Life in Exile

After a long journey across the Urals, in which the sledges were stalled in the snow and the cold bit brutally at the travelers, Dostoevsky arrived at the Omsk Fortress, in Siberia. It was a cold, hopeless, brutal place. Upon arrival, all prisoners had half of their heads shaved and were sent to a convict's hut, which Dostoevsky describes as an "old, dilapidated wooden construction":

In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall...We were packed like herrings in a barrel...There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs...Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel...
[Frank 76. Quoted from Pisma, I: 135-137]

But the prison's most threatening vermin was Major Krivtsov, the despot who ran it. Krivtsov believed it was his mission to break the prisoners' spirits. He humiliated them, terrified them, flogged them. Dostoevsky became obsessed with a fear of being flogged. He would linger around prisoners who had experienced the whip and ask them to describe the pain to him in minute detail. He wanted to determine whether he, himself, could endure it. The hardships of prison proved to be a strain on his already-weak nerves, and Dostoevsky found himself often in the prison hospital, suffering fits of epilepsy.

Making matters worse for Dostoevsky was the class hostility between prisoners. The serf prisoners hated the gentlemen and took advantage of every opportunity to seek revenge for the wrongs done to them in the outside world. Dostoevsky describes the class hatred:

They [the peasant convicts] were coarse, ill-natured, cross-grained people. Their hatred for the gentry knew no bounds, and therefore they received us, the gentlemen, with hostility and malicious joy in our troubles. They would have eaten us alive, given the chance... {The peasants accused the gentry:] "You are noblemen, iron beaks that used to peck us to death. Before, the master used to torment the people, but now he is lower than the lowest, has become one of us."
[Frank 76. Quoted from Pisma, I: 135-137]

This revelation - that the peasants hated the gentry - challenged Dostoevsky's earlier idealization of the "simple peasant." It also challenged his belief that man is essentially good. In prison, Dostoevsky witnessed the abuse of the prisoners by the guards; he also saw prisoners abusing one another. They stole from each other, beat each other, cheated each other, and even raped each other. But worst of all, they seemed not to feel any remorse. Dostoevsky had believed that the peasants were spiritually superior to the intelligentsia. He also believed in the redeeming social power of remorse. Now he understood that he had misunderstood human nature altogether.

Even worse, he had misunderstood himself. Dostoevsky was surprised at the revulsion he felt towards his fellow man. In a letter, he says:

There were moments when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself - but you just can't help it.
[Frank 105. Quoted from a letter to Mme. Fonvizina, Pisma, I: 143]

Still, in the midst of abuse, corruption, and cruelty, Dostoevsky experienced a change of heart. It was during Pascha, a holiday very important to Orthodox Christianity, that Dostoevsky found that he did indeed share something with his inmates -Russian Orthodoxy. Dostoevsky writes about this moment in the "fictionalized memoir" he wrote after his return from exile, Notes from the House of the Dead:

The convicts took their prayers very seriously, and each time they came to church each one of them would...buy a candle or contribute to the collection. "I'm somebody, too," was what they thought or felt as they gave it up - "everyone's equal before God..." We took communion at early mass. When, with the chalice in his hand, the priest cam to the words "...receive me, O Lord, even as the robber," nearly all the convicts fell kneeling to the ground with a jangling of fetters, apparently interpreting these words as a literal expression of their own thoughts.
[Fyodor Dostoevsky, House of the Dead, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin Books, 1985) 275]

This moment illustrates the beginning of Dostoevsky's conversion. Once he saw the peasants as brothers in Christ, he came to believe once again that criminals were spiritual beings, worthy of care and capable of redemption:

Men, however, are everywhere men...Believe me, there are deep, strong, beautiful characters among them, and what a joy it was to discover the gold under the coarse, hard surface. And not one, not two, but several. It is impossible not to respect some of them, and some are positively splendid...I have lived closely with them, and so I think I know them thoroughly. How many stories of tramps and bandits, and in general or the dark and miserable milieu! ... What a wonderful people ...
[Frank 77-78. Quoted from Pisma, I: 138-139]

Despite his conversion, however, Dostoevsky's belief in Russian Orthodoxy would never be complete. As he wrote to a friend, he would always suffer as:

...a child of disbelief and doubt...and will remain so until the grave. How much terrible torture this thirst for faith has cost me and costs me even now, which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I find against it.
[Frank 160. Quoted from a letter to Mme. Fonvizina, Pisma, I: 142]

Dostoevsky's prison days -- and, indeed, the whole of his life -- would be a struggle to retain his faith both in God and in the goodness of man.

Read on: Release and Return

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