Dostoevsky
place so wet that one scarcely dares to move. From twilight till
morning we are forbidden to leave the barrack-room; the doors are
barricaded; in the ante-room a great wooden trough for the calls of
nature is placed; this makes one almost unable to breathe. All the
prisoners stink like pigs; they say that they can’t help it, for they
must live, and are but men. We sleep upon bare boards; each man was
allowed one pillow only. We covered ourselves with short sheepskins,
and our feet were outside the covering all the time. It was thus that
we froze night after night. Fleas, lice, and other vermin by the
bushel. In the winter we got thin sheepskins to wear, which didn’t keep
us warm at all, and boots with short legs; thus equipped, we had to go
out into the frost.
“To eat we got bread and cabbage soup; the soup should, by the
regulations, have contained a quarter pound of meat per head; but they
put in sausage-meat, and so I never came across a piece of genuine
flesh. On feast days we got porridge, but with scarcely any butter. On
fast days, cabbage and nothing else. My stomach went utterly to pieces,
and I suffered tortures from indigestion.
“From all this you can see yourself that one couldn’t live there at
all without money; if I had had none, I should most assuredly have
perished; no one could endure such a life. But every convict does some
sort of work and sells it, thus earning, every single one of them, a
few pence. I often drank tea and bought myself a piece of meat; it
was my salvation. It was quite impossible to do without smoking, for
otherwise the stench would have choked one. All these things were done
behind the backs of the officials.
“I was often in hospital. My nerves were so shattered that I had some
epileptic fits--however, that was not often. I have rheumatism in my
legs now, too. But except for that, I feel right well. Add to all these
discomforts the fact that it was almost impossible to get one’s self a
book, and that when I did get one, I had to read it on the sly; that
all around me was incessant malignity, turbulence, and quarrelling;
then perpetual espionage, and the impossibility of ever being alone,
even for an instant--and so without variation for four long years.
You’ll believe me when I tell you I was not happy! And imagine, in
addition, the ever-present dread of drawing down some punishment on
myself, the irons, and the utter oppression of spirits--and you have
the picture of my life.
“I won’t even try to tell you what transformations were undergone by my
soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart, in those four years. It would be
a long story. Still, the eternal concentration, the escape into myself
from bitter reality, did bear its fruit. I now have many new needs and
hopes of which I never thought in other days. But all this will be pure
enigma for you, and so I’ll pass to other things. I will say only one
word: do not forget me, and do help me! I need books and money. Send
them me, for Christ’s sake.
“Omsk is a hateful hole. There is hardly a tree there. In summer, heat
and winds that bring sandstorms; in winter, snowstorms. I have scarcely
seen anything of the country around. The place is dirty, almost
exclusively inhabited by military, and dissolute to the last degree. I
mean the common people. If I hadn’t discovered some human beings here,
I should have gone utterly to the dogs.
“Constantine Ivanovitch Ivanov is like a brother to me. He has done
everything that he in any way could for me. I owe him money. If he ever
goes to Petersburg, show him some recognition. I owe him twenty-five
roubles. But how can I repay his kindness, his constant willingness to
carry out all my requests, his attention and care for me, just like a
brother’s? And he is not the only one I have to thank in that way.
Brother, there are very many noble natures in the world.
“I have already said that your silence often tortures me. I thank you
for the money you sent. In your next letter (even if it’s ‘_official_,’
for I don’t know yet whether it is possible for me to correspond with
you)--in your next, write as fully as you can of all your affairs, of
Emilie Fyodorovna, the children, all relations and acquaintances; also
of those in Moscow--who is alive and who is dead; and of your business;
tell me what capital you started with, whether it is lucrative, whether
you are in funds, finally, whether you will help me financially, and
how much you will send me a year. But send no money with the official
letter--particularly if I don’t find a covering address. For the
present, give Michael Petrovitch as the consignor of all packets (you
understand, don’t you?). For the time, I have some money, but I have no
books. If you can, send me the magazines for this year, or at any rate
the _O.Z._
“But what I urgently need are the following: I need (very necessary!)
ancient historians (in French translation), modern historians: Guizot,
Thierry, Thiers, Ranke, and so forth; national studies, and the Fathers
of the Church. Choose the cheapest and most compact editions. Send them
by return.
“People try to console me: ‘They’re quite simple sort of fellows
there.’ But I dread simple men more than complex ones. For that matter,
men everywhere are just--men. Even among the robber-murderers in
the prison, I came to know some men in those four years. Believe me,
there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often
gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior. And not in a
single case, or even two, but in several cases. Some inspired respect,
others were downright fine. I taught the Russian language to a young
Circassian--he had been transported to Siberia for robbery with murder.
How grateful he was to me! Another convict wept when I said good-bye to
him. Certainly I had often given him money, but it was so little, and
his gratitude so boundless! My character, though, was deteriorating;
in my relations with others I was ill-tempered and impatient. They
accounted for it by my mental condition, and bore all without
grumbling. Apropos, what a number of national types and characters I
became familiar with in prison! I lived _into_ their lives, and so I
believe I know them really well. Many tramps’ and thieves’ careers
were laid bare to me, and above all, the whole wretched existence of
the common people. Decidedly I have not spent my time there in vain. I
have learnt to know the Russian people as only a few know them. I am a
little vain of it. I hope that such vanity is pardonable....
“Send me the Koran, and Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_, and if you
have the chance of sending me anything not officially, then be sure
to send Hegel, but particularly Hegel’s _History of Philosophy_. Upon
that depends my whole future. For God’s sake, exert yourself to get
me transferred to the Caucasus; try to find out from well-informed
sources whether I shall be permitted to print my works, and in what way
I should seek this sanction. I intend to try for permission in two or
three years. I beg you to sustain me so long. Without money I shall be
destroyed by military life. So please!...
“Now I mean to write novels and plays. But I must still read a great
deal. Don’t forget me.
“Once again farewell.
“F. D.”[41]
This letter, like so many others, remained unanswered. It is evident
that Dostoevsky was left without news from his family during his
whole term of imprisonment. Are we to suppose, on his brother’s part,
prudence, fear of compromising himself, or maybe indifference? I cannot
tell. Mme. Hoffmann, in her biography, inclines to the last-mentioned
supposition.
The first we know of Dostoevsky’s letters subsequent to his release and
enlistment in the 7th Siberian Line Regiment is dated March 27, 1854.
It does not appear in the French edition of his correspondence. In this
letter we read as follows:
“Send me--not newspapers, but European histories. Economists--Church
Fathers--as many of the classics as possible. Herodotus, Thucydides,
Tacitus, Pliny, Flavius, Plutarch, Diodorus, etc., in French
translations. And the Koran and a German Dictionary. Not all at once,
of course, but as much as you can. Send me Pissaren’s _Physics_
too, and a manual of physiology, any one, in French if better than
in Russian. All in the cheapest editions. Not in one consignment,
but slowly, one book after another. I shall be grateful for every
little thing you can do for me. Do realize how urgently I need this
intellectual food!...”
“Now you know my chief occupations,” he writes a little later. “Really
I have none but these connected with my duty. No outside events, no
disturbances in my life, no mishaps. But what is happening in soul,
heart, and mind, what has sprung up, ripened or been blighted, what
has been cast aside with the tares, _that_ cannot be told and written
down on a scrap of paper. Here I live in isolation; I shrink out of
sight, as usual. Moreover, for five years I lived with an escort,
and there are times when it is pure bliss for me to be alone. On
the whole, prison has destroyed many things in me and created new.
For example, I’ve already spoken about my illness: strange attacks
resembling epilepsy. And yet not epilepsy. Some day I shall give you
particulars.”[42]
In the last of these causeries we shall come back to this terrible
question of his illness.
In a letter dated November 6 of the same year we find:
“It will soon be ten months since I took up my new life. As for the
other four years, I look upon them as a period when I was buried alive
and closed in a coffin. What terrible years! I cannot, my friend, tell
you how terrible. Unspeakable suffering without end, for every hour,
every minute lay heavy on my soul. During the whole of these four
years, not a moment but what I was conscious of my prison walls.”[43]
But, immediately after, watch how far his optimism rises above it all:
“I was so busy all summer that I had scarcely time for sleep. But now
I have grown used to things. My health too has improved slightly.
And, hope not wholly lost, I can look at the future with moderate
fortitude.”[44]
Three letters from the same period were given in the _Niva_, April,
1898. Of these the French edition of Dostoevsky’s _Correspondence_
includes the first only. In one (August 21, 1855) there is reference to
a letter of the previous October, which has not been traced.
“When, in my letter of last October, I repeated my complaints at your
silence, you answered that these had made very painful reading for
you. Oh, Mysha! for the love of God, bear me no ill-will; remember
my loneliness. I am like a pebble cast aside. I’ve always been of
a gloomy, sickly, susceptible disposition. I am myself thoroughly
convinced I was in the wrong.”
Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg on November 29, 1859. At
Semipalatinsk he had married the widow of a deportee, mother of a
growing son whose intelligence seemingly was less than mediocre.
Dostoevsky adopted the boy, for whom he made himself answerable. He had
a perfect mania for assuming burdens.
“He was but little altered,” his friend Miliukov tells us. “His mien
is more confident than of yore, and his features have lost none of the
energy they used to express.”
In 1861 he published _Insulted and Injured_; in 1861-2 his _Memories of
the House of the Dead_. _Crime and Punishment_, the first of his great
novels, did not appear till 1866.
During the years 1863-1865, he busied himself actively with a review.
One of his letters speaks so eloquently of the years between that I
must read further passages: this is, I think, the last time I shall
quote to you from his correspondence! This particular letter is dated
March 31, 1865.