The vodka seller was in his glory at Christmas time, when there were great festivities and a drunken orgy was in progress with the tacit permission of the authorities. Gazin kept sober until toward the end of the celebration. He stood by the side of his camp bedstead, beneath which he had concealed his store of drink, after bringing it from his customary hiding place deep buried under the snow in the barrack yard. “He smiled knowingly when he saw his customers arrive in crowds. He drank nothing himself; he waited for that till the last day when he had emptied the pockets of his comrades,” who degenerated into the wildest excesses, singing, laughing and crying by turns, patrolling the barrack room in bands, and striking the strings of their balalaiki or native guitars.
To drink to excess was the chief way to find an outlet for rejoicing; it was also the means of deadening the hideous anticipation of acute and inevitable pain. A convict sentenced to be flogged invariably contrived to swallow the largest possible dose of spirits beforehand, often a long time ahead and at a fabulous price. A certain conviction prevailed that a drunken man suffered less from the plet or “the stick” than a sober one in the full possession of his faculties. In one case, an ex-soldier awaiting punishment infused a quantity of snuff into a bottle of vodka and drank it off at once. He was seized with violent convulsions, vomited blood, and was taken to hospital unconscious. His lungs had been hopelessly affected, phthisis declared itself and he soon died of consumption.
CHAPTER V
LIFE IN THE OSTROG
The hospital life at Omsk—Humanity of the prison doctors—Tender treatment for victims of the lash—Sympathy shown to one another by convicts—The prison bath—Different classes of criminals—The murderer Petrov—Sirotkin; his history—Luka Kuzmich, the murderer of six men—The “old believer” from Little Russia—Ali, the young Tartar—Two brigands—The Jew, Isaiah Fomich; the prison usurer—The festival of Christmas—Gifts of food and drink sent in from the town—Prison theatricals—Convicts’ pets—Tanning and skin dressing carried on by the convicts—Dostoyevski’s release.
The one bright spot in the ostrog was the hospital. It was no part, however, of the prison proper. The convicts when sick were lodged in a couple of wards in the military hospital, which stood outside the fortress at a distance of five or six hundred yards. It was a large building of one story, painted yellow, spacious and well managed. Dostoyevski bears witness to the humanity and good feeling of the prison doctors, who made no distinction between the convicts and those who had never come under the ban of the law. In Russia the common people alone vie with the doctors in showing compassion for prisoners, whom they never reproach with their misdeeds, satisfied that they are suffering sufficiently in working out the sentences imposed upon them. The convicts were grateful for the kindness shown them, and were in the habit of saying that the doctors were like fathers to them and that they could not praise them too highly. This was also the common attitude of the peasantry toward the doctors, who in Russia generally enjoy the affection and respect of the people, although the latter would often prefer to take the empirical remedies of some old witch than go into a hospital and be treated with regular medicine, being influenced by the fantastic stories currently reported of the horrors perpetrated in hospitals. These fears vanish when they have once made acquaintance with the doctors and their humane and compassionate methods of practice. Personal prejudices disappear with personal knowledge.
The prison doctors were careful and attentive to their patients, questioning them minutely about their ailments, diagnosing anxiously and prescribing the necessary remedies with judgment and much medical skill. They were quick to detect imposture and malingering, but were not too hard upon the pretended invalids, whom they could forgive for seeking the ease and comfort of the hospital with its warm lodging, its bed with a mattress and the more palatable food. They had a scientific name for feigned disease, which they styled febris catharalis, a formula quite understood, and an imaginary malady required a week’s treatment. But they drew the line at last, and refused to be further imposed upon. If any one seemed disposed to linger on in hospital, the doctor would say plainly, “Come, come, you have had your rest, you must go out now and take no more liberties.”
One case of persistent malingering must be quoted. It was of a class not unknown in western prisons. A convict long suffered from a seemingly incurable disease of the eyes for which no treatment availed, although plasters, blisters, and leeches were tried. This particular prisoner was under sentence to receive a thousand lashes, and he was eager to postpone the punishment as long as possible. The most desperate devices have been tried for this purpose, sometimes even a murderous attack upon an officer or comrade, which would entail a fresh trial and an additional penalty, but which would also delay the flogging. The man with the sore eyes had some secret method of aggravating the disease which was never discovered, but its use was eventually checked by another operation applied to the back of the patient’s neck. The skin was taken up into the form of a blister, into which a double incision was made, one on each side and a thick thread of cotton was passed through the wound. Every day at a certain hour the thread was pulled backward and forward so that the wound would suppurate and never heal. The torture of this was intolerable, and to escape the continual suffering the convict volunteered to leave the hospital. Almost immediately after he went out, his eyes became well and as soon as the neck was healed he underwent his corporal punishment.
It was a painful moment for the hospital when the victim of a severe flogging was brought in fresh from the lash. He was received with grave composure and a respect proportioned to the enormity of his offence and the amount of punishment it had entailed. Those who had suffered most cruelly were thought more of than the mere deserter guilty of a minor military crime. If the patient were too much injured to attend to himself, he received even more sympathy. The surgeons knew they were leaving him in kindly and experienced hands. The treatment of the poor back, all scored and mangled, was extremely simple: the constant application of a piece of linen steeped in cold water. A very delicate operation inflicting acute torture was the picking out from the lacerated wounds the scraps and fragments of the twigs when the flogging had been performed by rods. Yet the sufferers usually exhibited extraordinary stoicism. Dostoyevski says: “I have seen many convicts who had been whipped cruelly. I do not remember one who uttered a groan. Only after such an experience the countenance becomes pale and discomposed, the eyes glitter, the look wanders and the lips tremble so that the patient sometimes bites them till they bleed.”
Quoting further and speaking of one man just flogged, the same writer says: “He was only twenty years old. He had been a soldier and was rather a fine man, tall and well-made, with a bronzed skin. His back, uncovered down to the waist, had been seriously beaten and his body trembled with fever beneath the damp sheet applied to his bleeding sores. For the first half hour he walked up and down the room in agony. I looked in his face; he seemed to be thinking of nothing, his eyes had a strange expression at once wild and timid; they fixed themselves with difficulty upon surrounding objects. He stared at the hot tea I had before me steaming in its cup. I offered it to the poor creature who stood there shivering, with chattering teeth, and he drank it down at one gulp, without looking at me or making a sign, then put the cup down silently and resumed his walk. His pain was too intense for words or thanks. No one questioned him or spoke; the other prisoners attended to the changing of the cold compresses, thinking rightly that he would prefer that to outspoken compassion, and the sufferer seemed satisfied and grateful to be left severely alone.”
That the convicts, even the most criminal and degraded, were not quite heartless or insensible to the finer feelings, was to be seen in their demeanour when a sick comrade died in hospital. The passing away of one poor victim of consumption is told with infinite pathos and much painful realism. Toward the end he became almost unconscious, his sight was confused, he recognised no one and was evidently suffering acutely. His respiration was painful, deep and irregular; his breast rose and fell convulsively as he struggled for breath, and he cast off his bedding as an intolerable burden. When exposed, it was terrible to see his immensely long body—with fleshless arms and legs, and ribs as clearly marked as a skeleton’s—which was absolutely naked but for the cross pendent from his neck and his leg irons. As his last moment approached, a death-like stillness prevailed, no one spoke or only in whispers. The convicts stepped on tiptoe across the floor, gazing furtively at the dying man, who caught with trembling hand at the cross, which seemed to be suffocating him, and tried to tear it off; the rattling in his throat grew more and more pronounced, and at last he died.