Soon after that, Fyodor went to stay the night at Apollon Maikov’s house, hoping that, in the intimacy of late-night conversation, he might convince him to join in the conspiracy. As Fyodor pulled on his red nightshirt, they began to talk about the two circles, Petrashevsky’s and Durov’s. That Maikov was sympathetic, he knew, but what remained to be seen was whether he was prepared to put his ideals into practice.
‘Of course, you understand that Petrashevsky is a gossip. He is not a serious person and nothing can possibly come of his undertakings,’ Fyodor said.89 ‘And for that reason several serious people from his circle have decided, without telling the others, to form their own secret society with a secret printing press in order to print various books and even magazines. We had our doubts about you – for one thing, you are too proud.’5
‘What do you mean?’ Maikov asked.
‘Well, you don’t recognise authority. For instance, you do not agree with Speshnev.’
‘I am not particularly interested in political economy. And it does seem to me that Speshnev talks nonsense. But what of it?’
‘For the good of the common cause you must exercise self-control. There are seven of us now: Speshnev, Mordvinov, Mombelli, Pavel Filippov, Grigoriev, Vladimir Miliutin and myself. We have chosen you to be the eighth. Do you want to join our society?’
‘But what is the purpose?’
‘Its purpose is to organise a coup in Russia, naturally. We already had a printing press designed by Mordvinov. It was ordered bit by bit, in different places. It is all ready.’
If Fyodor had expected Maikov to be honoured, he was mistaken.
‘Not only do I not wish to join the society, but I advise you to get out of it. What sort of political leaders would we make? We are poets and artists, not practical men, and we haven’t a copeck. Surely, you don’t think we are suited to be revolutionaries, do you?’
They argued for some time before bed, and it was the first thing Fyodor brought up when they woke in the morning. But Maikov held firm.
‘I woke up before you did and thought about it. I won’t join, and you should get out too, if you still can.’
‘Well, that’s my own affair,’ Fyodor replied irritably. ‘And, listen, only seven people know what I told you. You are the eighth – there must not be a ninth.’
‘As far as that is concerned, here is my hand. I won’t say a word.’
Fyodor trusted Maikov more than most. But it was not Maikov who would betray them.
At 4 a.m. on 23 April 1849, Fyodor returned home from seeing Grigoriev and fell asleep. Less than an hour later, as if in a dream, I saw several peculiar and suspicious people enter my room. I heard the sound of a sword hitting something in the room, as if by accident. What was that? I struggled to open my eyes, and I heard a pleasant and sympathetic voice: ‘Please get up.’ I saw a handsome District Police Officer with delicate whiskers. It was not he who spoke, however, but a man dressed in a blue uniform with colonel’s insignia.6 There was another soldier in a blue uniform – the uniform of the Third Section7 – standing at the door.
‘What’s happened?’ Fyodor asked, getting out of bed.
‘Pursuant to the order . . .’ It seemed that they had a warrant for his arrest. The situation was a little absurd, they dressed in full regalia, he in his bedclothes.
‘Please would you let me . . .’ Fyodor began.
‘Please don’t worry. Get dressed, we’ll wait,’ said the colonel in an even nicer voice. Fyodor dressed, and they asked to have his books. All his papers and letters were neatly bound in string.
They didn’t find much, but made a lot of mess not finding it. One of the police officers wanted to show off his detective skills, so he went to the fireplace and stirred the ashes. Another stood on a chair next to the fireplace to see whether anything was hidden in the wall, and he fell off it with a terrible racket. The first officer picked up an old coin and examined it attentively, perhaps considering it a bonus.
‘What do you think, is it counterfeit?’ Fyodor asked.
‘Well, we will have to investigate,’ the officer stammered and added it to the confiscated materials.
They all went out into the frigid air, where there was a carriage waiting. The landlady and her husband had come out to see them off – they must have been awoken by the officer’s fall. The old man looked at Fyodor in a dull, official way. The officers sat inside the carriage with Fyodor and they went down to the Fontanka, across the chain bridge and along the edge of the Summer Garden.
When we arrived, I saw that there were many people inside, some of whom I recognised. Someone must have informed on them. Durov had been arrested, and Petrashevsky. All of them were silent and sleepy. One of the high-ranking officers conducted the reception of the newcomers. Men in blue uniforms were constantly coming in, bringing with them new victims . . . One of the people they brought in was Fyodor’s younger brother, Andrei, which was baffling until the two of them worked out that Andrei had been mistaken for Mikhail. He hadn’t done anything that was likely to result in a long sentence, but Fyodor begged Andrei not to give the game away immediately, to buy Mikhail some time to get his affairs in order and say goodbye to his wife and their newborn child.
Having been given almost no information, the group of haggard and enervated poets gathered around the ranking officer, who was holding a list of names. In front of Antonelli’s name was written: ‘The police agent in this case.’
So, it was Antonelli.
At around midnight Fyodor was taken to Peter and Paul Fortress, where Peter the Great had his son tortured. The sharp spike of the cathedral spire didn’t so much reach up towards God as impale the sky. Fyodor was shown into a small, dark room in the Alexeevsky cells. It had three by two metres of stale air, but with a very high ceiling. The windows and doors were covered in iron bars, the bed in grey cloth. Was this the cell in which the Decembrist Colonel Bulatov had killed himself by repeatedly head-butting the wall?8
They took from Fyodor 60 copecks, a short, shabby winter coat, a shirt, a vest, underwear, boots, stockings, a scarf, a handkerchief and a comb. He was given a thick grey prison robe and stockings and the door was shut. He would spend the rest of the year there, leaving only to be interrogated. Before his arrest, Fyodor had begun publishing an audacious novel, one of the first Russian novels with a complex, female protagonist, the eponymous Netochka Nezvanova. He’d already covered her tragic early life and infatuation with a young princess named Katya, and the plan had been to follow her into early adulthood. No one was publishing anything remotely like it; but now it would have to be abandoned.
Oh, how happy I would have been if I could have blamed myself! I could have borne anything then, even shame and disgrace. But I judged myself severely, and my exasperated conscience found no particularly terrible fault in my past, except a simple blunder which might happen to anyone.90 Fyodor sat for months in his cell, not knowing what was likely to happen, reliving the past. He suffered from haemorrhoids, and nervous throat spasms. He managed to sleep only about five hours out of twenty-four, lying awake in the darkness for four or five hours a night, and could eat only castor oil. His nerves began to fray, and at night the floor would seem to heave under his bed as if he were sloshing around in a ship’s cabin. Still, after a few months the guards gave him permission to take brief walks in the garden, in which he counted 17 trees, and later they even allowed him a candle.
After the endless interrogations came the death sentence and the subsequent ordeal of the mock execution.9 The whole thing was awful, as bad as he could ever have imagined, and yet also, if he allowed himself the thought, which he always did, thrillingly literary. He felt like the protagonist in Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man.
Mikhail had been released and came to visit on Christmas Eve, a few hours before Fyodor began his journey to Siberia. He was very distressed, lip trembling, tears in his eyes, and by the way that Fyodor ended up trying to console him, an observer might have assumed it
was the older brother who was going off to hard labour.
‘Stop, brother,’ Fyodor said. ‘You know me. I’m not going to my grave, this isn’t my burial – and they aren’t wild animals out there. They are people, perhaps better and worthier than I am.’91 They would not exchange another word for over four years. Fyodor had heavy iron shackles put on him as the bell struck midnight: Christmas Day. He got into the open sleigh, and they drove on past the festive lights of the city. He felt sad riding past Mikhail’s apartment but it was only later, stuck in a snowdrift crossing the Urals, that he would break down in tears at the thought of leaving Europe behind. It was a punishing journey of 3,000 versts, riding in temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero.10 Or to put it another way, it was a month with nothing to do but stare at the back of an official as he lashed out at the horses.
Notes
1 Or so Fyodor thought. In reality, Turgenev’s mother was miserly and refused him an allowance, so he borrowed money to pay for his tailoring and always contrived to leave dinner before the bill appeared.
2 Yes, he did actually switch to French in order to accuse Dostoevsky of being mannered. (Frank, p. 97)
3 Had he been born in our time, he may have found what he was looking for: some patients with temporal lobe epilepsy have what is known as Geschwind Syndrome, characterised by hypergraphia (manic writing), hyperreligiosity, atypical sexuality, circumstantiality (an inability to explain oneself without giving excessive, irrelevant details), and an intensified mental life. Although, as Ivan Karamazov would later discover, naming your devil doesn’t make him disappear.
4 That is, Charles Fourier, who coined the word ‘feminism’, not his exact contemporary Joseph Fourier, who discovered greenhouse gases.
5 A bit rich, coming from Dostoevsky.
6 Sekirin, pp. 86–7. A neighbour remembers the police violently breaking down the door and Dostoevsky attempting unsuccessfully to break the window and climb out; see Sekirin p. 133.
7 i.e. the secret police.
8 The Decembrist Revolt was a failed military coup in the last month of 1825, intended to force liberal reforms such as a written constitution and the abolition of serfdom. The Decembrists originally planned to assassinate Alexander I in May 1826, but the Tsar disobligingly died of natural causes in December 1825, leaving the throne to his younger brother, Nicholas. When 3,000 rebels massed in Senate Square on the first day of Nicholas’s reign, he ordered them to be routed with 36 cannon. The five leaders were hanged and 100 more exiled to Siberia. Tsar Nicholas I was subsequently not very fond of liberals.
9 The Commission of Inquiry that convicted him was headed up by the novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s great-great-uncle, General Ivan Alexandrovich Nabokov.
10 Minus 40 is the only temperature where Celsius and Fahrenheit are equivalent. Dostoevsky could have been using the now obsolete Réaumur scale, which would mean it was –47°C, but that seems unlikely as the lowest recorded temperature in Omsk is –41.1°C. René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur was a remarkable polymath who also devised a new formula for porcelain, observed that crayfish can regrow their limbs, and proved that rope is stronger than the sum of its strands.
THREE
The Dead House
1850–1854
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 28 years.92
Description: White skin, clear face, grey eyes, regular nose, blond hair, small scar on the forehead over the left brow.1
Build: Strong.
Why sentenced: Distribution of printed works directed against the government.
Who made the decision: His Majesty – His personal decision with his General-Adjutant.
Punishment: Deprived of all civil rights.
Behaviour: Good conduct.
Term: Four years of hard labour in prison with consecutive service as private in the army.
Religion: Christian Orthodox.
Height: 2 arshins, 6 vershoks.2
Family status: Single.
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.93
On 23 January 1850, when finally they arrived in Omsk, Fyodor was taken to the prison in his fetters. Durov was there, too, but Fyodor had decided to avoid him at all costs. They had barely spoken to each other during the past four weeks, except at a stop in Tobolsk, where they had an opportunity to meet the wives of the Decembrists (one of whom gave Fyodor a Bible). At times on the journey, the cold had been so severe as to be almost unendurable, but he might as well get used to suffering, since there was nothing he could do about it now.
My first impression on entering the prison was one of disgust, and yet – strange to say – it seemed to me that it would be easier to live here than I imagined on the journey. The prisoners walked freely around, though they were in fetters, talking and smoking.94 It was already dark and the men were returning from their work to be lined up for the evening roll call. It was there that Fyodor had his first encounter with the angry (or perhaps drunk) Major Krivtsov. His spiteful, purple, pimply face made a very depressing impression, as though a malicious spider had run out to pounce on some poor fly that had landed in its web.95 The Major ordered Fyodor’s head to be shaved (or half of it, in fact, from ear to ear) and his clothing and property were to be taken, except for his Bible, which he was allowed to keep, and which had ten roubles slotted down the spine. He was given his prison clothes: a grey and black cap, a coat of the same colour, with a yellow diamond on the back, and a sheepskin with a high collar to protect the ears. Turning to him, the Major warned: ‘Mind you behave yourself. I don’t want to hear of you, or there will be corporal punishment. If you put one foot out of line – the lash!’96
Shortly afterwards, Fyodor was taken straight to his barrack, a low, stuffy room, the gloom punctuated by weak tallow candles (there were small windows, but the ice on them was an inch thick). He was given a low shelf to sleep on, by the door. The boards were rotten. In one corner was a proper bedstead where an old soldier would be locked in with them to keep the peace. On the ground, the filth lay thick and slippery. At the far end was a wooden trough which stank unmistakably of stale shit, to say nothing of the prisoners themselves. He could not see, or if he saw, could not identify, anywhere that a person could bathe.
When our prison room was shut up, it suddenly assumed a new aspect, and it was only now that I could see my fellow prisoners completely at home.97 They all quietly settled down in their places and lit their own candles. One sat down to stitch his boot, another took up sewing. The stove took six logs at once, but the ice in the room barely thawed, and it produced horrid fumes.98 A group squatted on their heels around a rug to play cards. They took out their loose change and persuaded one destitute soul to keep watch at the door all night for a paltry five copecks. He seemed happy enough, listening out in the passage by the door in the frost, but probably he was a pauper by nature. Everywhere in Russia there have always been, and always will be certain strange individuals who, while humble and by no means lazy, are destined to be broke for ever.99
As he lay on his plank, Fyodor was conspicuous by his idleness. Looking around the room, there were not more than five people who weren’t up to something, and their work wasn’t restricted to light sewing: one of his more ambitious neighbours was making a multi-coloured Chinese lantern, which had apparently been ordered in the town at a fairly good price. The prisoner introduced himself as Efim Belykh, and it transpired that, far from being a peasant, he used to be an army ensign, before murdering a Caucasian prince. He worked methodically without stopping until he was finished, put the lantern neatly away, said his prayers, and went to sleep. I lay down on the bare boards, put my clothes under my head (I had no pillow), and covered myself with my sheepskin. But for a long time I could not get to sleep, though I felt exhausted and broken by the monstrous strangeness of my first impressions. There was much ahead of me that I had never dreamed of.100
Before it had grown light, someone was beating out a tattoo on a loud drum. By the dim candlelight, the prisoners beg
an to get up, shivering with the cold. Most were silent and sullen. They yawned, stretched and wrinkled their branded foreheads.101 Ten minutes later the duty sergeant unlocked the doors. As their door opened, the fresh winter air rushed in, and Fyodor watched it turn to swirling cloud as it met the stuffy air of the barrack. Someone brought in a pail of water and the prisoners began to quarrel over the single ladle, filling their mouths and washing their hands and faces, while others crossed themselves.
They all wandered sleepily over to the kitchen, where the cooks (also convicts) were cutting up bread, sharing the prized regulation knife. The others kept calling them ‘kitchen maids’, which they didn’t seem to mind. The rest of the prisoners stood round in their caps and sheepskin coats, crumbling their bread into cups of kvass.3 An old man sat at one of the benches, scowling as he gummed his bit of bread, and bickered familiarly with a young man who came to sit next to him. By the time they were all belted up and ready for roll call, the kitchen had become incredibly noisy. And what masters of swearing they are! Such elaborate oaths, artistic, even. They turned bad language into a science of abuse.102
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