarded army general) shamelessly collected graft hand over fist, also fell from favor and was replaced. “I enjoyed more privileges toward the last than in the early years of my life in prison,” he notes in House of the Dead. “I discovered among the officers serving in the town some acquaintances and even old schoolfellows of mine . . . through their good offices I was able to obtain even larger supplies of money, and even to have books” (4: 229). Except for two titles—Russian versions of The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield—we do not know the books to which Dostoevsky finally had access. Years later he would see Mr. Pickwick as one of the precursors of his own Prince Myshkin, “a perfectly good man,” the embodiment of a Christian moral ideal mocked in the world. Most important, Dostoevsky had at last established friendly relations with some of the peasant convicts, and this provided a welcome relief from his oppressive sense of living in a world surrounded only by enmity and hatred.

  He was released from prison in February 1854—to serve as a lowly private in the Russian Army for an indeterminate period. All the same, the presentiment of the difficulties lying ahead could not suppress the immense joy of his long-awaited delivery. For years he had paced in solitude every evening around the stockade of the prison camp, counting another paling each day to mark the gradual expiration of his sentence; at last the great moment had arrived! “The fetters fell off,” he writes in House of the Dead, “I picked them up, I wanted to hold them in my hand, to look at them for the last time. I seemed already to be wondering that they could have been on my feet a minute before. ‘Well, with God’s blessing, with God’s blessing!’ said the convicts in coarse, abrupt voices, in which, however, there was a note of pleasure. Yes, with God’s blessing! Freedom, new life, resurrection from the dead. . . . What a glorious moment!” (4: 232).