Chapter VI: Dostoievsky (2)

The ancients called this “the sacred sickness.” Just before the attacks, Dostoievsky felt a kind of rapture, something like what people say they feel when they hear very great music, a perfect harmony between himself and the world, a sensation as if he had reached the edge of a planet, and were falling off it into infinite space. And this feeling was such that for some seconds of the rapture, he said, you might give ten years of your life, or even the whole of it. But after the attack his condition was dreadful, and he could hardly sustain the state of low-spirited dreariness and sensitiveness into which he was plunged. He felt like a criminal, and fancied there hung over him an invisible guilt, a great transgression. He compares both sensations, suddenly combined and blended in a flash, to the famous falling pitcher of Mahomet, which had not time to empty itself while the Prophet on Allah’s steed was girdling heaven and hell. It is no doubt the presence of this disease and the frequency of the attacks, which were responsible for the want of balance in his nature and in his artistic conceptions, just as his grinding poverty and the merciless conditions of his existence are responsible for the want of finish in his style. But Dostoievsky had the qualities of his defects, and it is perhaps owing to his very illness, and to its extraordinary nature, that he was able so deeply to penetrate into the human soul. It is as if the veil of flesh and blood dividing the soul from that which is behind all things, was finer and more transparent in Dostoievsky than in other men: by his very illness he may have been able to discern what is invisible to others. It is certainly owing to the combined poverty and disease which made up his life, that he had such an unexampled insight into the lives and hearts of the humble, the rejected, the despised, the afflicted, and the oppressed. He sounded the utmost depths of human misery, he lived face to face with the lowest representatives of human misfortune and disgrace, and he was neither dispirited nor dismayed. He came to the conclusion that it was all for the best, and like Job in dust and ashes consented to the eternal scheme. And though all his life he was one of the conquered, he never ceased fighting, and never for one moment believed that life was not worth living. On the contrary, he blessed life and made others bless it.

His life was “a long disease,” rendered harder to bear and more difficult by exceptionally cruel circumstances. In spite of this, Dostoievsky was a happy man: he was happy and he was cheerful; and he was happy not because he was a saint, but because, in spite of all his faults, he radiated goodness; because his immense heart overflowed in kindness, and having suffered much himself, he understood the sufferings of others; thus although his books are terrible, and deal with the darkest clouds which can overshadow the human spirit, the descent into hell of the human soul, yet the main impression left by them is not one of gloom but one of comfort. Dostoievsky is, above all things, a healer and a comforter, and this is because the whole of his teaching, his morality, his art, his character, are based on the simple foundation of what the Russians call “dolgoterpjenie,” that is, forbearance, and “smirenie,” that is to say, resignation. In the whole history of the world’s literature there is no literary man’s life which was so arduous and so hard; but Dostoievsky never complained, nor, we can be sure, would he have wished his life to have been otherwise. His life was a martyrdom, but he enjoyed it. Although no one more nearly than he bears witness to Heine’s saying that “where a great spirit is, there is Golgotha,” yet we can say without hesitation that Dostoievsky was a happy man, and he was happy because he never thought about himself, and because, consciously or unconsciously, he relieved and comforted the sufferings of others. And his books continued to do so long after he ceased to live.

All this can be summed up in one word: the value of Dostoievsky’s life. And the whole reason that his books, although they deal with the tragedies of mankind, bring comfort to the reader instead of gloom, hope instead of despair, is, firstly, that Dostoievsky was an altruist, and that he fulfilled the most difficult precept of Christianity--to love others better than oneself; and, secondly, that in leading us down in the lowest depths of tragedy, he shows us that where man ends, God takes up the tale.

IV

_POOR FOLK_ AND THE _LETTERS FROM A DEAD HOUSE_

In his first book, _Poor Folk_, which was published in 1846, we have the germ of all Dostoievsky’s talent and genius. It is true that he accomplished far greater things, but never anything more characteristic. It is the story of a poor official, a minor clerk in a Government office, already aged and worn with cares, who battles against material want. In his sombre and monotonous life there is a ray of light: in another house as poor and as squalid as his own, there lives a girl, a distant relation of his, who is also in hard and humble circumstances, and who has nothing in the world save the affection and friendship of this poor clerk. They write to each other daily. In the man’s letters a discreet unselfishness is revealed, a rare delicacy of feeling, which is in sharp contrast to the awkwardness of his everyday actions and ideas, which verge on the grotesque. At the office, he has to cringe and sacrifice his honour in order not to forfeit the favour of his superiors. He stints himself, and makes every kind of small sacrifice, in order that this woman may be relieved of her privations. He writes to her like a father or brother; but it is easy for us to see in his simple phrases that he is in love with her, although she does not realise it. The character of the woman is equally clear to us: she is superior to him in education and mind, and she is less resigned to her fate than he is. In the course of their correspondence we learn all that is to be known about their past, their melancholy history and the small incidents of their everyday life, the struggle that is continually working in the mind of the clerk between his material want and his desire not to lose his personal honour. This correspondence continues day by day until the crisis comes, and the clerk loses the one joy of his life, and learns that his friend is engaged to be married. But she has not been caught up or carried off in a brilliant adventure: she marries a middle-aged man, very rich and slightly discredited, and all her last letters are full of commissions which she trusts to her devoted old friend to accomplish. He is sent to the dress-makers about her gowns, and to the jeweller about her rings; and all this he accepts and does with perfect self-sacrifice; and his sacrifice seems quite accidental, a matter of course: there is not the slightest pose in it, nor any fuss, and only at the end, in his very last letter, and even then only in a veiled and discreet form, does he express anything of the immense sorrow which the blow is bringing to him.

The woman’s character is as subtly drawn as the man’s; she is more independent than he, and less resigned; she is kind and good, and it is from no selfish motives that she grasps at the improvement in her fortunes. But she is still young, and her youth rises within her and imperatively claims its natural desires. She is convinced that by accepting the proposal which is made to her she will alleviate her friend’s position as much as her own; moreover, she regards him as a faithful friend, and nothing more. But we, the outsiders who read his letters, see clearly that what he feels for her is more than friendship: it is simply love and nothing else.

The second important book which Dostoievsky wrote (for the stories he published immediately after _Poor Folk_ were not up to his mark) was the _Letters from a Dead House_, which was published on his return to Russia in 1861. This book may not be his finest artistic achievement, but it is certainly the most humanly interesting book which he ever wrote, and one of the most interesting books which exist in the whole of the world’s literature. In this book he told his prison experiences: they were put forward in the shape of the posthumous records of a nobleman who had committed murder out of jealousy, and was condemned to spend some years in the convict prison. The book is supposed to be the papers which this nobleman left behind him. They cover a period of four years, which was the term of Dostoievsky’s sentence. The most remarkable characteristic of the book is the entire absence of egotism in the author. Many authors in similar circumstances would have written volumes of self-analysis, and filled pages with their lamentations and in diagnosing their sensations. Very few men in such a situation could have avoided a slight pose of martyrdom. In Dostoievsky there is nothing of this. He faces the horror of the situation, but he has no grievance; and the book is all about other people and as little as possible about himself. And herein lies its priceless value, for there is no other book either of fiction or travel which throws such a searching light on the character of the Russian people, and especially on that of the Russian peasants. Dostoievsky got nearer to the Russian peasant than any one has ever done, and necessarily so, because he lived with them on equal terms as a convict. But this alone would not suffice to produce so valuable a book; something else was necessary, and the second indispensable factor was supplied by Dostoievsky’s peculiar nature, his simplicity of mind, his kindness of heart, his sympathy and understanding. In the very first pages of this book we are led into the heart of a convict’s life: the _milieu_ rises before us in startling vividness. The first thing which we are made aware of is that this prison life has a peculiar character of its own. The strange family or colony which was gathered together in this Siberian prison consisted of criminals of every grade and description, and in which not only every class of Russian society, but every shade and variety of the Russian people was represented; that is to say, there were here assassins by profession, and men who had become assassins by chance, robbers, brigands, tramps, pick-pockets, smugglers, peasants, Armenians, Jews, Poles, Mussulmans, soldiers who were there for insubordination and even for murder; officers, gentlemen, and political prisoners, and men who were there no one knew why.

Now Dostoievsky points out that at a first glance you could detect one common characteristic in this strange family. Even the most sharply defined, the most eccentric and original personalities, who stood out and towered above their comrades, even these did their best to adopt the manners and customs, the unwritten code, the etiquette of the prison. In general, he continues, these people with a very few exceptions (innately cheerful people who met with universal contempt) were surly, envious, extraordinarily vain, boastful, touchy, and in the highest degree punctilious and conventional. To be astonished at nothing was considered the highest quality; and in all of them the one aim and obsession was outward demeanour and the wish to keep up appearances. There were men who pretended to have either great moral or great physical strength and boasted of it, who were in reality cowards at heart, and whose cowardice was revealed in a flash. There were also men who possessed really strong characters; but the curious thing was, Dostoievsky tells us, that these really strong characters were abnormally vain. The main and universal characteristic of the criminal was his vanity, his desire, as the Italians say, to _fare figura_ at all costs. I have been told that this is true of English prisons, where prisoners will exercise the most extraordinary ingenuity in order to shave. The greater part of these people were radically vicious, and frightfully quarrelsome. The gossip, the backbiting, the tale-bearing, and the repeating of small calumnies were incessant; yet in spite of this not one man dared to stand up against the public opinion of the prison, according to whose etiquette and unwritten law a particular kind of demeanour was observed. In other words, these prisoners were exactly like private schoolboys or public schoolboys. At a public school, boys will create a certain etiquette, which has its unwritten law; for instance, let us take Eton. At Eton you may walk on one side of the street but not on the other, unless you are a person of sufficient importance. When you wear a great-coat, you must always turn the collar up, unless you are a person of a particular importance. You must likewise never go about with an umbrella unrolled; and, far more important than all these questions, there arrives a psychological moment in the career of an Eton boy when, of his own accord, he wears a stick-up collar instead of a turned-down collar, by which act he proclaims to the world that he is a person of considerable importance. These rules are unwritten and undefined. Nobody tells another boy not to walk on the wrong side of the road; no boy will ever dream of turning down his collar, if he is not important enough; and in the third and more special case, the boy who suddenly puts on a stick-up collar must feel himself by instinct when that psychological moment has arrived. It is not done for any definite reason, it is merely the expression of a kind of atmosphere. He knows at a given moment that he can or cannot go into stick-ups. Some boys can go into stick-ups for almost nothing, if they have in their personality the necessary amount of imponderable prestige; others, though the possessors of many trophies and colours, can only do so at the last possible minute. But all must have some definite reason for going into stick-ups: no boy can go into stick-ups merely because he is clever and thinks a lot of himself,--that would not only be impossible, but unthinkable.

Dostoievsky’s account of the convicts reminds me so strongly of the conduct of private and public schoolboys in England, that, with a few slight changes, his _Letters from a Dead House_ might be about an English school, as far as the mere etiquette of the convicts is concerned. Here, for instance, is a case in point: Dostoievsky says that there lived in this prison men of dynamic personalities, who feared neither God nor man, and had never obeyed any one in their lives; and yet they at once fell in with the standard of behaviour expected of them. There came to the prison men who had been the terror of their village and their neighbourhood. Such a “new boy” looked round, and at once understood that he had arrived at a place where he could astonish no one, and that the only thing to do was to be quiet and fall in with the manners of the place, and into what Dostoievsky calls the universal etiquette, which he defines as follows: “This etiquette,” he says, “consisted outwardly of a kind of peculiar dignity with which every inhabitant of the prison was impregnated, as if the fact of being a convict was, _ipso facto_, a kind of rank, and a respectable rank.” This is exactly the point of view of a schoolboy at a private school. A schoolboy prefers to be at home rather than at school. He knows that he is obliged to be at school, he is obliged to work against his will, and to do things which are often disagreeable to him; at the same time his entire efforts are strained to one object, towards preserving the dignity of his status. That was the great ambition of the convicts, to preserve the dignity of the status of a convict. Throughout this book one receives the impression that the convicts behaved in many ways like schoolboys; in fact, in one place Dostoievsky says that in many respects they were exactly like children. He quotes, for instance, their delight in spending the little money they could get hold of on a smart linen shirt and a belt, and walking round the whole prison to show it off. They did not keep such finery long, and nearly always ended by selling it for almost nothing; but their delight while they possessed it was intense. There was, however, one curious item in their code of morals, which is singularly unlike that of schoolboys in England, in Russia, or in any other country: they had no horror of a man who told tales to the authorities, who, in schoolboy language, was a sneak. “The Sneak” did not expose himself to the very smallest loss of caste. Indignation against him was an unthinkable thing: nobody shunned him, people were friends with him; and if you had explained in the prison the whole odiousness of his behaviour, they would not have understood you at all.

“There was one of the gentlemen prisoners, a vicious and mean fellow, with whom from the first moment I would have nothing to do. He made friends with the major’s orderly, and became his spy; and this man told everything he heard about the prisoners to the major. We all knew this, and nobody ever once thought of punishing or even of blaming the scoundrel.”

This is the more remarkable from the fact that in Russian schools, and especially in those schools where military discipline prevails, sneaking is the greatest possible crime. In speaking of another man who constantly reported everything to the authorities, Dostoievsky says that the other convicts despised him, not because he sneaked, but because he did not know how to behave himself properly.

The convicts, although they never showed the slightest signs of remorse or regret for anything they had done in the past, were allowed by their etiquette to express, as it were officially, a kind of outward resignation, a peaceful logic, such as, “We are a fallen people. We could not live in freedom, and now we must break stones.... We could not obey father and mother, and now we must obey the beating of the drum.” The criminals abused each other mercilessly; they were adepts in the art, more than adepts, artists. Abuse in their hands became a science and a fine art; their object was to find not so much the word that would give pain, as the offensive thought, the spirit, the idea, as to who should be most venomous, the most razor-like in his abuse.

Another striking characteristic which also reminds one of schoolboys, was that the convict would be, as a rule, obedient and submissive in the extreme. But there were certain limits beyond which his patience was exhausted, and when once this limit was overstepped by his warders or the officer in charge, he was ready to do anything, even to commit murder, and feared no punishment.

Dostoievsky tells us that during all the time he was in prison he never noticed among the convicts the slightest sign of remorse, the slightest burden of spirit with regard to the crimes they had committed; and the majority of them in their hearts considered themselves perfectly justified. But the one thing they could not bear, not because it roused feelings of emotion in them, but because it was against the etiquette of the place, was that people should dwell upon their past crimes. He quotes one instance of a man who was drunk--the convicts could get wine--beginning to relate how he had killed a child of five years old. The whole prison, which up till then had been laughing at his jokes, cried out like a man, and the assassin was obliged to be silent. They did not cry out from indignation, but because it was not _the thing_ to speak of _that_, because to speak of _that_ was considered to be violating the unwritten code of the prison. The two things which Dostoievsky found to be the hardest trials during his life as a convict were, first, the absolute absence of privacy, since during the whole four years he was in prison he was never for one minute either by day or night alone; and, secondly, the bar which existed between him and the majority of the convicts, owing to the fact that he was a gentleman. The convicts hated people of the upper class; although such men were on a footing of social equality with them, the convicts never recognised them as comrades. Quite unconsciously, even sincerely, they regarded them as gentlemen, although they liked teasing them about their change of circumstance. They despised them because they did not know how to work properly, and Dostoievsky says that he was two years in prison before he won over some of the convicts, though one can see from his accounts of what they said to him, how much they must have liked him, and he admits that the majority of them recognised, after a time, that he was a good fellow. He points out how much harder such a sentence was on one of his own class than on a peasant. The peasant arrives from all ends of Russia, no matter where it be, and finds in prison the _milieu_ he is accustomed to, and into which he falls at once without difficulty. He is treated as a brother and an equal by the people who are there. With a gentleman it is different, and especially, Dostoievsky tells us, with a political offender, whom the majority of the convicts hate. He never becomes an equal; they may like him, as they obviously did in Dostoievsky’s case, but they never regard him as being on a footing of equality with themselves. They preferred even foreigners, Germans for instance, to the Russian gentlemen; and the people they disliked most of all were the gentlemen Poles, because they were almost exaggeratedly polite towards the convicts, and at the same time could not conceal their innate hatred of them. With regard to the effect of this difference of class, Dostoievsky, in the course of the book, tells a striking story. Every now and then, when the convicts had a grievance about their food or their treatment, they would go on strike, and assemble in the prison yard. Dostoievsky relates that one day there was a strike about the food. As all the convicts were gathered together in the yard, he joined them, whereupon he was immediately told that that was not his place, that he had better go to the kitchen, where the Poles and the other gentlemen were. He was told this kindly by his friends, and men who were less friendly to him made it plain by shouting out sarcastic remarks to him. Although he wished to stay, he was told that he must go. Afterwards the strike was dispersed and the strikers punished, and Dostoievsky asked a friend of his, one of the convicts, whether they were not angry with the gentlemen convicts.

“Why?” asked this man.

“Why, because we did not join in the strike.”

“Why should you have joined in the strike?” asked the convict, trying to understand, “You buy your own food.”

“Many of us eat the ordinary food,” answered Dostoievsky, “but I should have thought that apart from this we ought to have joined, out of fellowship, out of comradeship.”

“But you are not our comrade,” said the other man quite simply; and Dostoievsky saw that the man did not even understand what he meant. Dostoievsky realised that he could never be a real comrade of these men; he might be a convict for a century, he might be the most experienced of criminals, the most accomplished of assassins, the barrier existing between the classes would never disappear: to them he would always be a gentleman, it would always be a case of “You go your way, we go ours.” And this, he said, was the saddest thing he experienced during the whole of his prison life.

The thing which perhaps caused him the most pleasure was the insight he gained into the kindness shown to convicts by outsiders. Alluding to the doctors in the prison hospital, he says: “It is well known to prisoners all over Russia that the men who sympathise with them the most are the doctors: they never make the slightest difference in their treatment of prisoners, as nearly all outsiders do, except perhaps the Russian poor. The Russian poor man never blames the prisoner for his crime, however terrible it may be; he forgives him everything for the punishment that he is enduring, and for his misfortune in general. It is not in vain that the whole of the Russian people call crime a misfortune and criminals ‘unfortunates.’ This definition has a deep meaning; it is all the more valuable in that it is made unconsciously and instinctively.”

It is an incident revealing this pity for the unfortunate which gave Dostoievsky more pleasure than anything during his stay in prison. It was the first occasion on which he directly received alms. He relates it thus:

“It was soon after my arrival in the prison: I was coming back from my morning’s work, accompanied only by the guard. There met me a mother and her daughter. The little girl was ten years old, as pretty as a cherub; I had already seen them once; the mother was the wife of a soldier, a widow; her husband, a young soldier, had been under arrest, and had died in the hospital in the same ward in which I had lain ill. The wife and the daughter had come to say good-bye to him, and both had cried bitterly. Seeing me, the little girl blushed, whispered something to her mother, and she immediately stopped and took out of her bundle a quarter of a kopeck and gave it to the little girl. The child ran after me and called out, ‘Unfortunate! For the sake of Christ, take this copper.’ I took the piece of money, and the little girl ran back to her mother quite contented. I kept that little piece of money for a very long time.”

What is most remarkable about the book, are the many and various discoveries which Dostoievsky made with regard to human nature: his power of getting behind the gloomy mask of the criminal to the real man underneath, his success in detecting the “soul of goodness” in the criminals. Every single one of the characters he describes stands out in startling relief; and if one began to quote these one would never end. Nevertheless I will quote a few instances.

There is Akim Akimitch, an officer who had earned his sentence thus: He had served in the Caucasus, and been made governor of some small fortress. One night a neighbouring Caucasian prince attacked his fortress and burnt it down, but was defeated and driven back. Akim Akimitch pretended not to know who the culprit was. A month elapsed, and Akim Akimitch asked the prince to come and pay him a visit. He came without suspecting any evil. Akim Akimitch marched out his troops, and in their presence told him it was exceedingly wrong to burn down fortresses; and after giving him minute directions as to what the behaviour of a peaceful prince should be, shot him dead on the spot, and reported the case to his superiors. He was tried and condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to twelve years’ hard labour. Akim Akimitch had thus once in his life acted according to his own judgment, and the result had been penal servitude. He had not common sense enough to see where he had been guilty, but he came to the conclusion that he never under any circumstances ought to judge for himself. He thenceforth renounced all initiative of any kind or sort, and made himself into a machine. He was uneducated, extremely accurate, and the soul of honesty; very clever with his fingers, he was by turn carpenter, bootmaker, shoemaker, gilder, and there was no trade which he could not learn. Akim Akimitch arranged his life in so methodical a manner in every detail, with such pedantic accuracy, that at first he almost drove Dostoievsky mad, although Akim Akimitch was kindness itself to him, and helped him in every possible way during the first days of his imprisonment. Akim Akimitch appeared to be absolutely indifferent as to whether he was in prison or not. He arranged everything as though he were to stay there for the rest of his life; everything, from his pillow upwards, was arranged as though no change could possibly occur to him. At first Dostoievsky found the ways of this automaton a severe trial, but he afterwards became entirely reconciled to him.

Then there was Orlov, one of the more desperate criminals. He was a soldier who had deserted. He was of small stature and slight build, but he was absolutely devoid of any sort of fear. Dostoievsky says that never in his life had he met with such a strong, such an iron character as this man had. There was, in this man, a complete triumph of the spirit over the flesh. He could bear any amount of physical punishment with supreme indifference. He was consumed with boundless energy, a thirst for action, for revenge, and for the accomplishment of the aim which he set before him. He looked down on everybody in prison. Dostoievsky says he doubts whether there was any one in the world who could have influenced this man by his authority. He had a calm outlook on the world, as though there existed nothing that could astonish him; and although he knew that the other convicts looked up to him with respect, there was no trace of swagger about him: he was not at all stupid, and terribly frank, although not talkative. Dostoievsky would ask him about his adventures. He did not much like talking about them, but he always answered frankly. When once he understood, however, that Dostoievsky was trying to find out whether he felt any pangs of conscience or remorse for what he had done, he looked at him with a lofty and utter contempt, as though he suddenly had to deal with some stupid little boy who could not reason like grown-up people. There was even an expression of pity in his face, and after a minute or two he burst out in the simplest and heartiest laugh, without a trace of irony, and Dostoievsky was convinced that when left to himself he must have laughed again time after time, so comic did the thought appear to him.

One of the most sympathetic characters Dostoievsky describes is a young Tartar called Alei, who was not more than twenty-two years old. He had an open, clever, and even beautiful face, and a good-natured and naïve expression which won your heart at once. His smile was so confiding, so childlike and simple, his big black eyes so soft and kind, that it was a consolation merely to look at him. He was in prison for having taken part in an expedition made by his brothers against a rich Armenian merchant whom they had robbed. He retained his softness of heart and simplicity and his strict honesty all the time he was in prison; he never quarrelled, although he knew quite well how to stand up for himself, and everybody liked him. “I consider Alei,” writes Dostoievsky, “as being far from an ordinary personality, and I count my acquaintance with him as one of the most valuable events of my life. There are characters so beautiful by nature, so near to God, that even the very thought that they may some day change for the worse seems impossible. As far as they are concerned you feel absolutely secure, and I now feel secure for Alei. Where is he now?”

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_.

In the chapter on Tolstoy and Tourgeniev, I pointed out that the Russian character could roughly be divided into two types, which dominate the whole of Russian fiction, the two types being Lucifer, the embodiment of invincible pride, and Ivan Durak, the wise fool. This is especially true with regard to Dostoievsky’s novels. Nearly all the most important characters in his books represent one or other of these two types. Raskolnikov, the hero of _Crime and Punishment_, is the embodiment of the Lucifer type, and the whole motive and mainspring of his character is pride.

Raskolnikov is a Nihilist in the true sense of the word, not a political Nihilist nor an intellectual Nihilist like Tourgeniev’s Bazarov, but a moral Nihilist; that is to say, a man who strives to act without principle and to be unscrupulous, who desires to put himself beyond and above human moral conventions. His idea is that if he can trample on human conventions, he will be a sort of Napoleon. He goes to pawn a jewel at an old woman pawnbroker’s, and the idea which is to affect his whole future vaguely takes root in his mind, namely, that an intelligent man, possessed of the fortune of this pawnbroker, could do anything, and that the only necessary step is to suppress this useless and positively harmful old woman. He thus expresses the idea later:

“I used to put myself this question: If Napoleon had found himself in my position and had not wherewith to begin his career, and there was neither Toulon, nor Egypt, nor the passage of the Alps, and if there were, instead of these splendid and monumental episodes, simply some ridiculous old woman, a usurer whom he would have to kill in order to get her money, would he shrink from doing this if there were no other alternative, merely because it would not be a fine deed and because it would be sinful? Now I tell you that I was possessed by this problem for a long time, and that I felt deeply ashamed when I at last guessed, suddenly as it were, that not only would he not be frightened at the idea, but that the thought that the thing was not important and grandiose enough would not even enter into his head: he would not even understand where the need for hesitation lay; and if there were no other way open to him, he would kill the woman without further reflection. Well, I ceased reflecting, and I killed her, following the example of my authority.”

Raskolnikov is obsessed by the idea, just as Macbeth is obsessed by the prophecy of the three witches, and circumstances seem to play the part of Fate in a Greek tragedy, and to lead him against his will to commit a horrible crime. “He is mechanically forced,” says Professor Brückner in his _History of Russian Literature_, “into performing the act, as if he had gone too near machinery in motion, had been caught by a bit of his clothing, and cut to pieces.” As soon as he has killed the old woman, he is fatally led into committing another crime immediately after the first crime is committed. He thinks that by committing this crime he will have trampled on human conventions, that he will be above and beyond morality, a Napoleon, a Superman. The tragedy of the book consists in his failure, and in his realising that he has failed. Instead of becoming stronger than mankind, he becomes weaker than mankind; instead of having conquered convention and morality, he is himself vanquished by them. He finds that as soon as the crime is committed the whole of his relation towards the world is changed, and his life becomes a long struggle with himself, a revolt against the moral consequences of his act. His instinct of self-preservation is in conflict with the horror of what he has done and the need for confession. Raskolnikov, as I have said, is the embodiment of pride; pride is the mainspring of his character. He is proud enough to build gigantic conceptions, to foster the ambition of placing himself above and beyond humanity, but his character is not strong enough to bear the load of his ideas. He thinks he has the makings of a great man in him, and in order to prove this to himself he commits a crime that would put an ordinary man beyond the pale of humanity, because he thinks that being an extraordinary man he will remain within the pale of humanity and not suffer. His pride suffers a mortal blow when he finds that he is weak, and that the moral consequences of his act face him at every turn. He fights against this, he strives not to recognise it; he deliberately seeks the company of detectives; he discusses murder and murderers with them minutely, and with a recklessness which leads him to the very brink of the precipice, when it would need but a word more for him to betray himself. The examining magistrate, indeed, guesses that he has committed the crime, and plays with him as a cat plays with a mouse, being perfectly certain that in the long-run he will confess of his own accord. The chapters which consist of the duel between these two men are the most poignant in anguish which I have ever read. I have seen two of these scenes acted on the stage, and several people in the audience had hysterics before they were over. At last the moment of expiation comes, though that of regeneration is still far distant. Raskolnikov loves a poor prostitute named Sonia. His act, his murder, has affected his love for Sonia, as it has affected the rest of his life, and has charged it with a sullen despair. Sonia, who loves him as the only man who has never treated her with contempt, sees that he has some great load on his mind, that he is tortured by some hidden secret. She tries in vain to get him to tell her what it is, but at last he comes to her with the intention of telling her, and she reads the speaking secret in his eyes. As soon as she knows, she tells him that he must kiss the earth which he has stained, and confess to the whole world that he has committed murder. Then, she says, God will send him a new life. At first he refuses: he says that society is worse than he, that greater crimes than his are committed every day; that those who commit them are highly honoured. Sonia speaks of his suffering, and of the torture he will undergo by keeping his dread secret, but he will not yet give in, nor admit that he is not a strong man, that he is really a _louse_--which is the name he gives to all human beings who are not “Supermen.” Sonia says that they must go to exile together, and that by suffering _together_ they will expiate his deed. This is one of Dostoievsky’s principal ideas, or rather it is the interpretation and conception of Christianity which you will most frequently meet with among the Russian people,--that suffering is good in itself, and especially suffering in common with some one else.

After Raskolnikov has confessed his crime to Sonia, he still hovers round and round the police, like a moth fatally attracted by a candle, and at last he makes open confession, and is condemned to seven years’ penal servitude. But although he has been defeated in the battle with his idea, although he has not only failed, but failed miserably, even after he has confessed his crime and is paying the penalty for it in prison, his pride still survives. When he arrives in prison, it is not the hardships of prison life, it is not the hard labour, the coarse food, the shaven head, the convict’s dress, that weigh on his spirit; nor does he feel remorse for his crime. But here once more in prison he begins to criticise and reflect on his former actions, and finds them neither foolish nor horrible as he did before. “In what,” he thinks, “was my conception stupider than many conceptions and theories which are current in the world? One need only look at the matter from an independent standpoint, and with a point-of-view unbiased by conventional ideas, and the idea will not seem so strange. And why does my deed,” he thought to himself, “appear so ugly? In what way was it an evil deed? My conscience is at rest. Naturally I committed a criminal offence, I broke the letter of the law and I shed blood. Well, take my head in return for the letter of the law and make an end of it! Of course, even many of those men who have benefited mankind and who were never satiated with power, after they had seized it for themselves, ought to have been executed as soon as they had taken their first step, but these people succeeded in taking further steps, and therefore they are justified: I did not succeed, and therefore perhaps I had not the right to take the first step.”

Raskolnikov accordingly considered that his crime consisted solely in this, that he was not strong enough to carry it through to the end, and not strong enough not to confess it. He also tortured himself with another thought: why did he not kill himself as soon as he recognised the truth? Why did he prefer the weakness of confession?