Resurrection
could not lie, he could not dissemble; not simply thin skinned, but
with all his nerves laid bare, as if he were flayed. Yes, his was a
complicated, rich nature, not such a-- But where is the use of talking?”
he added, with a vicious frown. “Shall we first educate the people
and then change the forms of life, or first change the forms and then
struggle, using peaceful propaganda or terrorism? So we go on disputing
while _they_ kill; _they_ do not dispute--they know their business; they
don’t care whether dozens, hundreds of men perish--and what men! No;
that the best should perish is just what they want. Yes, Herzen said
that when the Decembrists were withdrawn from circulation the average
level of our society sank. I should think so, indeed. Then Herzen
himself and his fellows were withdrawn; now is the turn of the
Neveroffs.”
“They can’t all be got rid off,” said Nabatoff, in his cheerful tones.
“There will always be left enough to continue the breed. No, there
won’t, if we show any pity to _them_ there,” Nabatoff said, raising his
voice; and not letting himself be interrupted, “Give me a cigarette.”
“Oh, Anatole, it is not good for you,” said Mary Pavlovna. “Please do
not smoke.”
“Oh, leave me alone,” he said angrily, and lit a cigarette, but at once
began to cough and to retch, as if he were going to be sick. Having
cleared his throat though, he went on:
“What we have been doing is not the thing at all. Not to argue, but for
all to unite--to destroy them--that’s it.”
“But _they_ are also human beings,” said Nekhludoff.
“No, _they_ are not human, they who can do what they are
doing--No--There, now, I heard that some kind of bombs and balloons have
been invented. Well, one ought to go up in such a balloon and sprinkle
bombs down on _them_ as if _they_ were bugs, until _they_ are all
exterminated--Yes. Because--” he was going to continue, but, flushing
all over, he began coughing worse than before, and a stream of blood
rushed from his mouth.
Nabatoff ran to get ice. Mary Pavlovna brought valerian drops and
offered them to him, but he, breathing quickly and heavily, pushed her
away with his thin, white hand, and kept his eyes closed. When the ice
and cold water had eased Kryltzoff a little, and he had been put to
bed, Nekhludoff, having said good-night to everybody, went out with the
sergeant, who had been waiting for him some time.
The criminals were now quiet, and most of them were asleep. Though the
people were lying on and under the bed shelves and in the space between,
they could not all be placed inside the rooms, and some of them lay in
the passage with their sacks under their heads and covered with their
cloaks. The moans and sleepy voices came through the open doors and
sounded through the passage. Everywhere lay compact heaps of human
beings covered with prison cloaks. Only a few men who were sitting in
the bachelors’ room by the light of a candle end, which they put out
when they noticed the sergeant, were awake, and an old man who sat naked
under the lamp in the passage picking the vermin off his shirt. The
foul air in the political prisoners’ rooms seemed pure compared to the
stinking closeness here. The smoking lamp shone dimly as through a mist,
and it was difficult to breathe. Stepping along the passage, one had to
look carefully for an empty space, and having put down one foot had to
find place for the other. Three persons, who had evidently found no
room even in the passage, lay in the anteroom, close to the stinking and
leaking tub. One of these was an old idiot, whom Nekhludoff had often
seen marching with the gang; another was a boy about twelve; he lay
between the two other convicts, with his head on the leg of one of them.
When he had passed out of the gate Nekhludoff took a deep breath and
long continued to breathe in deep draughts of frosty air.
CHAPTER XIX.
WHY IS IT DONE?
It had cleared up and was starlight. Except in a few places the mud was
frozen hard when Nekhludoff returned to his inn and knocked at one of
its dark windows. The broad-shouldered labourer came barefooted to open
the door for him and let him in. Through a door on the right, leading
to the back premises, came the loud snoring of the carters, who slept
there, and the sound of many horses chewing oats came from the yard. The
front room, where a red lamp was burning in front of the icons, smelt
of wormwood and perspiration, and some one with mighty lungs was snoring
behind a partition. Nekhludoff undressed, put his leather travelling
pillow on the oilcloth sofa, spread out his rug and lay down, thinking
over all he had seen and heard that day; the boy sleeping on the liquid
that oozed from the stinking tub, with his head on the convict’s leg,
seemed more dreadful than all else.
Unexpected and important as his conversation with Simonson and Katusha
that evening had been, he did not dwell on it; his situation in relation
to that subject was so complicated and indefinite that he drove the
thought from his mind. But the picture of those unfortunate beings,
inhaling the noisome air, and lying in the liquid oozing out of the
stinking tub, especially that of the boy, with his innocent face asleep
on the leg of a criminal, came all the more vividly to his mind, and he
could not get it out of his head.
To know that somewhere far away there are men who torture other men
by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradation and
sufferings on them, or for three months incessantly to look on while men
were inflicting these humiliations and sufferings on other men is a very
different thing. And Nekhludoff felt it. More than once during these
three months he asked himself, “Am I mad because I see what others do
not, or are they mad that do these things that I see?”
Yet they (and there were many of them) did what seemed so astonishing
and terrible to him with such quiet assurance that what they were doing
was necessary and was important and useful work that it was hard to
believe they were mad; nor could he, conscious of the clearness of his
thoughts, believe he was mad; and all this kept him continually in a
state of perplexity.
This is how the things he saw during these three months impressed
Nekhludoff: From among the people who were free, those were chosen, by
means of trials and the administration, who were the most nervous,
the most hot tempered, the most excitable, the most gifted, and the
strongest, but the least careful and cunning. These people, not a wit
more dangerous than many of those who remained free, were first locked
in prisons, transported to Siberia, where they were provided for and
kept months and years in perfect idleness, and away from nature, their
families, and useful work--that is, away from the conditions necessary
for a natural and moral life. This firstly. Secondly, these people
were subjected to all sorts of unnecessary indignity in these different
Places--chains, shaved heads, shameful clothing--that is, they were
deprived of the chief motives that induce the weak to live good lives,
the regard for public opinion, the sense of shame and the consciousness
of human dignity. Thirdly, they were continually exposed to dangers,
such as the epidemics so frequent in places of confinement, exhaustion,
flogging, not to mention accidents, such as sunstrokes, drowning or
conflagrations, when the instinct of self-preservation makes even the
kindest, most moral men commit cruel actions, and excuse such actions
when committed by others.
Fourthly, these people were forced to associate with others who
were particularly depraved by life, and especially by these very
institutions--rakes, murderers and villains--who act on those who are
not yet corrupted by the measures inflicted on them as leaven acts on
dough.
And, fifthly, the fact that all sorts of violence, cruelty, inhumanity,
are not only tolerated, but even permitted by the government, when it
suits its purposes, was impressed on them most forcibly by the inhuman
treatment they were subjected to; by the sufferings inflicted on
children, women and old men; by floggings with rods and whips; by
rewards offered for bringing a fugitive back, dead or alive; by the
separation of husbands and wives, and the uniting them with the wives
and husbands of others for sexual intercourse; by shooting or hanging
them. To those who were deprived of their freedom, who were in want
and misery, acts of violence were evidently still more permissible.
All these institutions seemed purposely invented for the production of
depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions
could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and
vice broadcast among the whole population.
“Just as if a problem had been set to find the best, the surest means
of depraving the greatest number of persons,” thought Nekhludoff, while
investigating the deeds that were being done in the prisons and halting
stations. Every year hundreds of thousands were brought to the highest
pitch of depravity, and when completely depraved they were set free to
carry the depravity they had caught in prison among the people. In
the prisons of Tamen, Ekaterinburg, Tomsk and at the halting stations
Nekhludoff saw how successfully the object society seemed to have set
itself was attained.
Ordinary, simple men with a conception of the demands of the social and
Christian Russian peasant morality lost this conception, and found a
new one, founded chiefly on the idea that any outrage or violence was
justifiable if it seemed profitable. After living in a prison those
people became conscious with the whole of their being that, judging by
what was happening to themselves, all the moral laws, the respect and
the sympathy for others which church and the moral teachers preach,
was really set aside, and that, therefore, they, too, need not keep the
laws. Nekhludoff noticed the effects of prison life on all the convicts
he knew--on Fedoroff, on Makar, and even on Taras, who, after two months
among the convicts, struck Nekhludoff by the want of morality in his
arguments. Nekhludoff found out during his journey how tramps, escaping
into the marshes, persuade a comrade to escape with them, and then kill
him and feed on his flesh. (He saw a living man who was accused of this
and acknowledged the fact.) And the most terrible part was that this was
not a solitary, but a recurring case.
Only by a special cultivation of vice, such as was perpetrated in these
establishments, could a Russian be brought to the state of this tramp,
who excelled Nietzsche’s newest teaching, and held that everything was
possible and nothing forbidden, and who spread this teaching first among
the convicts and then among the people in general.
The only explanation of all that was being done was the wish to put
a stop to crime by fear, by correction, by lawful vengeance as it was
written in the books. But in reality nothing in the least resembling any
of these results came to pass. Instead of vice being put a stop to, it
only spread further; instead of being frightened, the criminals were
encouraged (many a tramp returned to prison of his own free will).
Instead of being corrected, every kind of vice was systematically
instilled, while the desire for vengeance did not weaken by the measures
of the government, but was bred in the people who had none of it.
“Then why is it done?” Nekhludoff asked himself, but could find no
answer. And what seemed most surprising was that all this was not being
done accidentally, not by mistake, not once, but that it had continued
for centuries, with this difference only, that at first the people’s
nostrils used to be torn and their ears cut off; then they were branded,
and now they were manacled and transported by steam instead of on the