Quarrel & Quandary Read Online Free PDF Page A

“the well-known demagogue.” To improve the miserable living conditions of the peasants on his land, Petrashevsky had a commodious communal dormitory built for them, with every amenity provided. They all moved in, and the next day burned down the master’s paternalistic utopia. Undaunted, Petrashevskycontinued to propagandize for his ideas: the end of serfdom and censorship, and the reform of the courts. His commitment was to gradualism, but certain more impatient members of the Petrashevsky circle quietly formed a secret society dedicated to an immediate and deeply perilous activism.
    It was with these that Dostoyevsky aligned himself; he joined a scheme to print and disseminate the explosive manifesto in the form of the letter to Gogol, which Belinsky had composed a year or so earlier, protesting the enslavement of the peasants. Russia, Belinsky wrote, “presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men, without ever having the excuse so insidiously exploited by the American plantation owners who claim that the Negro is not a man.” Dostoyevsky gave an impressive reading of this document at one of Petrashevsky’s Friday nights. His audience erupted into an uproar; there were yells of “That’s it! That’s it!” A government spy, unrecognized, took notes, and at four in the morning Dostoyevsky’s bedroom was invaded by the Czar’s secret police. He was arrested as a revolutionary conspirator; he was twenty-seven years old.
    Nicholas I took a malicious interest in the punishment for this crime against the state—the Czar
was
the state—and personally ordered the mock execution, the last-minute reprieve, the transport to Siberia. Dostoyevsky’s sentence was originally eight years; he served four at forced labor in a prison camp at Omsk and the rest in an army regiment. In Siberia, after his release from the camp, he married for the first time—a tumultuous widow with worsening tuberculosis. His own affliction worsened; seizure followed on seizure. For the remainder of his life he would not be free of the anguish of fits. He feared he would die while in their grip.
    The moment of cataclysmic terror before the firing squad never left him. He was not so much altered as strangely—almostmystically—restored: restored to what he had felt as a child, kneeling with his mother at the reliquary of St. Sergey. He spoke circumspectly of “the regeneration of my convictions.” The only constant was his hatred of the institution of serfdom—but to hate serfdom was not to love peasants, and when he began to live among peasant convicts (political prisoners were not separated from the others), he found them degraded and savage, with a malignant hostility toward the gentry thrown into their midst. The agonies of hard labor, the filth, the chains, the enmity, the illicit drunkenness, his own nervous disorders—all these assailed him, and he suffered in captivity from a despondency nearly beyond endurance.
    And then—in a metamorphosis akin to the Ancient Mariner’s sudden love for the repulsive creatures of the sea—he was struck by what can only be called a conversion experience. In the twisted and branded faces of the peasant convicts—men much like those who may have murdered his father—he saw a divine illumination; he saw the true Russia; he saw beauty; he saw the kind-hearted serf who had consoled him when the imaginary wolf pursued. Their instinctive piety was his. Their soil-rootedness became a precept. He struggled to distinguish between one criminal motive and another: from the viewpoint of a serf, was a crime against a hardened master really a crime? Under the tatters of barbarism, he perceived the image of God.
    The collective routine of the stockade drove him further and further from the socialist dream of communal living. “To be alone is a normal need,” he railed. “Otherwise,
in this enforced communism one turns into a hater of mankind.
” And at the same time he began to discover