Dostoevsky (43 page)

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

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.