I cannot help quoting two incidents in Dostoievsky’s prison life which seem to me to throw light on the characteristics of the people with whom he mixed, and their manner of behaviour; the first is a story of how a young soldier called Sirotkin came to be a convict. Here is the story which Dostoievsky gives us in the man’s own words:
“My mother loved me very much. When I became a recruit, I have since heard, she lay down on her bed and never rose again. As a recruit I found life bitter. The colonel did not like me, and punished me for everything. And what for? I was obedient, orderly, I never drank wine, I never borrowed, and that, Alexander Petrovitch, is a bad business, when a man borrows. All round me were such hard hearts, there was no place where one could have a good cry. Sometimes I would creep into a corner and cry a little there. Once I was standing on guard as a sentry; it was night. The wind was blowing, it was autumn, and so dark you could see nothing. And I was so miserable, so miserable! I took my gun, unscrewed the bayonet, and laid it on the ground; then I pulled off my right boot, put the muzzle of the barrel to my heart, leaned heavily on it and pulled the trigger with my big toe. It was a miss-fire. I examined the gun, cleaned the barrel, put in another cartridge and again pressed it to my breast. Again a miss-fire. I put on my boot again, fixed the bayonet, shouldered my gun, and walked up and down in silence; and I settled that whatever might happen I would get out of being a recruit. Half an hour later the colonel rode by, at the head of the patrol, right past me.
“‘Is that the way to stand on guard?’ he said.
“I took the gun in my hand and speared him with the bayonet right up to the muzzle of the gun. I was severely flogged, and was sent here for life.”
The second story is about a man who “exchanged” his sentence. It happened thus: A party of exiles were going to Siberia. Some were going to prison, some were merely exiled; some were going to work in factories, but all were going together. They stopped somewhere on the way in the Government of Perm. Among these exiles there was a man called Mikhailov, who was condemned to a life sentence for murder. He was a cunning fellow, and made up his mind to exchange his sentence. He comes across a simple fellow called Shushilov, who was merely condemned to a few years’ transportation, that is to say, he had to live in Siberia and not in European Russia for a few years. This latter man was naïve, ignorant, and, moreover, had no money of his own. Mikhailov made friends with him and finally made him drunk, and then proposed to him an exchange of sentences. Mikhailov said: “It is true that I am going to prison, but I am going to some special department,” which he explained was a particular favour, as it was a kind of first class. Shushilov, under the influence of drink, and being simple-minded, was full of gratitude for the offer, and Mikhailov taking advantage of his simplicity bought his name from him for a red shirt and a silver rouble, which he gave him on the spot, before witnesses. On the following day Shushilov spent the silver rouble and sold the red shirt for drink also, but as soon as he became sober again he regretted the bargain. Then Mikhailov said to him: “If you regret the bargain give me back my money.” This he could not do; it was impossible for him to raise a rouble. At the next étape at which they stopped, when their names were called and the officer called out Mikhailov, Shushilov answered and Mikhailov answered to Shushilov’s name, and the result was that when they left Tobolsk, Mikhailov was sent somewhere to spend a few years in exile, and Shushilov became a “lifer”; and the special department which the other man talked of as a kind of superior class, turned out to be the department reserved for the most desperate criminals of all, those who had no chance of ever leaving prison, and who were most strictly watched and guarded. It was no good complaining; there was no means of rectifying the mistake. There were no witnesses. Had there been witnesses they would have perjured themselves. And so Shushilov, who had done nothing at all, received the severest sentence the Russian Government had power to inflict, whereas the other man, a desperate criminal, merely enjoyed a few years’ change of air in the country. The most remarkable thing about this story is this: Dostoievsky tells us that the convicts despised Shushilov, not because he had exchanged his sentence, but because he had made so bad a bargain, and had only got a red shirt and a silver rouble. Had he exchanged it for two or three shirts and two or three roubles, they would have thought it quite natural.
The whole book is crammed with such stories, each one of which throws a flood of light on the character of the Russian people.
These Letters from a Dead House are translated into French, and a good English translation of them by Marie von Thilo was published by Messrs. Longmans in 1881. But it is now, I believe, out of print. Yet if there is one foreign book in the whole world which deserves to be well known, it is this one. Not only because it throws more light on the Russian people than any other book which has ever been written, but also because it tells in the simplest possible way illuminating things about prisoners and prison life. It is a book which should be read by all legislators; it is true that the prison life it describes is now obsolete. It deals with convict life in the fifties, when everything was far more antiquated, brutal and severe than it is now. Yet although prisoners had to run the gauntlet between a regiment of soldiers, and were sometimes beaten nearly to death, in spite of the squalor of the prison and in spite of the dreariness and anguish inseparable from their lives, the life of the prisoners stands out in a positively favourable contrast to that which is led by our convicts in what Mr. Chesterton calls our “clean and cruel prisons,” where our prisoners pick oakum to-day in “separate” confinement. The proof of this is that Dostoievsky was able to write one of the most beautiful studies of human nature that have ever been written out of his prison experience. In the first place, the prisoners enjoyed human fellowship. They all had tobacco; they played cards; they could receive alms, and, though this was more difficult, they could get wine. There were no rules forbidding them to speak. Each prisoner had an occupation of his own, a hobby, a trade, in which he occupied all his leisure time. Had it not been for this, Dostoievsky says, the prisoners would have gone mad. One wonders what they would think of an English prison, where the prisoners are not even allowed to speak to each other. Such a régime was and is and probably always will be perfectly unthinkable to a Russian mind. Indeed this point reminds me of a startling phrase of a Russian revolutionary, who had experiences of Russian prisons. He was a member of the second Russian Duma; he had spent many years in prison in Russia. In the winter of 1906 there was a socialistic conference in London which he attended. When he returned to Russia he was asked by his fellow-politicians to lecture on the liberty of English institutions. He refused to do so. “A Russian,” he said, “is freer in prison than an Englishman is at large.”
The secret of the merit of this extraordinary book is also the secret of the unique quality which we find in all Dostoievsky’s fiction. It is this: Dostoievsky faces the truth; he faces what is bad, what is worst, what is most revolting in human nature; he does not put on blinkers and deny the existence of evil, like many English writers, and he does not, like Zola, indulge in filthy analysis and erect out of his beastly investigations a pseudo-scientific theory based on the belief that all human nature is wholly bad. Dostoievsky analyses, not in order to experiment on the patient and to satisfy his own curiosity, but in order to cure and to comfort him. And having faced the evil and recognised it, he proceeds to unearth the good from underneath it; and he accepts the whole because of the good, and gives thanks for it. He finds God’s image in the worst of the criminals, and shows it to us, and for that reason this book is one of the most important books ever written. Terrible as it is, and sad as it is, no one can read it without feeling better and stronger and more hopeful. For Dostoievsky proves to us—so far from complaining of his lot—that life in the Dead House is not only worth living, but full of unsuspected and unexplored riches, rare pearls of goodness, shining gems of kindness, and secret springs of pity. He leaves prison with something like regret, and he regards his four years’ experience there as a special boon of Providence, the captain jewel of his life. He goes out saved for ever from despair, and full of that wisdom more precious than rubies which is to be found in the hearts of children.
V
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment was published in 1866. It is a book which brought Dostoievsky fame and popularity, and by which, in Europe at any rate, he is still best known. It is the greatest tragedy about a murderer that has been written since Macbeth.