In ‘The House of the Dead’ (1862), Dostoyevsky presents a series of gripping character portraits based on his observations in the Siberian prison. This semi-autobiographical account of a “gentleman” condemned to hard labor for ten years explores the profound effects of confinement and servitude on his fellow prisoners, assembled from the farthest corners of Russia and forced to share their lives in the closest of quarters. Painfully accurate and stunningly rendered, the detached narration describes unflinchingly the grim life of the convicts -- those still desperate for hope and others already deadened by hopelessness -- with vivid realism. Considered a masterpiece of Russian literature, ‘The House of Dead’ is an example of Dostoyevsky at his finest.
Yeah. That.
If there is an overriding theme, it is something the narrator says early on regarding the conditions in which he and his fellow prisoners are forced to endure.
When it got dark we used all to be taken to the barracks, and to be locked up for the night. I always felt depressed at coming into our barrack-room from outside. It was a long, low-pitched, stuffy room, dimly lighted by tallow candles, full of a heavy stifling smell. I don’t understand now how I lived through ten years in it. I had three planks on the wooden platform; that was all I had to myself. On this wooden platform thirty men slept side by side in our room alone. In the winter we were locked up early; it was fully four hours before everyone was asleep. And before that -- noise, uproar, laughter, swearing, the clank of chains, smoke and grime, shaven heads, branded faces, ragged clothes, everything defiled and degraded. What cannot man live through! Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
Man can get accustomed to anything. The book is a testimony in defense of that proposition. And, importantly, I think, that “getting accustomed” to things can work in multiple directions. For example, not only can man get accustomed to being flogged:
I wondered sometimes how it was that a man who had murdered his officer for a blow could lie down under a flogging with such resignation. He was sometimes flogged when he was caught smuggling vodka. Like all convicts without a trade he sometimes undertook to bring in vodka. But he lay down to be flogged, as it were with his own consent, that is, as though acknowledging that he deserved it; except for that, nothing would have induced him to lie down, he would have been killed first.
He can also, evidently, grow accustomed to flogging others:
I do not know how it is now, but in the recent past there were gentlemen who derived from the power of flogging their victims something that suggests the Marquis de Sade and the Marquise de Brinvilliers. I imagine there is something in this sensation which sends a thrill at once sweet and painful to the hearts of these gentlemen. There are people who are like tigers thristing for blood. Anyone who has once experienced this power, this unlimited mastery of the body, blood and soul of a fellow man made of the same clay as himself, a brother in the law of Christ -- anyone who has experienced the power and full licence to inflict the greatest humiliation upon another creature made in the image of God will unconsciously lose the mastery of his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit; it may develop, and it does develop at last, into a disease. I maintain that the very best of men may be coarsened and hardened into a brute by habit. Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things, till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost for ever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible. Moreover, the example, the possibility of such despotism, has a perverting influence on the whole of society: such power is temptation. Society, which looks indifferently on such a phenomenon, is already contaminated to its very foundations. In short, the right of corporal punishment given to one man over another is one of the sores of social life, one of the strongest forces destructive of every germ, every effort in society towards civic feeling, and a sufficient cause for its inevitable dissolution.
This may indeed be the great genius of this work. It is not its story or plot -- which frankly is thin to the point of being absent -- but it looks in these ways into the very soul of man.
+ + +
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment