Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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young men knew nothing of it, and were making ready to die. If Nicholas I had been more subtly constituted, he would have realised that it would have been more generous to shoot the conspirators than to make them undergo such anguish. However, the Emperor acted in accordance with the manners of his time; our grandfathers had a great Uking for scenes of false sentiment. Nicholas no doubt thought he would confer a great joy on the young men by giving them back their lives on the scaffold itself. Few among them were able to bear this joy; some lost their reason, others died young. It i^ possible that my father's epilepsy would never have taken such a terrible form but for this grim jest.
Ill and enfeebled as he was, Dostoyevsky had mounted the scaffold boldly and had looked death bravely in the face. He has told us that all he felt at this moment was a mystic fear at the thought of presenting himself immediately before God, in his unprepared state. His friends who were gathered round the scaffold say he was calm and dignified. My father has described his emotions at this moment in The Idiot. Though he paints the anguish of one condemned to death, he tells us nothing of the joy he felt on learning his reprieve. It is probable that when the first rush of animal joy was over he felt a great bitterness, a deep indignation at the thought that he had been played with and tortured so cruelly. His pure soul, which was already aspiring heavenwards, perhaps regretted that it had to sink to earth again, and plunge once more into the mud in which we are all struggling.
My father returned to the fortress. A few days later he left for Siberia in company of a police officer. He quitted Petersburg on Christmas Eve. As he passed in a sleigh through the streets of the capital, he looked at the lighted windows of the houses and said to himself: " At this moment they are lighting up the Christmas tree in my brother Mihail's house. My nephews are admiring it, laughing and dancing round it, and I am not with them. God knows if I shall ever see them again I " Dostoyevsky regretted only his little nephews as he turned his back on that cold-hearted city.
On arriving in Siberia my father had a visit at one of the first halts from two ladies. They were the wives of " Dekabrists," 36 whose self-appointed mission it was to meet newly arrived political prisoners, in order to say a few words of comfort to them, and give them some advice about the life that awaited them as convicts. They handed my father a Bible, the only book allowed in prison. Taking advantage of a moment when the police officer's back was turned, one of the ladies told my father in French to examine the book carefully when he was alone. He found a note for 25 roubles stuck between two leaves of the Bible. With this money he was able to buy a little linen, soap and tobacco, to improve his coarse fare, and get white bread. He had no other money all the time he was in exile. His brothers, his sisters, his aunt and his friends had all basely deserted him, terrified by his crime and its punishment.
36 Persons implicated in a political plot against Nicholas I at the beginning of his reign. They made their attempt to overthrow autocratic rule in the month of December, whence their name of " Dekabrists." They were sent to a convict station; their wives followed them. They enjoyed more liberty than their husbands, who at the time of the Petrachevsky conspiracy, had already served their sentence, but had still to remain in Siberia under police siuveiUance. The " Dekabrists " had wished to introduce an aristocratic repubUc in Russia, and apportion power among those who belonged to the union of hereditary nobles. The nobles always had a great respect for the " Dekabrists " and considered them martyrs.
VI
PRISON LIFE
When a man is suddenly uprooted and finds himself obliged to spend years in a strange world, with people whose coarseness and lack of education are bound to distress him, he thinks out a plan by means of which he may avoid the worst blows to his susceptibilities, adopts an attitude, and resolves on a certain course of conduct. Some entrench themselves in silence and disdain, hoping to be left in peace; others become flatterers, and seek to purchase their repose by the basest adulation. Dostoyevsky, condemned to Uve for years in prison, in the midst of a redoubtable band of criminals, who, having nothing to lose, feared nothing and were capable of anything, chose a very different attitude; he adopted a tone of Christian fraternity. This was no new part to him; he had already essayed it when, as a child, he had approached the iron gate in his father's private garden and, risking a punishment, had entered into conversation with the poor patients of the hospital; again, when he had talked with the peasant-serfs of Darovoye, and tried to gain their affection by helping the poor women in their field-work. He adopted the same fraternal tone later when he studied the poor of Petersburg in the small cafis and drink-shops of the capital, playing billiards with them, and offering them their choice of refreshments the while he tried to surprise the secrets of their hearts. Dostoyevsky realised that he would never become a great writer by frequenting elegant drawing-rooms, full of polite people in -well-cut coats, with fashionable cravats, empty heads, anaemic hearts and colourless souls. Every writer depends on the people, on the simple souls who have never been taught the art of hiding their sufferings under a veil of trivial words. The moujiks of Yasnaia Poliana taught Tolstoy more than his Moscow friends could teach him. The peasants who accompanied Turgenev on his sporting expeditions gave him more original ideas than his European friends. Dostoyevsky in his turn depended on poor people, and from his childhood, instinctively sought a means of approaching them. This science, which he had already acquired to some extent, was to prove of the greatest service to him in Siberia.
Dostoyevsky has not concealed from us his method of making himself beloved by his fellow-convicts. In his novel. The Idiot, he describes his first steps in detail. Prince Mishkin, the descendant of a long line of ancestors of European culture, is travelling on a cold winter's day. He is a Russian, but having spent all his youth in Switzerland, he knows little of his fatherland. Russia interests and attracts him greatly; he longs to enter into her soul and discover her secrets. As the Prince is poor, he travels third class. He is no snob; his coarse, common fellow-travellers inspire no disgust in him. They are the first real Russians he has seen; in Switzerland he met only our intellectuals, who aped Europeans, and political refugees, who, speaking a horrible jargon they called Russian, posed as the representatives of the sacred dreams of our nation. Prince Mishkin realises that hitherto he had seen only copies and caricatures, he longs to know the originals at last. Looking sympathetically at his third-class companions, he waits only for the first sentence to enter into conversation with them. His fellow-travellers observe him with curiosity; they had never seen such a bird at close quarters before. The Prince's polite manners and European dress seemed ridiculous to them. They entered into conversation with him to make a fool of him, that they might have some fun at his expense. They laughed rudely, nudging each other, at the Prince's first words; but gradually, as he went on speaking, they ceased to laugh. His charming courtesy, his freedom from snobbishness, his ingenuous manner of treating them as his equals, as people of his own world, made them realise that they were in the presence of an extremely rare and curious creature—a true Christian. The youthful Rogogin feels the attraction of this Christian kindness, and hastens to pour out the secret of his heart to this distinguished unknown, who listens to him with so much interest. Though illiterate, Rogogin is very intelligent; he understands that Prince Mishkin is morally his superior. He admires and reverences him, but he sees clearly that the poor Prince is but a big child, an artless dreamer, who has no knowledge of life. He knows how malicious and relentless the world is. The idea of protecting this charming Prince enters Rogogin's noble heart. " Dear Prince," he says, when he takes leave of him in the station at Petersburg, " Come and see me. I will have a good pelisse made for you, and I will give you money and magnificent clothes, suitable to your rank."
Dostoyevsky arrived in Siberia on a cold winter's day. He travelled third-class, in company with thieves and murderers, whom the mother-country was sending away from her to the different convict-stations of Siberia. He observed his new companions with curiosity. Here it was at last, the real Russia which he had vainly sought in Petersburg I Here they were, those Russians, a curious mixture of Slavs and Mongolians, who had conquered a sixth part of the world ! Dostoyevsky studied the gloomy faces of his fellow-travellers, and that second sight which all serious writers have more or less, enabled him to decipher their thoughts and read their child-like hearts. He looked sympathetically