The house of the dead or, Prison life in Siberia
thirty kopecks silver a lesson. His external appearance interested me.
He was excessively pale and thin, still young--about thirty-five years
of age--short and weak, always very neatly dressed in the European
style. When you spoke to him he looked at you in a very attentive
manner, listening to your words with strict politeness, and with a
reflective air, as though you had placed before him a problem or wished
to extract from him a secret. He replied clearly and shortly; but in
doing so, weighed each word, so that one felt ill at ease without
knowing why, and was glad when the conversation came to an end. I put
some questions to Ivan Gvosdikof in regard to him. He told me that
Goriantchikoff was of irreproachable morals, otherwise Gvosdikof would
not have entrusted him with the education of his children; but that he
was a terrible misanthrope, who kept apart from all society; that he was
very learned, a great reader, and that he spoke but little, and never
entered freely into a conversation. Certain persons told him that he was
mad; but that was not looked upon as a very serious defect. Accordingly,
the most important persons in the town were ready to treat Alexander
Petrovitch with respect, for he could be useful to them in writing
petitions. It was believed that he was well connected in Russia.
Perhaps, among his relations, there were some who were highly placed;
but it was known that since his exile he had broken off all relations
with them. In a word--he injured himself. Every one knew his story, and
was aware that he had killed his wife, through jealousy, less than a
year after his marriage; and that he had given himself up to justice;
which had made his punishment much less severe. Such crimes are always
looked upon as misfortunes, which must be treated with pity.
Nevertheless, this original kept himself obstinately apart, and never
showed himself except to give lessons. In the first instance I paid no
attention to him; then, without knowing why, I found myself interested
by him. He was rather enigmatic; to talk with him was quite impossible.
Certainly he replied to all my questions; he seemed to make it a duty to
do so; but when once he had answered, I was afraid to interrogate him
any longer.
After such conversations one could observe on his countenance signs of
suffering and exhaustion. I remember that, one fine summer evening, I
went out with him from the house of Ivan Gvosdikof. It suddenly occurred
to me to invite him to come in with me and smoke a cigarette. I can
scarcely describe the fright which showed itself in his countenance. He
became confused, muttered incoherent words, and suddenly, after looking
at me with an angry air, took to flight in an opposite direction. I was
very much astonished afterwards, when he met me. He seemed to
experience, on seeing me, a sort of terror; but I did not lose courage.
There was something in him which attracted me.
A month afterwards I went to see Petrovitch without any pretext. It is
evident that, in doing so, I behaved foolishly, and without the least
delicacy. He lived at one of the extreme points of the town with an old
woman whose daughter was in a consumption. The latter had a little child
about ten years old, very pretty and very lively.
When I went in Alexander Petrovitch was seated by her side, and was
teaching her to read. When he saw me he became confused, as if I had
detected him in a crime. Losing all self-command, he suddenly stood up
and looked at me with awe and astonishment. Then we both of us sat down.
He followed attentively all my looks, as if I had suspected him of some
mysterious intention. I understood he was horribly mistrustful. He
looked at me as a sort of spy, and he seemed to be on the point of
saying, “Are you not soon going away?”
I spoke to him of our little town, of the news of the day, but he was
silent, or smiled with an air of displeasure. I could see that he was
absolutely ignorant of all that was taking place in the town, and that
he was in no way curious to know. I spoke to him afterwards of the
country generally, and of its men. He listened to me still in silence,
fixing his eyes upon me in such a strange way that I became ashamed of
what I was doing. I was very nearly offending him by offering him some
books and newspapers which I had just received by post. He cast a greedy
look upon them; he then seemed to alter his mind, and declined my offer,
giving his want of leisure as a pretext.
At last I wished him good-bye, and I felt a weight fall from my
shoulders as I left the house. I regretted to have harassed a man whose
tastes kept him apart from the rest of the world. But the fault had been
committed. I had remarked that he possessed very few books. It was not
true, then, that he read so much. Nevertheless, on two occasions when I
drove past, I saw a light in his lodging. What could make him sit up so
late? Was he writing, and if that were so, what was he writing?
I was absent from our town for about three months. When I returned home
in the winter, I learned that Petrovitch was dead, and that he had not
even sent for a doctor. He was even now already forgotten, and his
lodging was unoccupied. I at once made the acquaintance of his landlady,
in the hope of learning from her what her lodger had been writing. For
twenty kopecks she brought me a basket full of papers left by the
defunct, and confessed to me that she had already employed four sheets
in lighting her fire. She was a morose and taciturn old woman. I could
not get from her anything that was interesting. She could tell me
nothing about her lodger. She gave me to understand all the same that he
scarcely ever worked, and that he remained for months together without
opening a book or touching a pen. On the other hand, he walked all night
up and down his room, given up to his reflections. Sometimes, indeed, he
spoke aloud. He was very fond of her little grandchild, Katia, above all
when he knew her name; on her name’s-day--the day of St. Catherine--he
always had a requiem said in the church for some one’s soul. He detested
receiving visits, and never went out except to give lessons. Even his
landlady he looked upon with an unfriendly eye when, once a week, she
came into his room to put it in order.
During the three years he had passed with her, he had scarcely ever
spoken to her. I asked Katia if she remembered him. She looked at me in
silence, and turned weeping to the wall. This man, then, was loved by
some one! I took away the papers, and passed the day in examining them.
They were for the most part of no importance, merely children’s
exercises. At last I came to a rather thick packet, the sheets of which
were covered with delicate handwriting, which abruptly ceased. It had
perhaps been forgotten by the writer. It was the narrative--incoherent
and fragmentary--of the ten years Alexander Petrovitch had passed in
hard labour. This narrative was interrupted, here and there, either by
anecdotes, or by strange, terrible recollections thrown in convulsively
as if torn from the writer. I read some of these fragments again and
again, and I began to doubt whether they had not been written in moments
of madness; but these memories of the convict prison--“Recollections of
the Dead-House,” as he himself called them somewhere in his
manuscript--seemed to me not without interest. They revealed quite a new
world unknown till then; and in the strangeness of his facts, together
with his singular remarks on this fallen people, there was enough to
tempt me to go on. I may perhaps be wrong, but I will publish some
chapters from this narrative, and the public shall judge for itself.
CHAPTER II.
THE DEAD-HOUSE
Our prison was at the end of the citadel behind the ramparts. Looking
through the crevices between the palisade in the hope of seeing
something, one sees nothing but a little corner of the sky, and a high
earthwork, covered with the long grass of the steppe. Night and day
sentries walk to and fro upon it. Then one perceives from the first,
that whole years will pass during which one will see by the same
crevices between the palisades, upon the same earthwork, always the same
sentinels and the same little corner of the sky, not just above the
prison, but far and far away. Represent to yourself a court-yard, two
hundred feet long, and one hundred and fifty feet broad, enclosed by an
irregular hexagonal palisade, formed of stakes thrust deep into the
earth. So much for the external surroundings of the prison. On one side
of the palisade is a great gate, solid, and always shut; watched
perpetually by the sentinels, and never opened, except when the convicts
go out to work. Beyond this, there are light and liberty, the life of
free people! Beyond the palisade, one thought of the marvellous world,
fantastic as a fairy tale. It was not the same on our side. Here, there
was no resemblance to anything. Habits, customs, laws, were all
precisely fixed. It was the house of living death. It is this corner
that I undertake to describe.
On penetrating into the enclosure one sees a few buildings. On each
side of a vast court are stretched forth two wooden constructions, made
of trunks of trees, and only one storey high. These are convicts’
barracks. Here the prisoners are confined, divided into several classes.
At the end of the enclosure may be seen a house, which serves as a
kitchen, divided into two compartments. Behind it is another building,
which serves at once as cellar, loft, and barn. The centre of the
enclosure, completely barren, is a large open space. Here the prisoners
are drawn up in ranks, three times a day. They are identified, and must
answer to their names, morning, noon, and evening, besides several times
in the course of the day if the soldiers on guard are suspicious and
clever at counting. All around, between the palisades and the buildings
there remains a sufficiently large space, where some of the prisoners
who are misanthropes, or of a sombre turn of mind, like to walk about
when they are not at work. There they go turning over their favourite
thoughts, shielded from all observation.
When I met them during those walks of theirs, I took pleasure in
observing their sad, deeply-marked countenances, and in guessing their
thoughts. The favourite occupation of one of the convicts, during the
moments of liberty left to him from his hard labour, was to count the
palisades. There were fifteen hundred of them. He had counted them all,
and knew them nearly by heart. Every one of them represented to him a
day of confinement; but, counting them daily in this manner, he knew
exactly the number of days that he had still to pass in the prison. He
was sincerely happy when he had finished one side of the hexagon; yet he
had to wait for his liberation many long years. But one learns patience
in a prison.
One day I saw a prisoner, who had undergone his punishment, take leave
of his comrades. He had had twenty years’ hard labour. More than one
convict remembered seeing him arrive, quite young, careless, thinking
neither of his crime nor of his punishment. He was now an old man with
gray hairs, with a sad and morose countenance. He walked in silence
through our six barracks. When he entered each of them he prayed before
the holy image, made a deep bow to his former companions, and begged
them not to keep a bad recollection of him.
I also remember one evening, a prisoner, who had been formerly a
well-to-do Siberian peasant, so called. Six years before he had had news
of his wife’s remarrying, which had caused him great pain. That very
evening she had come to the prison, and had asked for him in order to
make him a present! They talked together for two minutes, wept together,
and then separated never to meet again. I saw the expression of this