Authors: Joseph Frank
Dostoevsky (42 page)
Katorga
In the four years he spent in prison camp, Dostoevsky had not received a single word from his family, and the complete loss of contact inspired him to compose a lengthy letter to Mikhail on February 22, 1854, just a week after being released. Picking up the thread of his life at the moment of departure for Siberia, it begins by recounting the impressions gathered on the eighteen-day journey and the major incidents marking his arrival at the first way station, Tobolsk. “It was a sad moment when we crossed the Urals,” Dostoevsky recalls. “The horses and sledges had foundered in the drifts. A snowstorm was raging. We got out of the sledges—it was night—and stood waiting while they were dragged out. All around us was the snow and storm; it was the frontier of Europe; ahead was Siberia and our unknown fate, while all the past lay behind us—it was so depressing that I was moved to tears.”
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On January 9, the party reached Tobolsk, once the capital city of Western Siberia and, at that time, the main distribution center in which prisoners arriving from European Russia were sorted out and dispatched to their final destinations. The prison was set inside a fortress complex, and as Dostoevsky’s party climbed the road up to it, one of the first sights to greet their eyes was the town’s most ancient and notorious exile, the famous Uglich bell, located just off the road along which they were proceeding. Its story was known to all: At the discovery of the death of Crown Prince Dimitry, suspected of having been murdered by his guardian, Boris Godunov, the bell had rung to summon the inhabitants of Uglich to avenge the boy’s death. The new tsar, Boris, later ordered the offending bell to be publicly flogged and mutilated, and it was exiled to Siberia in perpetuity with the injunction that it never ring again. But the people of Tobolsk had long since housed the Uglich bell in a small belfry, and its deep-voiced sonority called them to prayer. There it stood along the roadside, a constant reminder to later exiles of the despotic, capricious, and all-encompassing authority of the Russian tsars, as well as of the ultimate futility of many of their sternest
ukazy
.
Dostoevsky’s reception in Tobolsk illustrates some of the moral incorporated in the subversive survival of the Uglich bell. “I will only say,” Dostoevsky writes
to Mikhail, “that the sympathy and lively concern we met with blessed us with almost complete happiness. The exiles of the old days (that is, not they themselves but their wives) looked after us as though we were their own flesh and blood. What wonderful people, tried by twenty-five years of sorrow and self-sacrifice! We had only a glimpse of them, for we were strictly confined. But they sent us food and clothing, they consoled us and gave us courage.”
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Jastrzembski also left a description of their arrival in Tobolsk and of his first glimpse of convict clerks, branded on cheeks and forehead. “We were taken into a room. A narrow, dark, cold dirty room. . . . Here there were plank beds, and on them three sacks filled with straw instead of mattresses and three pillows of the same kind. It was pitch-black. Outside the door, on the threshold, could be heard the heavy tread of the sentinel, walking back and forth in a 40 degree frost.” Their room was separated only by a partition from another, which held other prisoners awaiting trial, and they could hear “the exclamations of people playing cards and other games, and what insults, what curses.”
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All three travelers were in a lamentable state after their weeks on the road. “Durov’s fingers and toes were frostbitten,” recalls Jastrzembski, “and his feet had been badly damaged by the shackles. Dostoevsky, moreover, had broken out with scrofulous sores on his face and in his mouth while still in the Alekseevsky Ravelin.”
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Utterly dejected by the prospect of even further suffering looming ahead, Jastrzembski decided to commit suicide—a decision, he says, for which his solitary imprisonment in the Ravelin had been an excellent preparation. As it turned out, one of the officers of gendarmes at Tobolsk was an old acquaintance, who provided him and his friends with a candle, matches, and some hot tea, “which seemed to us sweeter than nectar. Some excellent cigars suddenly turned up in Dostoevsky’s possession. . . . We spent a good part of the remainder of the night in friendly conversation. The sympathetic, gentle voice of Dostoevsky, his tenderness and delicacy of feeling, even some of his capricious sallies, quite like a woman, had a soothing effect on me. I gave up any extreme decision. Dostoevsky, Durov, and I were separated in the Tobolsk prison, we wept, embraced, and never saw each other again.”
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If Dostoevsky was instrumental in bringing solace to Jastrzembski, the same function was performed for Dostoevsky by the wives of “the exiles of the old days,” who helped so much to ease the lot of political prisoners, whether Russian or Polish, during the last years of the regime of Nicholas I. One hundred and
twenty Decembrists, all of good (and some of the very best) families, had been sent into exile in 1825. All had long since served their sentences at hard labor. Not allowed to reside in European Russia, they had remained in Siberia and formed part of the very small educated and cultivated society composed of the higher ranks in the army and the bureaucracy. Many of them had relations at court, some were independently wealthy, and all were treated with marked consideration by the officials coming from Petersburg. New arrivals were only too happy to mix with people of their own class and breeding in this still wild frontier territory, otherwise peopled only by uncouth and enterprising freebooters out to make a fortune and by a mixture of Asiatic nomads, still living their age-old tribal existence. The Decembrists, through their connections, were thus able to exercise a considerable influence despite their suspect status as ex-rebels, and their wives and children were unceasingly active in charitable work among the convicts.
On the last day that Dostoevsky and Durov spent in Tobolsk, three Decembrist wives arranged to visit them in the quarters of one of the officers. It was a moment he was to remember all his life, and one that he refers to again, in the same grateful and reverential tone, years later in his
Diary of a Writer
(1873): “We saw these sublime sufferers, who had voluntarily followed their husbands to Siberia. They gave up everything, position, wealth, family ties, sacrificed everything for the highest moral duty, a duty which nothing could impose on them except themselves. Completely innocent, during twenty-five years they bore everything to which their husbands had been condemned. The meeting lasted an hour. They blessed us as we entered on a new life, made the sign of the cross, and gave us a New Testament—the only book allowed in prison. It lay under my pillow for four years during penal servitude. I read it sometimes, and read it to others. With it, I taught one convict to read.”
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Each copy of the holy book contained, in its binding, ten rubles in bank notes.
The three women who came in to talk with Dostoevsky were Mme Muravyeva, Mme Annenkova, and Mme Fonvizina. The only native Russian of the three, and the most important of all for Dostoevsky, was Natalya Fonvizina, a remarkable woman of considerable intellectual culture and profound religious faith. Mme Fonvizina was related to Count Gorchakov, the governor-general of Siberia, and promised to speak to him on Dostoevsky’s behalf. Letters were sent to the three daughters of Count Gorchakov, then on a visit to their father, enlisting their intercession on behalf of the Petrashevtsy. It was also during this hour-long meeting that Dostoevsky first heard about the terrible Major Krivtsov, the commandant of the prison camp at Omsk, and was warned to be on his guard against him.
On the morning of the departure of Dostoevsky and Durov for Omsk, Natalya Fonvizina and another Decembrist wife, Marie Frantseva, rode out in advance to meet them on the way. “Having gone out in a sledge very early,” writes the latter in her memoirs, “we got out of our vehicle and walked ahead on purpose up the road for a verst because we did not want the coachman to be a witness to our farewells; particularly since I had to give in secret to the gendarme a letter for my close friend, Lieutenant Colonel Zhdan-Pushkin, in which I asked him to look after Dostoevsky and Durov. . . . At last we heard the distant tinkle of bells. Quickly, a troika appeared out of the edge of the forest [and] . . . Dostoevsky and Durov leaped out of their Siberian sledge. The first was a thin, not very tall, not very good-looking young man. . . . They were dressed in convict half-coats and fur hats with earflaps; heavy shackles made a resounding noise on their feet. We . . . had time only to tell them not to lose heart, and that kind people would look after them even where they were going. I gave the letter I had ready for Pushkin to the gendarme, who conscientiously delivered it to him in Omsk.”
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Unfortunately, the gendarme also carried another letter, which he delivered just as conscientiously—a secret letter from the commandant at Tobolsk to the one at Omsk. It contained instructions, originating from the tsar himself, that the two deportees were to be treated as “prisoners in the full sense of the word; according to their sentence, the improvement of their condition in the future should depend on their conduct, on the clemency of the monarch, and by no means on the indulgence of those in immediate authority over them; a trustworthy official should be appointed to maintain a strict and unceasing vigilance.”
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In these faraway outposts of the Russian Empire, such instructions were more apt to be honored in the breach than in the observance, and there is no evidence that any such petty bureaucrat was ever appointed. All the same, such orders made it more difficult to come to the aid of the political prisoners; there was always the chance that some zealous underling, eager to gain advancement, would denounce any favoritism to the headquarters of the governor-general.
Dostoevsky’s letter to Mikhail contains an unvarnished description of his years in prison:
I had already become acquainted with convicts in Tobolsk, and here in Omsk I settled down to living with them for four years. They were coarse, ill-natured, cross-grained people. Their hatred for the gentry knew no bounds, and therefore they received us, the gentlemen, with hostility and
malicious joy in our troubles. They would have eaten us alive, given the chance. Judge, moreover, how much protection we had, having to live, to eat and drink and sleep with these men for several years, without even the chance of complaining of the innumerable affronts of every possible kind. ‘You are noblemen, iron beaks that used to peck us to death. Before, the master used to torment the people, but now he is lower than the lowest, has become one of us’—that’s the theme on which they played variations for four years. One hundred and fifty enemies never tired of persecuting us; it was a pleasure for them, an amusement, something to do, and if anything at all saved us, it was indifference, moral superiority (which they could not but recognize and respect), and unyielding resistance to their will. They always acknowledged that we were superior to them. They had no understanding of our crime. We ourselves were silent on the subject, and so we could not understand each other, and we had to endure all the persecution and vindictiveness toward the gentry class for which they lived and breathed.
Things were very bad for us. A military prison is much worse than a civilian one. I spent the whole four years in the prison behind walls and never went out except to work. The work they found for us was heavy (not always, of course), and I was sometimes completely exhausted in foul weather, in damp and rain and sleet, and in the unendurable cold of winter. Once I spent four hours on urgent work, when the mercury froze and there was perhaps about 40 degrees of frost. My foot became frostbitten.
We lived on top of each other, all together in one barrack. Imagine an old, dilapidated, wooden construction, which was supposed to have been pulled down long ago, and which was no longer fit for use. In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall. The little windows were so covered with frost that it was almost impossible to read at any time of the day. An inch of ice on the panes. Drips from the ceiling, draughts everywhere. We were packed like herrings in a barrel. The stove took six logs at once, but there was no warmth (the ice in the room barely thawed), only unendurable fumes—and this, all winter long. There in the barracks the convicts washed their clothes and the whole space was splashed with water. There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs, for after all, ‘we’re live human beings.’ We slept on bare boards and were allowed only a pillow. We spread our sheepskin coats over us, and our feet were always uncovered all night. We shivered all night. Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel. In winter we wore short sheepskin coats, often of the most
wretched quality, which hardly gave any warmth, and on our feet half-boots—just try to walk around with them in the freezing cold.
The food they gave us was bread and cabbage soup with a quarter of a pound of beef in it; but the meat was minced up and I never saw any of it. On holidays, thin porridge almost without fat. On fast days, boiled cabbage and hardly anything else. I suffered unbearably from indigestion and was ill several times. You may judge whether we could have lived without money, and if I had had none I should certainly have died; and nobody, no convict, whoever he was, could have borne such a life without it. But everybody worked at something, sold it, and thus had a kopek or two. I drank tea and sometimes bought a piece of meat to eat, and this was my salvation. It was impossible not to smoke tobacco as well, for one might have choked in that atmosphere. All this was done by stealth.
I often lay ill in the hospital. Disordered nerves have given me epilepsy, but the fits occur only rarely. I have rheumatism in the legs besides. Apart from this I feel fairly well. Add to all theses amenities the almost complete impossibility of possessing a book (and if you get one you read it on the sly), the eternal hostility and quarreling around one, the wrangling, shouting, uproar, din, always under escort, never alone, and all this for four years without change—really, one may be pardoned for saying that things were bad. Besides all this, the eternal threat of punishment hanging over one, shackles, the total stifling of the soul, there you have an image of my existence.
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