Dostoevsky (48 page)

Such words anticipate Dostoevsky’s later pronounced distaste for legal formalities of any kind, which stick to the letter of the law and rarely leave room for any probing of the heart and mind of the individual criminal. He was eventually to pour all his anguish over this issue into the portrayal of the investigation of the putative crime of Dimitry Karamazov, with its regard only for the “facts” and its total neglect of Dimitry’s own responses. This growing apprehension of human diversity among his fellow convicts enormously increased the range of Dostoevsky’s philanthropic convictions of the 1840s—but without causing him to blur the distinction between good and evil. What had been a pitying sentimentalism toward weak and basically unassertive characters now took on a tragic complexity as Dostoevsky’s sympathies with the unsubjugated peasant convicts stretched the boundaries of official morality to the breaking point. More important than the crime itself were the motives, the human situation, from which it emerged. It is in the context of such considerations that we must place one of the most famous passages in the book. “After all,” Dostoevsky declares, “one must tell the whole truth; these men were exceptional men. Perhaps they were the most gifted, the strongest of our people” (4: 231). Their crimes sprang from a strength of character and, frequently, a defense of instinctive
moral principles, exhibited under circumstances where others would have been completely crushed.

Dostoevsky’s years in the house of the dead exposed him to an extraordinary range of personalities, among whom genuine saintliness rubbed elbows with the basest depravity. Nearly everyone had, at some crucial instant, stepped outside the bounds of normal social life to commit a violent act that had decided his destiny once and for all. The effect of such exposure on Dostoevsky’s imaginative grasp of human experience was considerable, and his portrayal of character was later to take a qualitative leap in depth and scale that may be directly attributed to this cause.

There was one particular aspect of camp life that became the most distinctive hallmark of his genius.
House of the Dead
contains a remarkable series of analyses that, focusing on the unconscious urges of the human psyche, describe its irresistible need to assert itself and affirm its native dignity. This need was so imperious that, unable to find normal outlets under the repressive conditions of the prison camp, it burst forth in all sorts of irrational, absurd, and even self-destructive forms. Always preoccupied with the deformations of character caused by lack of freedom, Dostoevsky had explored this theme in his early stories, but there he had barely scratched the surface. Life in prison camp gave him the unique vantage point from which to study human beings living under extreme psychic pressure, and responding to such pressure with the most frenzied behavior. Once Dostoevsky had mastered himself sufficiently to be able to contemplate his environment with lucidity, he began to understand even such sensedefying conduct as the product of a genuine human need—no longer as the monstrous perversities of a collection of moral Quasimodos wholly beyond the human pale.

We cannot truly understand Dostoevsky’s later worldview if we separate his perceptions and values too sharply from the context of psychic constraint in which they were remolded. For Dostoevsky was persuaded that no human order could ultimately prove viable unless it acknowledged—and offered some relief for—these irrepressible demands of the human spirit.
House of the Dead
is so rich in illustrations of this power of the irrational, and they are so varied in their nature and importance, that one scarcely knows where to begin. But let us start with Dostoevsky’s remarks on the psychically unsettling effects of the communal life imposed on the convicts. He was convinced that this closeness contributed to their excessive restlessness and irritability. “I am certain,” he affirms, “that every convict felt this torture, though of course in most cases unconsciously.” As for himself, perhaps the worst “torture in prison life, almost more terrible than any other . . . [was]
compulsory life in common
” (4: 20–22). Elsewhere, he
repeats: “I could never have imagined, for instance, how terrible and agonizing it would be never once for a single minute to be alone for the [four] years of my imprisonment” (4: 11).

The truth of these words is proven by a letter that Dostoevsky wrote, almost immediately after his release, to Mme Fonvizina: “It is now almost five years that I have been under guard among a crowd of people, and I never had a single hour alone. To be alone is a normal need, like eating and drinking; otherwise, in this enforced communism one turns into a hater of mankind. The society of other people becomes an unbearable torture, and it was from this that I suffered most during those four years.”
²²
It is striking to see how early Dostoevsky identifies his prison-camp existence with life in one of those ideal Socialist Utopias (Fourier, Cabet) that so many of his friends in the Petrashevsky Circle had once admired. He had, to be sure, never fully accepted such Utopias himself, but his rejection had now become viscerally rooted in this overwhelming sense of the need for the personality to defend itself against psychic encroachment.

A much more dramatic illustration of the power of irrational impulse over human behavior is provided by Dostoevsky’s remarks about prisoners awaiting punishment by flogging or beating. “To defer the moment of punishment . . . convicts sometimes resorted to terrible expedients; by stabbing one of the officials or a fellow convict they would get a new trial, and their punishment would be deferred for some two months and their aim would be attained. It was nothing to them that their punishment, when it did come, two months later, would be twice or three times as severe” (4: 144). One of the patients in the hospital had drunk a jug of vodka mixed with snuff to delay his punishment, and died from the effects. Commonplace prudence, as we see, was swept away by a fear too elemental to master.

The irrational component of such examples is still motivated by comprehensible causes. This is not the case with other types of behavior, where the cause is so slight as to be entirely incommensurate with the effect, or where no immediate cause is perceptible. Dostoevsky’s true genius reveals itself when he turns to explore these aberrant extremes, and intuits the deep human significance of what looks like madness. A peculiar feature of peasant convict life, for example, was the general attitude toward money. It was, Dostoevsky points out, “of vast and overwhelming importance” in prison, allowing the convict to obtain all sorts of forbidden luxuries—extra food, tobacco, vodka, sex—which helped make life more endurable. One would thus assume that the convicts hung on to their money for dear life and used it sparingly, but exactly the opposite turned out to be the case. Every convict who managed to scrape together a sufficient sum would invariably squander it gloriously on a drunken fling. And so, after
amassing the money “with cruel effort, or making use of extraordinary cunning, often in conjunction with theft and cheating,” the convict threw it away with what Dostoevsky calls “childish senselessness” (4: 65–66).

But, he hastens to explain, “if he throws it away like so much rubbish, he throws it away on what he considers of even more value.” And what is more precious for the convict than all the material benefits he can obtain from money? “Freedom or the dream of freedom,” Dostoevsky replies. For one must realize that “the word convict means nothing else but a man with no will of his own, and in spending money he is showing a will of his own.” By drinking and carousing, by breaking the rules of prison discipline and bullying his companions in misery, the convict is “pretending to his companions and even persuading himself,
if only for a time
, that he has infinitely more power and freedom than is supposed” (4: 66). Nothing is more important for the convict than to
feel
that he can assert his will and thus exercise his freedom; there is no risk he will refuse to run, no punishment he will not endure, for the sake of his temporary (and illusory) but infinitely precious satisfaction.

Here Dostoevsky is no longer simply stressing the dominating role of irrational elements in human behavior; now the need of the human personality to exercise its will, and hence to experience a sense of autonomy while doing so, is seen as the strongest drive of the psyche. The inability to fulfill this drive can be disastrous. Even, Dostoevsky observes, “this sudden outbreak in the man from whom one would least have expected it, is simply the poignant hysterical craving for self-expression, the unconscious yearning for himself, the desire to assert himself, to assert his crushed personality, a desire which suddenly takes possession of him and reaches the pitch of fury, or spite, of mental aberration, of fits and nervous convulsions. So perhaps a man buried alive and awakening in his coffin might beat upon its lid and struggle to fling it off, though of course reason might convince him that all his efforts would be useless; but the trouble is that it is not a question of reason, it is a question of nervous convulsions” (4: 66–67).

Similar conditions exist outside, and many of the convicts had landed in the camp precisely for having revolted against them. Each had been a peasant, house serf, soldier, or workman who had long led a quiet and peaceable life, bearing the burdens of his lot with patience and resignation. “Suddenly something in him seems to snap; his patience gives way and he sticks a knife into his enemy and oppressor” (4: 87–88). Such descriptions of personalities oppressed beyond endurance, who break out in hysterical frenzy and revolt against their subjugation, are among the most impressive passages in the book. Here we are at the source of what was one day to become the revolt of the underground man, but this work could be written only after Dostoevsky had become convinced that, in the world envisaged by the radical ideology of the 1860s, the situation of the
human personality would become identical with what he had seen and felt in the prison camp.

Many details of
House of the Dead
help us understand how the peasant convicts maintained their psychic equilibrium, and here again emphasis is placed on the prevalence of irrational components over other aspects of convict behavior. The convicts preferred to be given a “task” rather than simply to work the regulation number of hours; the assignment would incite them to work harder so as to gain a little extra free time and acquire some slight degree of control over their lives. For this very reason, everyone hated the
forced
labor and found it particularly burdensome, even though Dostoevsky was surprised to find it so relatively light. Many peasant convicts had worked much harder in civilian life, and Dostoevsky admits to realizing “only long afterwards . . . that the hardness, the penal character of the work lay not in its being difficult and uninterrupted but in its being
compulsory
, obligatory, enforced” (4: 20).

Most of the convicts were skilled craftsmen who earned a little money by selling their products to the local population. All the convicts possessed forbidden tools, and Dostoevsky surmised that “the authorities shut their eyes” to this infraction of the rules because they understood intuitively that such work was a safety valve for the prisoners. “If it were not for his own private work to which he was devoted with his whole mind, his whole interest,” Dostoevsky writes, “a man could not live in prison.” More important than the extra money were the psychic benefits of this self-imposed task, freely performed and which guarantees the individual a sense of self-possession and moral autonomy. “Without labor, without lawful normal property man cannot live; he becomes depraved and is transformed into a beast. . . . Work saved them from crime; without [private] work the convicts would have devoured one another like spiders in a glass jar” (4: 16–17). The social-political implications of this assertion constitute a flat rejection of the moral basis of Utopian Socialism (or any other kind), which views private property as the root of all evil.

But just as the human personality could be driven to irrational crime and self-destruction, so too it had an irrational inner self-defense against reaching such a state. And this self-defense is the human capacity to hope. “From the very first day of my life in prison,” Dostoevsky says, “I began to dream of freedom.” In the case of many other convicts, “the amazing audacity of their hopes impressed me from the beginning.” It was as if prison life was not part of a convict’s existence, and he was emotionally unable to accept it as such. “Every convict . . . looks at twenty years as though they were two, and is fully convinced that when he leaves prison at fifty-five he will be as full of life and energy as he is now at thirty-five” (4: 79). Even convicts condemned to life sentences continued to
hope for a change of luck, and, writes Dostoevsky, “
this strange impatient and intense hope
, which sometimes found involuntary utterance, at times so wild as to be almost like delirium, and what was most striking of all, often persisted in by men of apparently the greatest common sense—gave a special aspect and character to the place” (4: 196).