Dostoevsky (40 page)

Once having ascended the platform, the prisoners were separated again and arranged in two files on each side. Standing beside Mombelli, Dostoevsky quickly and incongruously, in a state of febrile agitation, told him the plan of a story he had written in prison. Suddenly the square resounded with the crisp, metallic sound of soldiers snapping to attention, and the accused were ordered
to remove their headgear while their sentences were being read. Most hesitated to obey the order in the biting cold, and the soldiers standing behind them were ordered to rip off their hats. Another Civil Service official, in full dress uniform, then moved along the line so as to face each man while reading to him the list of his imputed crimes and the punishment. It was impossible, according to Akhsharumov, to catch what he said because he spoke so rapidly and indistinctly. But, during the half-hour or so that he was performing his function, one sentence echoed and re-echoed like the tolling of a funeral bell: “The Field Criminal Court has condemned all to death before a firing squad.”
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As the meaning of these words began to sink in, the sun suddenly appeared again through the clouds, and Dostoevsky, turning to Durov, said, “It’s not possible that we’ll be executed.”
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In reply, Durov gestured to a peasant cart standing beside the scaffolding, in which were piled up, as he mistakenly imagined, coffins covered with straw matting. From that moment, as Dostoevsky recalled, he was convinced that he was doomed, and he could never afterward forget the words thrown out so matter-of-factly: “condemned to death by a firing squad.” After the official finished, the prisoners were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps—their funeral shrouds—and helped into them by their military escort. The same priest, now with Bible as well as cross in hand, appeared on the scaffolding again and uttered the following appeal: “Brothers! Before dying one must repent. . . . The Savior forgives the sins of those who repent. . . . I call you to confession.”
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In 1873, Dostoevsky wrote that many of the Petrashevtsy who heard this entreaty may have been troubled by lapses they wished to confess (“those which every man, throughout his life, conceals in his conscience”). “But that action for which we were being condemned,” writes Dostoevsky, “those thoughts, those ideas, which ruled our souls—they seemed to us not only not to require repentance, but even to be something purifying, a martyrdom for which much could be forgiven!”
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Akhsharumov reports that none of the Petrashevtsy responded to the priest’s repeated call to repent. But if the Petrashevtsy refused to lend themselves to a public act of contrition, they did not exhibit any hostility to the sacred symbol of the Christian faith in which all had been raised. When the priest moved down the row and held up the cross to their lips, they unanimously—including such confirmed atheists as Petrashevsky and Speshnev—kissed it. Much later, in
The Idiot
, Dostoevsky depicted such a scene, and suggested that the kiss, without containing anything specifically “religious,” helped the condemned man to sustain the ordeal.

11. The mock execution of the petrashevsty

What occurred next was the most terrifying of all: the first three men in one of the rows—Petrashevsky, Mombelli, and Grigoryev—were seized by the arm, taken off the platform, and tied to the stakes standing just beside it. In one account—that of F. N. Lvov, which tends to glorify Petrashevsky—the impenitent agitator is supposed to have quipped in going from the platform to the stakes: “Mombelli, lift your legs higher, otherwise you’ll go to the kingdom of heaven with a cold.”
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The order was given to pull the caps of the bound men over their heads, but Petrashevsky defiantly pushed his back and stared straight at a firing squad taking aim. Dostoevsky was among the next three in the row from which the first group had been selected, and he fully expected that his turn would come in a few moments.

What was he feeling at this time? Quite late in life, he told Orest Miller that “he felt only a mystic terror, and was completely dominated by the thought that in perhaps five minutes he would be going to another, unknown life.”
⁵⁷
He describes his emotions in the famous passage from
The Idiot
in which Prince Myshkin tells the Epanchin ladies what he heard from a man who believed he had just five minutes to live before being executed: “His uncertainty and his repulsion
before the unknown, which was going to overtake him immediately, was terrible” (8: 52).
The Idiot
, of course, was written twenty years after the gruesome charade on Semenovsky Square. However Lvov, who stood with him on the scaffold, wrote between 1859 and 1861, “Dostoevsky was quite excited, he recalled
Le dernier jour d’un condamné
of Victor Hugo, and, going up to Speshnev, said: ‘
Nous serons avec le Christ
’ [We shall be with Christ]. ‘
Un peu de poussière
’ [A bit of dust]—the latter answered with a twisted smile.”
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Nothing could better illustrate the difference between Dostoevsky’s tormented and uncertain faith and the stoicism of a confirmed atheist like Speshnev. It is precisely because Dostoevsky could not help believing in some sort of life after death that he was so tormented by its impenetrable mystery.

The suspense of waiting for the firing squad to pull the trigger—Akhsharumov recalls it as having been “terrible, repulsive, frightening”
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—lasted about a minute, and then the roll of the drums was heard beating retreat. Not having served in the army, Akhsharumov did not understand the meaning of the signal and thought it would coincide with a volley from the rifles; the ex-officer Dostoevsky knew immediately that his life had been spared. The next moment the firing squad had lowered their rifles and were no longer taking aim; the three men at the stake were untied and returned to their places. One of them, Grigoryev, was white as a sheet, all the blood having drained from his face; he had already shown signs of mental derangement in prison, and the mock execution ceremony finished him off entirely. Never recovering his senses, he remained a helpless mental invalid for the rest of his days. Meanwhile, an aide-de-camp arrived on the scene at a gallop carrying the tsar’s pardon and the real sentences. These were read to the astonished prisoners, some of whom greeted the news with relief and joy, others with confusion and resentment. The peasant blouses and the nightcaps were taken off, and two men—looking like executioners, and dressed in worn, multicolored caftans—climbed the scaffolding. Their assigned task was to break swords over the heads of the prisoners, who were compelled to kneel for this part of the ceremony; the snapping of the sword signaled exclusion from civilian life, and they were then given convict headgear, soiled sheepskin coats, and boots.

Now outfitted in the garb appropriate to their lowly status, the condemned men were still lacking one essential item—their shackles. These were dumped in the middle of the platform with a grinding crash that made the planking vibrate, but only Petrashevsky was led forward by two blacksmiths, who, fastening the chains on his legs, began to close them with a large hammer. At first standing patiently while the work was going on, Petrashevsky finally seized one of the
heavy hammers and, sitting on the floor, began to rivet the shackles with his own hands. “What impelled him to do violence to himself, what he wished to express in this fashion, is difficult to say,” writes Akhsharumov, “but we were all in an unhealthy frame of mind or in a state of exaltation.”
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Such a scene would have been much more understandable to Dostoevsky, with his intuitive comprehension of masochism as the self-assertion of a personality driven to desperation by helplessness and humiliation. A peasant cart then pulled up with a troika of horses and a gendarme perched beside the driver as an escort, ready to transport Petrashevsky on the first leg of his journey into exile; but he protested that he wished to say good-bye to his friends before departing. Petrashevsky then embraced each in turn and bowed deeply to them all. The unaccustomed weight of his shackles impeded him from climbing into the cart, and he had to be aided before sinking heavily into his seat and being driven away. His sentence provided that he be dispatched to Siberia immediately; the others were to follow in the course of the next several days.

The remaining prisoners were taken back to the fortress in the carriages that had brought them. On returning to his cell, Dostoevsky seized pen and paper to write Mikhail—and this moving letter allows us to grasp the moral-spiritual consequences of the ordeal he had just sustained. It is from this instant that the primarily secular perspective from which Dostoevsky had previously viewed human life sinks to the background, and what comes forward to absorb it are the agonizing “accursed questions” that have always plagued mankind—the questions whose answers can be given, if at all, only by religious faith. Dostoevsky’s novels would later create a remarkable fusion between these two dimensions of human awareness. Indeed, it is this union of uncommon social sensitivity with agonized religious probings that gives his work its properly tragic character and its unique place in the history of the novel.

Poured out in the fever of the moment, Dostoevsky’s letter mingles penetrating glimpses into the recesses of his soul with requests for aid, last-minute instructions, and a sober factual account of what had just occurred. Notable is the deep love it exhibits for his older brother and his family; they were, he assures Mikhail, in his thoughts during his (presumed) last moments, “and only then did I know how much I loved you, my dear brother!”
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The agonizing question of the future preoccupies him, and he oscillates between fear and hope while wondering whether he will ever be able to resume his literary career. “Can it be that I will never again take my pen in hand? I think it will be possible
in four years. . . . My God! How many forms, still alive and created by me anew, will perish, extinguished in my brain or dissolved like poison in my bloodstream. Yes, if it’s impossible to write I will die. Better fifteen years’ imprisonment with pen in hand!” But Dostoevsky clings desperately to the life line provided by service in the army and tells Mikhail, “Don’t grieve over me. Know that I am not downhearted, remember that I have not given up hope. In four years my lot will be easier. I will be a soldier—and that’s different from a convict.”
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What Dostoevsky dreads most is that his health will break down under the physical strain of the trials he is about to face: “Will my body hold out? I don’t know. I am leaving in ill health. I have scrofula. But maybe it will!” Despite such concerns, Dostoevsky assures Mikhail that he has never been in a better emotional state: “Never before have I felt welling up in me such abundant and healthy reserves of spiritual life as I do now.”
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“My life in prison,” he added, “has already sufficiently destroyed in me those fleshly demands that are not entirely pure; I did not spare myself before. Now, deprivation means nothing to me, and this is why I am not afraid that any kind of material hardship will destroy me. . . . Oh, only let me be healthy!”
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“I cannot recall when I was ever as happy as on that day,” Dostoevsky told his second wife many years later. “I walked up and down my cell in the Alekseevsky Ravelin and sang the whole time, sang at the top of my voice, so happy was I at being given back my life.”
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Such happiness overwhelmed Dostoevsky with the impact of a revelation. “But I still have my heart and the same flesh and blood,” he assures Mikhail, “and these too can live, suffer, desire and remember, and that, after all, is also life.
On voit le soleil
!”
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This last phrase (“One sees the sun”) is a slightly altered snatch of Hugo’s
Le dernier jour d’un condamné
, whose details had surged back into Dostoevsky’s memory as he stared death in the face. The citation forms part of the frantic reflections of Hugo’s “condemned man” as he awaits execution by the guillotine and desperately tells himself that life under any conditions is preferable to extinction. At least—
on voit le soleil
!