On the 23d of April, 1849, at five o’clock in the morning, thirty-three persons looked upon as suspicious characters were arrested, the Dostoyevski brothers being among the number. The prisoners were carried to the citadel, and placed in solitary confinement in the gloomy casemates, which were haunted by the most terrible associations. They remained there eight months, with no distractions except the visits of the examining commissioners; finally, they were allowed the use of a few religious books. Feodor Mikhailovitch wrote once to his brother, who had been soon released through the want of sufficient evidence against him: “For five months I have lived upon my own substance; that is, upon my own brain alone…. To think constantly, and receive no outside impression to renew and sustain thought, is wearing…. I was as if placed under a receiver from which all the pure air was extracted….”
On the 22d of December the prisoners were led out, without being informed of the sentence which had been pronounced upon them. There were now only 21, the others having been discharged. They were conducted to a square where a scaffold had been erected. The cold was intense; the criminals were ordered to remove all their clothing, except their shirts, and listen to the reading of the sentence, which would last for a half-hour. When the sheriff began to read, Dostoyevski said to the prisoner next him: “Is it possible that we are going to be executed?” The idea seemed to have occurred to him for the first time. His companion pointed to a cart, loaded with what appeared to be coffins covered over with a cloth. The last words of the sentence were: “They are condemned to death, and are to be shot.”
The sheriff left the scaffold, and a priest mounted upon it with a cross in his hand, and exhorted the prisoners to confess. Only one responded to this exhortation; all the others kissed the cross. Petrachevski and two of the principal conspirators were bound to the pillar. The officer ordered the company of soldiers drawn up for the purpose to charge their weapons. As they were taking aim, a white flag was hoisted in front of them, when the twenty-one prisoners heard that the Emperor had commuted their penalty to exile in Siberia. The leaders were unbound; one of them, Grigoref, was struck with sudden insanity, and never recovered.
Dostoyevski, on the contrary, has often assured me, as if he were really convinced of it, that he should inevitably have gone mad if he had not been removed by this and following disasters from the life he was leading. Before his imprisonment he was beset by imaginary maladies, nervous depression, and “mystic terrors,” which condition would certainly have brought about mental derangement, from which he was only saved by this sudden change in his way of life, and by the necessity of steeling himself against his overwhelming trials,—which may have been true, for it is said that imaginary evils are best cured by real ones; still, I cannot but think that there was some degree of pride in this affirmation.
In each of his books he depicts a scene similar to what he himself experienced, and he has labored to make a perfect psychological study of the condemned prisoner who is about to die. You feel that these pages are the result of a nightmare, proceeding from some hidden recess of the author’s own brain.
The imperial decree, which was less severe for him than for any of the rest, reduced his punishment to four years of hard labor, after which he was to serve as a common soldier, losing his rank among the nobles as well as all civil rights.
The exiled prisoners started immediately in sledges for Siberia. At Tobolsk, after one night passed together, when they bade each other farewell, they were put in irons, their heads shaved, and they were then sent to their several destinations. It was at that temporary prison that they were visited by the wives of the revolutionists of December. These brave women had set a noble example. Belonging to the upper class, and accustomed to a life of luxury, they had renounced everything to follow their exiled husbands into Siberia, and for twenty-five years had haunted the prison gates. Learning now of the arrival of another set of refugees, they came to visit them, warned these young men of what was in store for them, and counselled them how best to support their hardships, offering to each of them all that they had to give, the Gospel.
Dostoyevski accepted his, and throughout the four years always kept it under his pillow. He read it every evening under the lamp in the dormitory, and taught others to read in it. After the hard day’s work, while his companions in chains were restoring their wasted energies in sleep, he obtained from his book a consolation more necessary still for a thinking man, a renewal of moral strength, and a support in bearing his trials. How can we imagine this intellectual man, with his delicate nervous organization, his overweening pride, his sensitive imagination, prone to exaggeration of every dreaded evil, condemned to the companionship of these low wretches in such a monotonous existence, forced to daily labor; and for the slightest negligence, or at the caprice of his keepers, threatened with a flogging by the soldiers! He was inscribed among the worst set of malefactors and political criminals, who were kept under military surveillance.
They were employed in turning a grindstone for marble works, in demolishing old boats on the ice in winter, and other rough and useless labor.
How well he has described the weariness of being forced to labor merely for the sake of being employed, feeling that his task is nothing but a gymnastic exercise. He has also said the severest trial of all, was never being allowed to be alone for a single moment for years. But the greatest torture of all for this writer, now at the height of his powers, incessantly haunted by images and ideas, was the impossibility of writing, of alleviating his lot by absorbing himself in some literary work. But he survived, and was strengthened and purified, and the personal history of this martyr can be read in his “Recollections of a Dead House,”[K] which he wrote after he left the prison. How unjust is literary fame, and what a thing of chance it is! The name and work of Silvio Pellico are known throughout the civilized world. In France the book is one of the classics; and yet there, on the great highway of all fame and of all great thoughts, even the title of this tragic work of Dostoyevski’s was but yesterday quite unknown,—a book as superior to that of the Lombard prisoner, as the tales exceed his in horror.