Dostoevsky (46 page)

To make matters worse, he was “cunning and clever, good-looking, even rather well educated.” What made Aristov’s presence literally intolerable for Dostoevsky was his manner of glorying in his own infamy: “And how revolting it was to me to look on his everlasting mocking smile! He was a monster; a moral Quasimodo” (4: 63). And just as Dostoevsky did not forget Ilyinsky, so too Aristov remained an ineradicable memory. The first references in Dostoevsky’s notebooks to the character of Svidrigailov, the cynically derisive aristocratic
debauchee in
Crime and Punishment
, are entered under the name of Aristov.
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More immediately, Dostoevsky held Aristov responsible for deepening the crisis of values brought on by prison-camp life. “He poisoned my first days in prison,” Dostoevsky explains, “and made them even more miserable. I was terrified at the awful baseness and degradation into which I had been cast. . . . I imagined that everything here was as base and degraded. But I was mistaken, I judged all by A” (4: 64).

Indeed, Dostoevsky looked on the peasant convicts as simply cruder replicas of Aristov; having lost any sense of the distinction between good and evil, they seemed to belong to another species. Another appalling individual was a bandit chief named Orlov, about whom Dostoevsky had heard “marvelous stories” before he turned up in the army hospital during one of Dostoevsky’s stays. Orlov “was a criminal such as there are few, who had murdered old people and children in cold blood—a man of terrible strength of will and proud consciousness of his strength.” Far from having lost his humanity, like Aristov, because of subjugation by the lusts of the flesh, Orlov for Dostoevsky was “unmistakably the case of a complete triumph over the flesh. It was evident that the man’s power of control was unlimited, that he despised every sort of punishment and torture, and was afraid of nothing in the world.” He was, clearly, a person of extraordinary self-possession, and Dostoevsky notes being “struck by his strange haughtiness. He looked down on everything with incredible disdain, though he made no effort to maintain his lofty attitude—it was somehow natural” (4: 47).

Tremendously excited by
House of the Dead
when he first came across it, Nietzsche could well have seen Orlov as one of the incarnations of his Superman, and what Dostoevsky tells us of his own conversations with the famous brigand remarkably anticipates the Nietzschean distinction between master and slave morality.
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For when Dostoevsky began to question Orlov about his “adventures,” the latter became aware that his interlocutor “was trying to get at his conscience and to discover some sign of penitence in him.” Orlov’s only response was to glance at Dostoevsky “with great contempt and haughtiness, as though I had suddenly in his eyes become a foolish little boy, with whom it was impossible to discuss things as you would with a grown-up person. There was even a sort of pity for me to be seen on his face. A moment later he burst out laughing at me, a perfectly open-hearted laugh free from any hint of irony.” Dostoevsky concludes that “he could not really help despising me, and must
have looked upon me as a weak, pitiful, submissive creature, inferior to him in every respect” (4: 48). It is impossible to read these words without thinking of Raskolnikov’s impassioned dialectic in
Crime and Punishment
, which, although nourished by ideologies that had not yet made their appearance on the Russian social-cultural scene, certainly draws much of its vitality from such a recollection. And Raskolnikov may well be seen as a conscience-stricken member of the intelligentsia—exactly like Dostoevsky himself at this moment—who had tried to whip himself up into behaving like an Orlov, but who ultimately finds it morally impossible to sustain the awful consequences of his deeds.

The Omsk stockade also contained eight Polish nobles, all sent to Siberia for having participated in plots to gain independence for their homeland from the Russian crown. Few other inmates of the
House of the Dead
are described in the laudatory terms that Dostoevsky lavishes on the Polish prisoners with whom he became friendly. “I never ceased to love him,” Dostoevsky says of B. (Joszef Boguslawski), and these words stand out as a sudden splotch of radiant color in the surrounding darkness. It was largely disagreements over politics that led to their rift with Dostoevsky, for they refused to tolerate the virulent Russian nationalism that Dostoevsky displayed when the talk turned, as it obviously did, to the sacred cause for which the Polish prisoners were suffering their cruel punishment. Tokarzewski records, “How painful it was to listen to this conspirator, this man sentenced to prison for the cause of freedom and progress, when he confessed that he would be happy only when all the nations would fall under Russian rule. . . . He affirmed that [Ukraine, Volynia, Podolia, Lithuania, and Poland] had forever been the property of Russia; that the divine hand of justice had put these provinces and countries under the scepter of the Russian tsar because they would [otherwise] have remained in a state of dark illiteracy, barbarism, and abject poverty. . . . Listening to these arguments we acquired the conviction that Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was affected by insanity.”
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Dostoevsky keeps silent about such political arguments in
House of the Dead
because of censorship, but he writes that he was greatly upset by the Polish abhorrence of the Russian peasant convicts, whom they looked down on with supreme contempt. “They . . . were elaborately, offensively polite and exceedingly uncommunicative with them. They never could conceal from the convicts their aversion for them, and the latter saw it very clearly and paid the Poles back in the same coin” (4: 26). Tokarzewski relates how he first entered the barracks where Dostoevsky was to join him later: “And these shapes of men or of the damned approached us and extended their hands, hands so many times covered with blood, so many times soiled by offense and crime. . . . I pulled away my
hand and, pushing everyone aside, I entered the barracks with my head held proudly aloft.”
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Such was the Polish attitude, and Dostoevsky would have had to be considerably more obtuse than he was not to have realized that it resembled his very own. Yet the intensely patriotic Dostoevsky soon found himself defending his country, and presumably the majority of its inhabitants, against the only educated people in the prison camp whom he personally liked and who had helped to relieve his numbing loneliness. But how could he argue on behalf of Russia without overcoming his violent repugnance for that portion of the Russian people existing all around him in flesh and blood? His disputes with the Polish exiles only intensified his inner crisis—the crisis initially caused by the destruction of his humanitarian faith in the people—to an unbearable pitch of psychic malaise. Nothing was more emotionally necessary for Dostoevsky than to find some way of reconciling his ineradicable love for his native land with his violently negative reactions to the loathsome denizens of the camp.

In the article entitled “The Peasant Marey,” Dostoevsky supplies the missing pages from his prison memoirs that help to pierce the enigma of “the regeneration of [his] convictions.” To counter the disillusion created by a previous article in
Diary of a Writer
in which he had depicted the people as “coarse and ignorant, addicted to drunkenness and debauch,” and as “barbarians awaiting the light,” he dredges up from memory an incident in the prison camp that had once rescued him from despair under the weight of the same disillusioning impressions.

The incident that Dostoevsky describes took place during “the second day of Easter Week”
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and was motivated by his memory of the peasant Marey, one of his father’s serfs whom he had known as a boy. During Lent the prisoners, relieved of work for one week, went to church two or three times a day. “I very much liked the week of the preparation for the sacrament,” Dostoevsky confirms in
House of the Dead
. “The Lenten service so familiar to me from the faraway days of my childhood in my father’s house, the solemn prayers, the prostrations—all this stirred in my heart the far, far-away past, bringing back the days of my childhood.” The convicts stood at the back of the church, as the peasants had done in Dostoevsky’s youth, and he remembered how he, from his privileged position, had once watched them “slavishly parting to make way for a thickly epauletted officer, a stout gentleman, or an overdressed but pious lady. . . . I used to fancy then that at the church door they did not pray as we
did, but they prayed humbly, zealously, abasing themselves and fully conscious of their humble state” (4: 176).

The Easter preparations thus naturally evoked memories of the days when his faith had been untroubled—and of his sense even then that the peasants were more truly Christian in their devotions than the arrogant ruling class. “The convicts prayed very earnestly and every one of them brought his poor farthing to the church every time to buy a candle, or to put it in the collection. ‘I, too, am a man,’ he thought, and felt perhaps as he gave it, ‘in God’s eyes we are all equal.’ We took the sacrament at the early mass. When with the chalice in his hands the priest read the words ‘accept me, O Lord, even as the thief,’ almost all of them bowed down to the ground with the clanking of chains, apparently applying the words literally to themselves” (4: 177). Such impressions certainly began to weaken Dostoevsky’s notion that the convicts were so many cruder replicas of Aristov; nor should we overlook the possible effects of the Orthodox Easter service itself, which, in celebrating the central mystery of the resurrection of Christ, places strong emphasis on the brotherly love and mutual forgiveness that should unite all the faithful in joy at the miraculous event.

By the second day of Easter week, then, Dostoevsky had gone through a long period in which his most exalted feelings had repeatedly been aroused, and it was thus all the more infuriating to witness the appalling spectacle that he saw all around him. “It was the second day of the ‘holiday’ in the camp; the prisoners were not taken out to work, many were drunk, cursing and quarreling flared up from one moment to the next on every side. Ugly, filthy songs; gambling groups squatting underneath the plank bed; convicts beaten half to death, by common consent, because of having been too rowdy, and lying on the plank bed covered with sheepskins until they revive and wake up; knives already drawn several times—all this, on the second day of the holiday, tormented me to the point of illness.”
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What finally impelled him “to run out of [the barracks] like a madman” was that “six robust peasants, all together, threw themselves on the drunken Tartar Gazin, in order to subdue him; they beat him furiously—a camel could have been killed with such blows, but they knew that it was difficult to kill this Hercules, so they beat him without fear.”
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Unable to bear this horrifying sight a moment longer, Dostoevsky rushed outside into the bright, sunlit day, the blue sky radiant overhead. He began to walk, as he often did, in the open space between the stockade and the buildings; but the beauty of the day could not calm the indignation raging in his breast. “Finally,” he recalls, “my heart was inflamed with rancor”; and just at this instant he happened to meet one of the Polish prisoners, Mirecki, strolling in the same
isolated walkway and evidently for the same reasons. “He looked at me gloomily, his eyes flashed and his lips began to tremble: ‘
Je hais ces brigands
[I hate those bandits]!’—he muttered through his clenched teeth, in a half-strangled voice, and passed by.”
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The effect of these words was to make Dostoevsky abruptly turn on his heel and go back to the barracks. Mirecki had voiced the very poisonous thoughts, had exhibited the same anger seething within Dostoevsky himself; and this had given him a terrible jolt. It raised to the surface the extent of his alignment with the Poles against his fellow Russians; and he returned to the barracks as a gesture of solidarity with his countrymen. All the same, still finding it impossible to support the sight of the pandemonium indoors, Dostoevsky lay down on his few inches of plank bed and pretended to be asleep. “But now I could not dream: my heart was beating agitatedly, and I could hear Mirecki’s words ringing in my ears: ‘
Je hais ces brigands!
’ ”
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The severity of his inner conflict was reaching a peak; this was why he found it so difficult to blot out the present, as he had so often been accustomed to do, and allow his subconscious to wander freely in the past via involuntary associations. “I used to analyze these impressions, adding new touches to things long ago outlived, and—what is more important—I used to correct, continually to correct them.”
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What emerged now was the memory of an incident of his childhood—a period of his life just revived in his subconscious by the Easter preparations and ceremonies. And the experience had involved the same emotions of shock, fright, and fear that had been aroused by the prison-camp orgy. Wandering through the forest one day on his father’s scruffy little “estate,” the nine-year-old Dostoevsky suddenly thought he heard a shout that a wolf was roaming in the vicinity. The wood was criss-crossed with ravines, in which wolves sometimes appeared, and Dostoevsky’s mother had warned him to be careful. The frightened boy ran out of the wood and toward a peasant plowing in a nearby field, one of his father’s serfs, whom he knew only as “Marey.” The surprised Marey halted work to soothe the white-faced and trembling child, and assured him that no one had shouted and no wolf was near. Dostoevsky recalled Marey smiling at him gently “like a mother,” blessing him with the sign of the cross and crossing himself, and then sending him home with the reassurance that he would be kept in sight. “All this came back suddenly, I do not know why,” Dostoevsky writes, “with surprising clarity and in full detail. I suddenly opened my eyes, straightened up on the plank bed and, I recall, my face still retained its gentle smile of recollection.”
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