The house of the dead or, Prison life in Siberia
bring myself to believe him guilty.’
“Some time ago the editor of the ‘Recollections of the House of the
Dead,’ had intelligence from Siberia of the discovery of the innocence
of this ‘parricide,’ and that he had undergone ten years of the
imprisonment with hard labour for nothing; this was recognised and
avowed by the authorities. The real criminals had been discovered and
had confessed, and the unfortunate man in question set at liberty. All
this stands upon unimpeachable and authoritative grounds.”
To say more would be useless. The tragical facts speak too clearly for
themselves. All words are weak in such a case, where a life has been
ruined by such an accusation. Such mistakes as these are among the
dreadful possibilities of life, and such possibilities impart a keener
and more vivid interest to the “Recollections of the House of the Dead,”
which dreadful place we see may contain innocent as well as guilty men.
To continue. I have said that I became at last, in some sense,
accustomed, if not reconciled, to the conditions of convict life; but it
was a long and dreadful time before I was. It took me nearly a year to
get used to the prison, and I shall always regard this year as the most
dreadful of my life, it is graven deep in my memory, down to the very
least details. I think that I could minutely recall the events and
feelings of each successive hour in it.
I have said that the other prisoners, too, found it as difficult as I
did to get used to the life they had to lead. During the whole of this
first year, I used to ask myself whether they were really as calm as
they seemed to be. Questions of this kind pressed themselves upon me. As
I have mentioned before, all the convicts felt themselves in an alien
element to which they could not reconcile themselves. The sense of home
was an impossibility; they felt as if they were staying, as a stage
upon a journey, in an evil sort of inn. These men, exiles for and from
life, seemed either in a perpetual smouldering agitation, or else in
deep depression; but there was not one who had not his ordinary ideas of
one thing or another. This restlessness, which, if it did not come to
the surface, was still unmistakable; those vague hopes of the poor
creatures which existed in spite of themselves, hopes so ill-founded
that they were more like the promptings of incipient insanity than aught
else; all this stamped the place with a character, an originality,
peculiarly its own. One could not but feel when one went there that
there was nothing like it anywhere else in the whole world. There
everybody went about in a sort of waking dream; nor was there anything
to relieve or qualify the impressions the place made on the system of
every man; so that all seemed to suffer from a sort of hyperæsthetic
neurosis, and this dreaming of impossibilities gave to the majority of
the convicts a sombre and morose aspect, for which the word morbid is
not strong enough. Nearly all were taciturn and irascible, preferring to
keep to themselves the hopes they secretly and vainly cherished. The
result was, that anything like ingenuousness or frank statement was the
object of general contempt. Precisely because these wild hopings were
impossible, and, despite themselves, were felt to be so, confessed to
their more lucid selves to be so, they kept them jealously concealed in
the most secret recesses of their souls; while to renounce them was
beyond their powers of self-control. It may be they were ashamed of
their imagination. God knows. The Russian character is, in its normal
conditions, so positive and sober in its way of looking at life, so
pitiless in criticism of its own weaknesses.
Perhaps it was this inward misery of self-dissatisfaction which was at
the bottom of the impatience and intolerance the convicts showed among
themselves, and of the cruel biting things they said to each other. If
one of them, more naïve or impartial than the rest, put into words what
every one of them had in his mind, painted his castles in the air, told
his dreams of liberty, or plans of escape, they shut him up with brutal
promptitude, and made the poor fellow’s life a burden to him with their
sarcasms and jests. And I think those did it most unscrupulously who had
perhaps themselves gone furthest in cherishing futile hopes, and
indulging in senseless expectations. I have said, more than once, that
those among them who were marked by simplicity and candour were looked
on rather as being stupid and idiotic; there was nothing but contempt
for them. The convicts were so soured and, in the wrong sense,
sensitive, that they positively hated anything like amiability or
unselfishness. I should be disposed to classify them all broadly, as
either good or bad men, morose or cheerful, putting by themselves, as a
sort of separate creatures, the ingenious fellows who could not hold
their tongues. But the sour-tempered were in far the greatest majority;
some of these were talkative, but these were usually of slanderous and
envious disposition, always poking their noses into other people’s
business, though they took good care not to let anybody have a glimpse
of the secret thoughts of their _own_ souls; that would have been
against the fashions and conventions of this strange, little world. As
to the fellows who were really good--very few indeed were they--these
were always very quiet and peaceable, and buried their hopes, if they
had any, in strict silence; but more of real faith went with their hopes
than was the case with the gloomy-minded among the convicts. Stay, there
was one category further among our convicts, which ought not to be
forgotten; the men who had lost all hope, who were despairing and
desperate, like the old man of Starodoub; but these were very few
indeed.
The old man of Starodoub! This was a very subdued, quiet, old man; but
there were some indications of what went on in him, which he could not
help giving, and from which, I could not help seeing, that his inward
life was one of intolerable horror; still he had _something_ to fall
back upon for help and consolation--prayer, and the notion that he was a
martyr. The convict who was always reading the Bible, of whom I spoke
earlier, the one that went mad and threw himself, brick in hand, upon
the Major, was also probably one of those whom hope had altogether
abandoned; and, as it is perfectly impossible to go on living without
hope of some sort, he threw away his life as a sort of voluntary
sacrifice. He declared that he attacked the Major though he had no
grievance in particular; all he wanted was to have some torments
inflicted on himself.
Now, what sort of psychological operation had been going on in _that_
man’s soul? No man lives, can live, without having _some_ object in
view, and making efforts to attain that object. But when object there is
none, and hope is entirely fled, anguish often turns a man into a
monster. The object _we_ all had in view was liberty, and getting out of
our place of confinement and hard labour.
So I try to place our convicts in separately-defined classes and
categories; but it cannot well be done. Reality is a thing of infinite
diversity, and defies the most ingenious deductions and definitions of
abstract thought, nay, abhors the clear and precise classifications we
so delight in. Reality tends to infinite subdivision of things, and
truth is a matter of infinite shadings and differentiations. Every one
of us who were there had his own peculiar, interior, strictly personal
life, which lay altogether outside of the world of regulations and our
official superintendence.
But, as I have said before, I could not penetrate the depths of this
interior life in the early part of my prison career, for everything that
met my eyes, or challenged my attention in any way, filled me with a
sadness for which there are no words. Sometimes I felt nothing short of
hatred for poor creatures whose martyrdom was at least as great as mine.
In those first days I envied them, because they were among persons of
their own sort, and understood one another; so I thought, but the truth
was that their enforced companionship, the comradeship where the word of
command went with the whip or the rod, was as much an object of aversion
to them as it was to myself, and every one of them tried to keep himself
as much to himself as possible. This envious hatred of them, which came
to me in moments of irritation, was not without its reasonable cause,
for those who tell you so confidently that a cultivated man of the
higher class does not suffer as a mere peasant does, are utterly in the
wrong. That is a thing I have often heard said, and read too. In the
abstract, the notion seems correct, and it is founded in generous
sentiment, for all convicts are human beings alike; but in reality it is
different. In the real living facts of the problem there come in a
quantity of practical complications, and only experience can pronounce
upon these: experience which I have had. I do not mean to lay it down
peremptorily, that the nobleman and the man of culture feel more
acutely, sensitively, deeply, because of their more highly developed
conditions of being. On the other hand, it is impossible to bring all
souls to one common level or standard; neither the grade of education,
nor any other thing, furnishes a standard according to which punishment
can be meted out.
It is a great satisfaction to me to be able to say that among these
dreadful sufferers, in a state of things so barbarous and abject, I
found abundant proof that the elements of moral development were not
wanting. In our convict establishment there were men whom I was familiar
with for several years, and whom I looked upon as wild beasts and
abhorred as such; well, all of a sudden, when I least expected it, these
very men would exhibit such an abundance of feeling of the best kind, so
keen a comprehension of the sufferings of others, seen in the light of
the consciousness of their own, that one might almost fancy scales had
fallen from their eyes. So sudden was it as to cause stupefaction; one
could scarcely believe one’s eyes or ears. Sometimes it was just the
other way: educated men, well brought up, would occasionally display a
savage, cynical brutality which nearly turned one’s stomach, conduct of
a kind impossible to excuse or justify, however much you might be
charitably inclined to do so.
I lay no stress on the entire change in the habits of life, the food,
etc., as to which there come in points where the man of the higher
classes suffers so much more keenly than the peasant or working man, who
often goes hungry when free, while he always has his stomach-full in
prison. We will leave all that out. Let it be admitted that for a man
with some force of character these external things are a trifle in
comparison with privations of a quite different kind; for all that, such
total change of material conditions and habits is neither an easy nor a
slight thing. But in the convict’s _status_ there are elements of horror
before which all other horrors pale, even the mud and filth everywhere
about, the scantiness and uncleanness of the food, the irons on your
limbs, the suffocating sense of being always held tight, as in a vice.
The capital, the most important point of all is, that after a couple of
hours or so, every new-comer to a convict establishment, who is of the
lower class, shakes down into equality with the rest; he is _at home_
among them, he has his “freedom” of this city of the enslaved, this
community of convicted scoundrels, in which one man is superficially
like every other man; he understands and is understood, he is looked
upon by everybody as _one of themselves_. Now all this is _not_ so in
the case of the nobleman. However kindly, just-minded, intelligent a man