Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Impressions of Russian Literature - VI
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the ranks with loss of his rank as a noble and his rights
as a citizen. In Tobolsk the ways of the prisoners
separated; they said farewell to each other. Their feet were
fettered, their heads shaved, and they were sent to their
several places of destination.[1]
What Dostoyevski saw, felt, lived through, and
suffered in the Siberian House of Correction among the
dregs of the world, the poor creatures, the ignorant and
the barbarous, the criminals and the desperate, that he
has indirectly told the world in his “Recollections of a
Dead House,” one of the greatest masterpieces descriptively
and psychologically, which any literature has to
show. If he had written it in his own name, and spoken
of his crime as political, the book would never have
passed the censor. Therefore an imaginary narrator is
found, who in a moment of passion has committed a
common crime, and to whose account the observations are
placed. What Dostoyevski does not tell is that he
himself was the subject of the horrible corporal punishments
which he describes.
From 1849 to 1859 Dostoyevski was wholly dead to
literature.
At the age of thirty-seven he returned home from
Siberia with his nervous system wholly destroyed. A
great change had taken place in him. In the four years
he had passed in the workhouse, he had only one single
book with him, the New Testament, and he had read it
again and again. All revolt was quenched in his soul. It
was not simply that he saw with how little knowledge of
men he had wished to reform the world, and how little
this abstract idealism availed; but for once and all he
had become meek and humble, obedient and submissive.
He found his punishment just; nay, even more, he was
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