Dostoevsky (45 page)

One of the first things that Dostoevsky was told, by a prisoner who had once been an army officer, was that the peasant convicts “do not like the gentlemen,
especially political prisoners, they will eat them alive, and that’s understandable. First of all, you are another breed, different from what they are, and then, they were all serfs or soldiers. Judge for yourself if they can like you” (4: 28). Elsewhere, Dostoevsky remarks that “If I had begun to try and win their good-will by making up to them, being familiar with them . . . they would at once have supposed that I did it out of fear and cowardice and would have treated me with contempt” (4: 77). Dostoevsky did not seek any closer contact with the peasant convicts and decided to remain aloof; but nothing appears to have taken him more by surprise than the discovery of their innate and instinctive hostility.

Like other members of his class, Dostoevsky had probably thought that, while the peasant would certainly strike back at personal injury, he was too primitive and intellectually undeveloped to take any conscious objection to his own status and condition. In a famous article on Peter the Great, which may be considered a manifesto of the ideology of the Russian Westernizers, Belinsky had written in 1841 that “the Russian
muzhik
is still semi-Asiatic. . . . For men in their natural state, apart from satisfying their hunger and similar wants, are incapable of thinking.”
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If Dostoevsky held some such opinion of the
muzhik
, we can understand why the evidence of a certain social-political consciousness among them should have come as such a jolt. What affected him most was the reflection of this self-consciousness in the implacable enmity of the peasant convicts toward the nobles in general, and himself in particular.

“Not one word in our defense!” Dostoevsky observes about the incident in the prison kitchen with Gazin. “Not one shout at Gazin, so intense was their hatred of us!” This is only the first of many occasions when Dostoevsky learned the truth of the words uttered by one of the Polish political prisoners, whom Dostoevsky had naïvely asked why peasant convicts seemed to resent his tea even though many of them were eating their own food. The prison-hardened Polish noble replied, “It is not because of your tea. They are ill-disposed to you because you were once gentlemen and not like them. Many of them would dearly like to insult you, to humiliate you. You will meet with a lot of unpleasantness here” (4: 32).

Such predictions were borne out a few days later, when Dostoevsky was sent on his first assignment with a work party. He found that “everywhere I was pushed aside almost with abuse. The lowest ragamuffin, himself a wretched workman, . . . thought himself entitled to shout at me on the pretext that I hindered him if I stood beside him. At last one of the smarter ones said to me plainly and coarsely: ‘Where are you shoving? Get away! Why do you poke yourself in where you are not wanted!’ ” As a result, Dostoevsky continues, “I had to stand apart, and to stand apart when all are working makes one feel
ashamed. But when it happened that I did walk away and stood at the end of the barge, they shouted at once: ‘Fine workmen they’ve given us; what can one get done with them?’ ” (4: 76). The thin-skinned and excruciatingly vulnerable Dostoevsky, ready to flare up at the slightest pinprick to his self-esteem, was now caught in a nightmare of humiliation from which there was no escape, and which he simply had to learn how to endure.

Over and over again in
House of the Dead
he returns to confirm the heartache inflicted by this relentless class hatred. Indeed, he came to consider, as the most agonizing of all the torments of camp life, this awareness of being eternally ringed by enemies, eternally alienated from the vast majority by a wall of animosity that nothing he could do would ever cause to crumble. An ordinary peasant convict, he explains, “within two hours after his arrival . . . is on the same footing as all the rest, is
at home
, has the same rights in the community as the rest, is understood by everyone, and is looked on by everyone as a comrade. It is very different with
the gentleman
, the man of a different class. However straightforward, good-natured and clever he is, he will for years be hated and despised” (4: 198).

A peasant convict named Petrov, an ex-soldier reputed to be the most dangerous man in prison, was one of the few men of his class to seek an acquaintance with Dostoevsky. He pumped Dostoevsky for all sorts of information—sometimes concerning French politics, sometimes whether the people in the antipodes really walked on their heads. “But,” writes Dostoevsky, “I had the impression that in general he considered me . . . almost as a new-born baby, incapable of understanding the simplest matters. . . . [H]e had decided . . . that outside of books I understood nothing and was even incapable of understanding anything” (4: 86). Dostoevsky was certain that, even when stealing from him, Petrov pitied him because he was not able to defend his own belongings. “He said to me himself one day,” Dostoevsky recalls, “that I was ‘a man with a good heart,’ and ‘so simple, so simple, that it makes one feel sorry for you’ ” (4: 87).

An outside observer portrays Dostoevsky, during the first year in prison camp, as looking like “a wolf in a trap.” “His cap was pulled down over his forehead to his eyebrows; he looked fierce, withdrawn, unfriendly; his head drooped and his eyes remained fixed on the ground.”
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This time of withdrawal marked the beginning of a searching revision of all his earlier ideas and convictions. “In my spiritual solitude,” Dostoevsky writes, “I reviewed all my past life, went over it all to the smallest detail, . . . judged myself sternly and relentlessly, and even sometimes blessed fate for sending me this solitude, without which I would not have judged myself like this, nor viewed my past so sternly” (4: 220). Dostoevsky tells us nothing about the contents of these self-accusatory musings, but some
pages in his prison memoirs hardly can be read except as an Aesopian exposure of his folly as an apprentice revolutionary conspirator.

One day, Dostoevsky noticed that the other convicts had assembled in the courtyard of the prison at an unusual time. He immediately fell in as if for a roll call, but was jeered at and told to leave the group. Hesitating to obey the shouts coming at him from all directions, he was finally taken by the arm and led away to the camp kitchen. There, looking on at the rumpus, were gathered a handful of peasant convicts and all the other gentlemen, who told him that a “complaint” had been organized against Major Krivtsov because of the quality of the food. What had happened then became clear: the peasant convicts had spontaneously and unanimously refused to let a gentleman join their protest.

The complaint was easily crushed by the infuriated major, who ordered some of the protestors to be flogged at random, but the treatment that Dostoevsky had received remained as a rankling and admonitory recollection. “I had never before been so insulted in prison,” he writes, despite all the humiliations inflicted upon him otherwise, “and this time I felt it very bitterly” (4: 203). That very afternoon, he spoke about it to Petrov:

The social-political implications of this interchange finally sank into the consciousness of the erstwhile revolutionary conspirator who had once hoped to stir up a peasant revolution. The notion that peasants would have accepted the leadership of gentlemen in any struggle to obtain freedom, as he now realized, had been the sheerest delusion.

Elsewhere in the book, Petrov is depicted as a natural revolutionary, exactly the type of peasant to whom the Speshnevites had wished to appeal—those who, as Dostoevsky writes, “are the first to surmount the worst obstacles, facing every danger without reflection, without fear” (4: 87). Such a man, as he now became aware, found it impossible to understand how a gentleman could unite with the peasants as a comrade in a social protest. Never again would Dostoevsky believe that the efforts of the radical intelligentsia could have the slightest effect in stirring the broad masses of the Russian people, and history was to prove him right during his lifetime—if not, to be sure, half a century after his death.

The people would never follow the intelligentsia, and their own leaders can only charge ahead on the road to selfdestruction. For such “agitators and ring-leaders . . . are too ardent to be shrewd and calculating; [and] . . . almost always fail, and are sent to prison and penal servitude in consequence” (4: 201). These are surely some of the melancholy conclusions that Dostoevsky began to draw as he judged his own past “sternly and relentlessly.” Everything that his readers believe they know about the peasants, Dostoevsky tells them, is woefully mistaken. “You may have to do with peasants all your life, you may associate with them every day for forty years . . . you will never know them really. It will all be an optical illusion and nothing more. . . . I have reached this conviction . . . from reality, and I have had plenty of time to verify it” (4: 198–199). He could well have recalled, in these moments of self-judgment, the famous concluding lines of Pushkin’s
The Captain’s Daughter
, a novel set in the midst of the bloody Pugachev uprising in the eighteenth century. Pushkin’s words express the point of view to which Dostoevsky had now come around himself: “God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us are either young and do not know our people, or are hardhearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.”
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Dostoevsky’s previous sympathetic attitude toward the peasants in the role of benefactor had now been replaced by a loathing of everything around him, but most of all of his fellow prisoners. “There were moments,” he confesses in a letter to Mme Fonvizina, “when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself—but you just can’t help it.”
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It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of this destruction of Dostoevsky’s humanitarian faith in the prison camp, but Dostoevsky
did
manage to find a way out of his torturing psychic entrapment, and, as we shall see a bit later, he went through an experience exhibiting all the characteristics noted in cases of conversion—whether religious or involving questions of political allegiance.

There were twelve other prisoners of the noble class in the Omsk camp while Dostoevsky was serving his sentence. In addition to Durov, three others were Russian, and what Dostoevsky tells us about them indicates abundantly, if obliquely, why he took so little comfort in their presence. One was an ex-officer
of the Russian Army whom Dostoevsky calls Akim Akimich—a person so conditioned to subordination that obedience with him had become inclination and second nature. He dwelt on the routine of army life with loving devotion, “and all in the same even, decorous voice like the dripping of water.” At times, Dostoevsky admits, “I . . . cursed the fate which had put me with my head next to his own on the common bed” (4: 208–209).

The second convict is referred to only as a “parricide.” His real name was D. I. Ilyinsky, and he is a figure of some importance in Dostoevsky’s career: his history later furnished the novelist with the main plot of
The Brothers Karamazov
, and his personality probably also provided some of the character traits for Dimitry Karamazov. Ilyinsky was an ex-officer convicted (but only on circumstantial evidence) of having killed his father to obtain his inheritance. Always “in the liveliest, merriest spirits,” he steadfastly denied his guilt, and Dostoevsky did not give entire credence to his conviction, remarking that “such savage insensibility seems impossible” (4: 16). Years later, while writing the final draft of his prison book, Dostoevsky learned that Ilyinsky had been released: a criminal had confessed to the murder. So Dostoevsky’s psychological intuition, based solely on his observation of Ilyinsky’s character, had been vindicated.

The third Russian noble, mentioned only by the initial A., was Pavel Aristov, “the most revolting example of the depths to which a man can sink and degenerate, and the extent to which he can destroy all moral feeling in himself without difficulty or repentance” (4: 62). Seventy entirely innocent people had been arrested as a result of Aristov’s denunciations while the latter was engaging in riotous orgies with the money furnished by the Third Section, and he continued turning up more “subversive political conspirators” so long as he was supplied with payment. After a certain period, however, even the Third Section became suspicious, and Aristov was eventually sent to prison camp for embezzlement and false denunciations. There he had ingratiated himself with Major Krivtsov and served as a spy and informer on the peasant convicts. Dostoevsky was literally aghast at encountering in the flesh someone of Aristov’s ilk, who surpassed his most livid fantasies of the evil that a human being could knowingly tolerate and perpetrate. “All the while I was in prison,” he declares, “A. seemed to me a lump of flesh with teeth and a stomach and an insatiable thirst for the most sensual and brutish pleasures” (4: 63).