DOSTOEVSKY'S FIRST DEATH
Kucherov, Samuel
Dostoevsky's First Death By SAMUEL KUCHEROV ON THE COLD and gloomy morning of December 22, 1849, twentytwo convicts stood before a scaffold awaiting execution. Tlt^y wore ¦ inly the long...
...Behind the prosecution was the tremendous fear of Nicholas and his government that the revolutionary tempest which swept Europe in 1848 would be carried over to Russia...
...In this novel the revolutionary Verkhovensky to some extent anticipated Lenin by several decades...
...Tlt^y wore ¦ inly the long white shirts designed for their funeral...
...A tumbril laden with coffins stood by...
...The sixth man in the row of convicts was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky...
...herded inttfsledges to begin their long trip' to Siberia...
...Valeryan Miiikov and Belinsky died before the case opened and thus escaped conviction...
...The sharpshooters raised their nlles...
...So you put your head right under tha knife and hear it coming down on your head, and that quarter of a second is tha most fearful of all...
...I am one of the I'vtrmhevUy...
...have been left untouched and unmolested...
...ONE HUNDRED YEARS have passed since the trial of the Petrashevtsy...
...For Dostoevsky the death penalty was commuted to lour years of hard labor, to be followed by another four years of military service as a private...
...Belinsky's famous letter to Gogol—a flaming protest against serfdom and obscurantism-was also discussed...
...Dostoevsky was charged with "reading Belinsky's letter to Gogol at the homes of the accused Durov and Petrashevsky and giving it to the accused Mombelli for copying" and of "being present at the leading of Griegoryev's Soldatskaya Be' (Soldier's Talk) at the home of the accused Speshnev...
...According _to the official records, published much later, "the formation of a secret society did not materialize in consequence of the differences of opinions of its members...
...That was all—but it was enough for a death sentence...
...nd there is no greater suffering ii» -fhe world...
...We* shall set fires going...
...Anyone murdered by brigands, cut down at night in a wood or something of that fort, must surely hope to escape till tha vary last minute...
...Why such shame, so monstrous, unnecessary, useless...
...Do you know, do you know how many we shall catch by little ready-made ideas...
...It was single blanket indictment of almost the entire leadership of Russian liberal intelligentsia...
...Petersburg in 1859...
...Wa shall stifle every genius in its infancy...
...The greatest Russian writers of the nineteenth century—Turgenev, Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyev—were most vehemently opposed to the death penalty...
...Petrashevsky and his associates were accused of "trying to implant the evil principles of liberalism in the young generation...
...He was convicted of joining a plot against the government and church, which later became known as "the Petrashevsky Conspiracy," after the name of its "leader," M. V. ButashevichPetrashevsky...
...Russia has lived through much since then...
...Besides Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail, G. E. Blagosvetlow, A. P. Milyukov, N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. Danilevsky, M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Appolon Maikov, A. Pleshcheev, and others, were involved...
...Tha great thing is tha certainty...
...I know that I was condemned for dreams and theories...
...The court martial sentenced 22 defendants to*death for "criminal conversations," "harmful ideas," and "infamous liberalism," but secretly asked the Tsar to commute the death sentences...
...In that case it la a sentence, and tha whole terrible suffering resides in the fact tb/t you are sure there is no escape...
...The former young Petrashevets now was convinced that social truth, "The Kingdom of God on Earth," could not be achieved by revolutionary upheavals...
...A solemn clerk read the death sentence and descended from the scaffold...
...Revolutionism and atheistic socialism were strongly condemned by Dostoevsky in The Possessed...
...DOSTOEVSKY HAD BEEN arrested on April 23, 1849, and thrown into the dungeon of the Fortress of Peter and Paul...
...A handful of persons, completely insignificant, mostly young and immoral, dreamed about the possibility of trampling on the most holy rights of religion, law, and property," the court said...
...Pernicious theories, which generated sedition and upheavals in all of Western Europe and threatened with destruction of every order and welfare of people provoked unfortunately a certain r'epcrcussion also in our fatherland...
...Executioner, just one moment more.' God may have pardoned her, just for that little moment, because a further grade of human distress cannot be imagined .. ." [Dostoevsky did not stand alone in his protest against the death penalty...
...Actually Petrashevsky and his friends gathered on certain days of the week for readings and discussions...
...But in tha other case all that last hope, which makes dying tan limes easier, is taken away for certain...
...I was condemned lawfully and justly...
...True, they have never known Petrashevsky, but it was not Petrashevsky who was the crucial point of all thai remote affair...
...There is going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before...
...He had written previously to his brother: "I wouldn't even try to tell you what transformations were undergone by my soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart in these few years...
...We shall proclaim destruction...
...How distressing it is to suffer for that which doas not exist any more, which has changed in ma in the opposite direction...
...But now, as under the most reactionary Tsar Russia has ever known, people are again tried and sentenced to death or hard labor in Siberia because of "criminal conversations^' "harmful ideas," and "infamous liberalism...
...His Majesty, Nicholar 1, Tsar of all the Russias, had reversed the judgment...
...The first three prisoners were blindfolded and tied to poles...
...The priest ascended it, cross in hand, and asked the convicts to nuke their last confessions...
...Russia will be overwhelmed by darkness, the earth will waap for old Gods...
...WHAT INFLUENCE did the Petrashevsky affair have on Dostoevsky...
...An unusual number of writers, publicists, and scholars were involved in the case...
...Another character ih The Idiot expresses his deepest emotion after having read the story of the Countess Du Barry who, as she was being pushed toward the guillotine, exclaimed: "Just one moment more, Mr...
...Murder by legal sentence is Immeasurably mora terrible than murder by brigands...
...Who has said that human nature was capable of bearing it without going mad...
...The death penalty had been commuted to hard labor, and immediately the chained convicts wen...
...His passionate protest against the death penalty was expressed by heroes of his novels...
...We shall sat legends going...
...FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOEVSKY "How Distrusting to Suffer for What Does Nof Exist" Samuel Kucherov has lectured on Russian history and literature at New York University and Middlebury College, and has contributed to ItiiHuinn Review and other periodicals...
...I realiie it completely...
...A long experience, burdening and poignant, has sobered me, up and hat changed my ideas about many things...
...The former revolutionary became a reactionary in the political sense, a monarchist and a nationalist...
...At that moment the troops suddehly beat a tattoo and the prisoners were unbound...
...The captain of the firing squad called his men to attention...
...After his discharge from military service, he returned from Siberia to St...
...They read Fourier, Cabet, Proudhon, and Louis Blanc, talked about serfdom, injustice, censorship, official venality, and the complete lack of individual freedom in Russia...
...We will make use of drunkenness, slander, spying...
...We shall penetrate in the midst of the masses...
...And on March 24, 1856, in a letter to E. I. Totleben he declared: "I was guilty...
...Dostoevsky in his Diary of a Writer wrote...
...The minutes he spent before the scaffold revealed to him the very depth of human misery...
...First of all we shall make an upheaval...
...Tolstoy, who could never forget an execution he witnessed in Paris, was even more bitterly critical than Dostoevsky in this respect...
...He denied to the state the right of any punishment, whereas Dostoevsky thought that punishment is necessary in order to relieve the burden of the criminal's remorses.] The Petrashevsky affair and the years of jail and banishment also effected a radical change in Dostoevsky's political views...
...The staging of the execution was a refined method of additional punishment...
...All right, one of the Pelrashevlsy— (although in my opinion this is an incorrect name, since a far larger number than those who stood on the scaffold and who were Pelrashevlsy just like us...
...I was convicted of tha intention (but not more) to act against the government...
...The wise "Idiot," Myshkin says: "And yet the greatest pain is not the wounds, but lies in this, that you know for a certainty that in an hour, in ten minutes, in half a minute, then directly, then this very moment, the soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a living being, and that it a certainty...
...But then, then I was blind, believed in theories and Utopias...
...A total of more than 250 persons were called to account...
...As a matter of fact, there was no conspiracy...
...In the first place, Dostoevsky is the only author who could write after having experienced death in his own lifetime...
Vol. 33 • March 1950 • No. 12
