19

THE sky was studded with stars. Returning to the inn over the mud, iron-hard except for an occasional spot where it gave, Nekhlyudov knocked at a dark window, and the broad-shouldered servant in his bare feet opened the door for him and let him in. The carters asleep in the back room on the right were snoring loudly; out through the door beyond, in the yard, a great number of horses could be heard crunching their oats. On the left a door led to a clean guest-room. The clean guest-room smelled of wormwood and sweat, and someone with mighty lungs was rhythmically snoring and making sucking noises behind a partition. A red lamp was burning in front of the ikons. Nekhlyudov undressed, spread his rug on the oilcloth sofa, arranged his leather pillow and lay down, thinking over all he had heard and seen that day. The most terrible spectacle of all for him had been the small boy sleeping in the liquid that oozed from the stinking tub, his head resting on the convict’s leg.

Unexpected and important though his conversation with Simonson and Katusha that evening had been, he did not dwell on it: his relation to the matter was too complex and at the same time so uncertain that he drove the thought of it from his mind. But the picture of those unfortunate creatures stifling in the putrid air, lying in the liquid oozing from the stinking tub, and especially the innocent face of the little boy asleep against the leg of a criminal, was all the more vivid and he could not get it out of his head.

To know that somewhere, far away, one set of people are torturing another set by subjecting them to every kind of humiliation, inhuman degradation and suffering; and for three months to have been a constant eye-witness of that defilement and agony inflicted on one set of people by another – are two very different things. And Nekhlyudov was experiencing this. More than once during the last three months he had asked himself: Am I mad, that I see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I see? Yet the people (and there were so many of them) who did the things that so bewildered and horrified him behaved with such calm assurance – not only that what they were doing was necessary but that it was highly important and valuable work – that it was difficult to believe them all to be mad. Nor could he admit that he was mad himself, for he was conscious of the clearness of his thoughts. Consequently, he found himself in a continual state of perplexity.

What he had seen during the past three months had left him with the impression that from the whole population living in freedom the government in conjunction with the courts picked out the most highly strung, mettlesome and excitable individuals, the most gifted and the strongest – but less crafty and cautious than other people – and these, who were not one whit more guilty or more dangerous to society than those who were left at liberty, were locked up in gaols, halting-stations, hard-labour camps, where they were confined for months and years in utter idleness, material security, and exile from nature, from their families and from useful work. In other words, they were forced outside all the conditions required for a normal and moral human existence. This was the first conclusion that Nekhlyudov drew from his observations.

Secondly, these people were subjected to all sorts of unnecessary degradation in these establishments – chains, shaven heads and infamous prison clothing; that is, they were deprived of the main inducements which encourage weak people to lead good lives: regard for public opinion, a sense of shame and a consciousness of human dignity.

Thirdly, with their lives in continual danger from the infectious diseases common in places of confinement, from physical exhaustion and from beatings (to say nothing of exceptional occurrences such as sunstroke, drowning and fire), these people lived continually in circumstances in which the best and most moral of men are led by the instinct of self-preservation to commit (and to condone in others) the most terribly cruel actions.

Fourthly, these people were forced to associate with men singularly corrupted by life (and by these very institutions, especially) – with murderers and wrong-doers who acted like leaven in dough on those not yet corrupted by the means employed.

And fifthly and finally, all the people subject to these influences were instilled in the most effective manner possible – namely, by every imaginable form of inhuman treatment practised upon themselves, by means of the suffering inflicted on children, women and old men, by beatings and floggings with rods and whips, by the offering of rewards for bringing a fugitive back, dead or alive, by the separation of husbands from wives and putting them to cohabit with other partners, by shootings and hangings – it was instilled into them in the most effective manner possible that all sorts of violence, cruelty and inhumanity were not only tolerated but even sanctioned by the government when it suited its purpose, and were therefore all the more permissible to those who found themselves under duress, in misery and want.

All these institutions seemed to have been devised for the express purpose of producing a concretion of depravity and vice, such as could not be achieved in any other conditions, with the ultimate idea of disseminating this concretion of depravity and vice among the whole population. ‘It is just as if the problem had been set: to find the best and surest means of corrupting the greatest number of people,’ thought Nekhlyudov, as he tried to penetrate to the heart of what happened in gaols and halting-stations. Every year hundreds and thousands of people were brought to the utmost pitch of depravity and, when completely corrupted, they were set free to spread up and down the country the corruption they had learned in prison.

In the prisons of Tumen, Ekaterinburg, Tomsk, and at the halting-stations on the way, Nekhlyudov saw how successfully the objects society seemed to have set itself were attained. Simple ordinary men brought up in the tenets of Russian social, Christian, peasant morality abandoned these principles and acquired new prison ideas, founded mainly on the theory that any outrage to or violation of the human personality, any destruction of the same, is permissible if profitable. In the light of what was done to them, people who had been in prison came to see and realize with every fibre of their being that all the moral laws of respect and compassion for man preached by religious and moral teachers were set aside in real life, and that therefore there was no need for them to adhere to them either. Nekhlyudov noticed evidence of this in all the convicts he knew : in Fedorov, Makar, even in Tarass, who after two months with the convicts had shocked Nekhlyudov by the lack of morality in his arguments. During the journey Nekhlyudov had discovered that tramps who escaped into the marshes would incite comrades to escape with them, and then murder them and eat their flesh. He saw a live man who had been accused of this and had admitted it. And the most appalling thing was that these were not isolated instances but cases that recurred continually.

Only by the special cultivation of vice such as was carried on in these establishments could a Russian be brought to the state of these tramps who (anticipating Nietzsche’s doctrine) considered everything permissible and nothing forbidden, and spread this teaching first among the convicts and then among the people in general.

The only explanation of all that was done was that it aimed at the prevention of crime, at inspiring fear, at correcting offenders and at dealing out to them ‘natural punishment’, as the books expressed it. But in reality nothing of the sort was achieved. Crime, instead of being prevented, was extended. Offenders, instead of being frightened, were encouraged, and many of them – the tramps, for example – had gone to gaol of their own accord. Instead of the correction of the vicious, there was a systematic dissemination of all the vices, while the need for punishment, far from being softened by the measures taken by the government, nurtured a spirit of revenge among the masses where it did not exist before.

‘Then why do they persist in what they are doing?’

Nekhlyudov asked himself, and found no answer.

And what surprised him most was that none of all this had happened accidentally, by mistake, once only, but that it had been going on for centuries, with the single difference that in the old days men had had their nostrils slit and their ears cut off; then a time came when they were branded and fastened to iron rods; and now they were manacled, and transported by steam instead of in carts.

The official argument that the conditions which excited his indignation arose from the imperfection of the arrangements at the places of confinement and deportation, and could all be improved as soon as prisons were built in accordance with modern methods, did not satisfy Nekhlyudov, because he felt that the things which aroused his indignation were not caused by more or less perfect arrangements at the places of detention. He had read of model prisons with electric bells, where executions were done by electricity as recommended by Tarde, and this perfected system of violence revolted him still more.

What revolted Nekhlyudov most of all was that there were men in the law-courts and in the ministries who received large salaries taken from the people for referring to books written by other officials like themselves, actuated by like motives, fitting to this or that statute actions that infringed the laws which they themselves had framed, and in accordance with these statutes of theirs went on sending people to places where they would never see them again and where those people were completely at the mercy of cruel, hardened inspectors, gaolers and convoy soldiers, and where they perished, body and soul, by the million.

Now that he had a closer acquaintance with prisons and halting-stations, Nekhlyudov saw that all the vices which developed among the convicts – drunkenness, gambling, brutality and all the dreadful crimes committed by the inmates of the prisons, and even cannibalism itself – were neither accidents nor signs of mental or physical degeneration (as certain obtuse scientists have declared, to the satisfaction of the government) but that they were the inevitable result of the incredible delusion that one group of human beings has the right to punish another. Nekhlyudov saw that cannibalism began, not in the Siberian marshes but in ministerial offices and government departments: it only found consummation in the marshes. He saw that his brother-in-law, for instance, and in fact all the lawyers and functionaries from usher to minister were not in the least concerned about justice or the good of the people, about which they talked: all they cared about were the roubles they were paid for doing the things that caused all this degradation and misery. That was quite evident.

‘Can it be, then, that all this simply springs from a misunderstanding? I wonder, could anything be done to secure their salaries to all these bureaucrats, even to pay them a premium, to leave off doing all that they are doing now?’ thought Nekhlyudov. And with these thoughts in his head, after the cocks had crowed for the second time he fell into a sound sleep, in spite of the fleas that spurted around him like water from a fountain every time he stirred.