A First Encounter With Dostoevsky
Silone, Ignazio
MY FIRST CONTACT with Dostoevsky's novels was rather belated, I am ashamed to say. It came only when I was twenty-two. And what is more, it was in a sense imposed on me by circumstances....
...Or in the monastery hall I knelt amidst other pilgrims, listening to the hoarse inspired voice of a holy old man, the starets Zosima...
...I hope to have the time, some day, to tell the stories of certain of those men...
...Had the judges forgotten this...
...What magnificent men they were...
...A hostile critic might deduce from this that if I was behind in my reading, I nevertheless displayed a certain precocity in the field of "political delinquency...
...I should like, before coming to my discovery of Dostoevsky, to say a few more words about that young painter who was condemned to die...
...Thus I had the immense joy of reading, for the first time, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot...
...MY FIRST CONTACT with Dostoevsky's novels was rather belated, I am ashamed to say...
...Among the anarchists confined there, several had been condemned to death for acts of terrorism...
...THE ACCOMMODATING doctor allowed me to spend all my mornings in his infirmary with the young lad, after informing the authorities that both of us were in need of daily medical attention...
...And none of us dared complain that time passed slowly...
...But it was difficult for the rest of us to share his carefree spirits...
...And as chance would have it, there were, among the books he had available, various volumes of Dostoevsky, in French translation...
...He himself was in a purely Dostoevskian situation...
...It came only when I was twenty-two...
...In the end it was rumored that respect for the law had prevailed: they would wait, and execute the guilty man when he was twenty-one...
...When I was taken there, early in the year 1923, the Barcelona prison was packed with Catalans, syndicalists, socialists, communists and anarchists...
...Or in a large garden, sitting among jasmine, I tremblingly watched Prince Mishkin as he waited for Nastasia Filippovna...
...No work of literature had ever affected me so much...
...After his sentence (in Spain execution is by the garrote—that is, strangulation), an eminent Catholic jurist had ventured to state publicly that no Spanish legal code, including the military, sanctioned the death penalty for minors...
...The doomed young man had lost nothing of his good humor: he amused himself by drawing caricatures of Spanish generals, invariably flanked by their enormous swords...
...In a sense, he was the model doctor for a model prison...
...Besides this relative freedom each morning, he obtained books and magazines that helped us endure the long afternoons and evenings—stretches that were interminable for prisoners returned to the solitude of their cells...
...Translated by FRANCIS STEEGMULLER...
...Were they to lose face because of a legality...
...The military men in power were uncertain how to proceed...
...The reading of these books caused the walls of my narrow cell to vanish, and transported me thousands of miles distant, to an atmosphere that filled me with an anguish such as I had never known...
...Soon I lost track of all notion of time and place...
...To be precise, I happened just then to be living—it proved to be for two months only—in the "Carcel Modelo" [model prison] of Barcelona...
...The doctor was an excellent man...
...Intervening time has done nothing to change my remembrance: those were marvelous days...
...In no other country in the world have I known men as admirable as those Spanish "subversives...
...Public opinion was aroused, and as a consequence the execution was postponed...
...The simple explanation is that Spain was at that time ruled by the military directorate presided over by Primo de Rivera, whose police found my presence in the country—obviously unjustifiable on touristic grounds— a matter of excessive concern...
...The "Carcel Modelo" was indeed, in certain respects, a truly model prison...
...Sometimes I was walking with an immense crowd along the banks of a great river, the Neva, while far off in the bright night gleamed the gilded domes of a monastery...
...And what is more, it was in a sense imposed on me by circumstances...
...The administration, on discovering a doctor among the prisoners, had seized the opportunity, for reasons of economy, to dismiss the former incumbent, a physician from the outside...
...It is beyond my power to say, now, how overwhelming I found them...
...Notwithstanding that the offense with which he was charged had been committed during his minority...
...What else could I possibly have talked about with that young man who had been condemned to death, each morning when I rejoined him in the infirmary...
...I have never understood why he should have been so considerate of me, a complete stranger...
...Especially vivid in my memory remains a very young painter, still under age, with whom I had a chance to become friends, thanks to the kindness of the prison doctor, himself incarcerated for "separatist ideas...
...They were among the most beautiful days of my life...
...The conditions of my undertaking the reading of Dostoevsky were anything but ordinary—so suitable, in fact, for the understanding of this exceptional writer that it may be worth while to give a brief account of them...
...I was no longer in prison...
Vol. 6 • April 1959 • No. 2
