Dostoevsky (37 page)

¹⁰
N. F. Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
(Moscow, 1971), 265.

¹¹
Ibid., 271–274.

¹²
Biografiya
, 90.

¹³
Evgrafova,
Proizvedeniya Petrashevtsev
, 503–504.

¹⁴
DVS
, 1: 172.

¹⁵
Ibid.

¹⁶
Cited by A. S. Dolinin, “Dostoevsky sredi Petrashevtsev,”
Zvenya
6 (Moscow–Leningrad, 1936), 533.

¹⁷
Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
, 129.

¹⁸
Schegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 3: 124.

¹⁹
“A Soldier’s Conversation” is reprinted in V. R. Leikina, E. A. Korolchuk, and V. A. Desnitsky, eds.,
Delo Petrashevtsev
, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1937–1951), 3: 233–237.

²⁰
Ibid., 250.

²¹
Schegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 3: 200.

²²
E. M. Feoktistov,
Vospominaniya
(Leningrad, 1929), 164; cited in V. R. Leikina-Svirskaya, “Revolutionaya praktika Petrashevtsev,”
Istoricheskie Zapiski
47 (1954), 210–211. Feoktistov, later a powerful bureaucrat, was one of the students to whom Pleshcheev spoke.

²³
Cited in D. O. Evans,
Social Romanticism in France
, 1830–1848 (Oxford, 1951), 39.

²⁴
Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
, 141.

²⁵
Schegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 3: 385. For the documents and other relevant references, see “Sledstvennoe delo M. M. Dostoevskogo—Petrashevtsa,” in
Dostoevsky: materialy i issledovaniya
, ed. G. M. Fridlender, 1: 254–265.

²⁶
Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
, 144.

²⁷
Biografiya
, 90.

²⁸
Leikina et al.,
Delo Petrashevtsev
, 426.

²⁹
Ibid., 427.

³⁰
Ibid., 435.

³¹
Schegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 3: 201.

³²
Both are cited in V. G. Belinsky,
Selected Philosophical Works
(Moscow, 1948), 529.

³³
Ibid., 506.

³⁴
Ibid., 506–507.

³⁵
Ibid., 504.

³⁶
Leikina et al.,
Delo Petrashevtsev
, 3: 435.

³⁷
Ibid., 436.

³⁸
Quoted in V. I. Cheshikhin,
T. N. Granovsky i ego vremya
(St. Petersburg, 1905), 317.

³⁹
DVS
, 1: 193.

“The whole city,” wrote Senator K. N. Lebedev in his diary, “is preoccupied with the detention of some young people (Petrashevsky, Golovinsky, Dostoevsky, Palm, Lamansky, Grigoryev, Mikhailov, and many others), who, it is said, reach the number of 60, and this number will no doubt increase with the uncovering of links with Moscow and other cities.”
¹
Senator Lebedev, who was well connected and personally acquainted with some of the young men under arrest, spoke to I. P. Liprandi, a seasoned official in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, “about our child-conspirators,” and received one reply: “The affair, in his opinion, is exceedingly important, and should terminate with capital punishment.”
²

At the notorious headquarters of the Third Section, close to the Summer Gardens, Dostoevsky found a good deal of bustle and stir: “light-blue gentlemen kept on arriving uninterruptedly with various victims.”
³
The prisoners clustered around the official checking the identity of those brought in and could see, marked on the documents he was consulting, the name of the secret agent—P. D. Antonelli. Someone whispered in Dostoevsky’s ear, using a peasant idiom, “Here, grandmother, is your St. George’s Day.”
⁴
April 23 was the spring St. George’s Day in the Russian calendar of saints, but this folk expression was peculiarly appropriate in a deeper sense. It has been traced back to the decree of Boris Godunov in 1597 that abolished the right of peasants to change masters on the fall St. George’s Day.
⁵
This was the effective beginning in Russian history of the total enslavement of the peasantry; and the idiom enshrines in folk speech the woebegone reaction of the Russian people to their loss of any liberty. The arrested Petrashevtsy were now indeed in “a fine fix” for having wished to make permanent the emancipation once enjoyed by the Russian peasant only on St. George’s Day in the fall.

Dostoevsky’s consternation was only heightened when he saw his younger brother, Andrey, brought in among other prisoners.
⁶
All spent the first day,
April 23, scattered through various rooms of the headquarters of the Third Section. At midday, Count A. I. Orlov, the head of the secret police, made the rounds of his “guests” and favored them with a little speech. Those assembled had unfortunately not known how to use the rights and freedoms accorded to them as Russian citizens, and their behavior had forced the government to deprive them of the said freedoms. After investigation of their crimes they would be judged, and the final decision as to their lot would depend on the mercy of the tsar. No accusations were made or other information offered; nor were the prisoners allowed to converse with each other.

10. The Peter-and-Paul Fortress

At about eleven in the evening, each name was called, and one by one the prisoners were taken by carriage to the ill-famed Peter-and-Paul Fortress. Built on an island in the Neva, this formidable citadel had been one of the first buildings to rise in the new city of Sankt Pieter Burkh. Here Peter the Great installed his headquarters while a vast army of serf laborers toiled and died to realize his vaulting dream of a great modern metropolis arising in the midst of the Finnish swamps, and for a few years this miniscule tuft of land became the effective capital of the Russian Empire. Deciding that the island would continue to serve as the bastion of the royal house of the Romanovs and the final resting place of its members, Peter ordered his Swiss-Italian architect, Trezzini, to erect a cathedral within the fortress grounds. Soon a Baroque church began to rise on the spot—a church whose tall and elegant bell tower, crowned with a golden cupola and spire, could be seen from every part of the city.

Less conspicuous but no less essential was a small maximum-security prison within the fortress complex, which Peter used for the seclusion, torture, and, finally, execution of his son, the Tsarevich Ivan. Later tsars also found it convenient
for the detention of highly placed personages who had incurred the royal displeasure. It was here that Catherine the Great, before shipping him off to Siberia, had imprisoned Alexander Radishchev, who had dared to expose the horrors of serfdom in his
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow
. It was here that the Decembrists had languished after their bungled uprising, while each awaited his turn to be taken to the Winter Palace and personally interrogated by the tsar. The prison very early acquired an evil reputation, and its ill repute only increased with time. No one had ever escaped over its wall, and it was reserved for inmates whose misdeeds were considered a danger to the state.

Even though Dostoevsky did not leave any description of the physical conditions of his incarceration, the memoirs of Andrey, as well as those of other prisoners, allow us to reconstruct them. The cells were ample for one person; most had vaulted ceilings, and all had windows (behind an iron grill) whose glass was smeared over, except at the very top, with a paste that allowed only a diffuse light to filter through. At night, each cell was lit by a small oil lamp, set high on the wall in a window embrasure, whose cotton wick often sputtered and fumed instead of giving off light. The lamp in Andrey’s cell smoked so much that it stung his eyes, but when, during his first night, he made a motion to snuff it out, a voice instantly told him to desist.

All cells had a small judas in the door, and the prisoners were constantly under surveillance by guards walking silently in the corridors. The furniture consisted of a cot, a stove of Dutch tiles, a table, a stool, and, in one corner, what Andrey calls “a necessary piece of furniture,”
⁷
probably a basin and a close-stool. The cot was covered with a straw mattress and a pillow of sacking material without sheets or pillowcase; the only covering was a blanket made of the coarse and heavy woolen cloth used for army overcoats. The walls of Andrey’s cell had recently been scraped to remove the graffiti of previous occupants; other cells still retained traces of the marks made on them by those struggling against apathy and numb dejection.

Most of the accounts of the fortress complain of its dampness, and Andrey writes that “one felt the cold piercing through to the very bones. I never took off the warm overcoat in which I slept.”
⁸
Other prisoners were not so appreciative of the prison garb they were forced to wear. “Cold shivers run all through me,” writes the gently nurtured P. A. Kuzmin, an officer of the General Staff, “when I remember the sensation I felt in putting on my convict’s clothes”—made of the roughest material and stained by previous usage—whose contact with his flesh filled him with uncontrollable repulsion.
⁹
Besides the cold, Andrey was also bothered by the appearance of good-sized rats the moment darkness came on, and he slept only during the daytime for fear of being attacked.

Andrey’s cell was in the Zotov bastion, more dilapidated than other sections of the prison. For he recalled the commandant of the fortress, General I. A. Nabokov (the great-great-uncle of the author of
Lolita
), looking round him with distaste on his first visit and muttering, “Yes, it’s bad here, very bad, and we’ve got to hurry”—meaning to build new quarters for prisoners.
¹⁰
Dostoevsky was placed in the Alekseevsky Ravelin, which was reserved for the most important prisoners. We may assume that his living conditions were much the same as those that I. F. Jastrzembski praises (“all the hygienic conditions there were satisfactory; fresh air, cleanliness, good food, etc., everything was fine”)
¹¹
and superior to those afforded his brother. Those prisoners who had a little money could have tea brought to them twice a day and could buy cigars, cigarettes, and tobacco. But “no book, not a sheet of paper,” writes Andrey, “was allowed. One could only dream and mull over what might lie ahead.”
¹²

Most trying for the imprisoned was the silence, the isolation, and the sense of being continually under secret observation. “The very thought that I was being held
au secret
,” writes Jastrzembski, “brought on nervous attacks, fainting, and palpitations of the heart.”
¹³
Akhsharumov, who could hear deep sighs, and sometimes the sound of weeping, from neighboring cells and from the corridor, remarked that these, along with “the silence, the stuffy air, total inactivity . . . exercised a dispiriting effect, which took away courage.”
¹⁴
Petrashevsky complained that he was being tortured and deprived of sleep by mysterious tappings on the wall and by whispering voices also coming from the wall, which disconcertingly substituted themselves for his own thoughts.

The Commission of Inquiry was headed by General Nabokov and included General P. P. Gagarin, Count V. A. Dolgorukov, General Ya. I. Rostovtsev, and General Dubelt. When it became clear to the commission that the young student Andrey Dostoevsky had been arrested by error, the other members were willing to allow him to languish in his cell until the formalities for his release had been completed, but Nabokov protested and installed Andrey in his own quarters. Both Feodor Dostoevsky and Durov spoke to Milyukov “with particular warmth . . . of the commandant [Nabokov], who had continually concerned himself with them and, so far as he could, eased their condition.”
¹⁵