What Dostoevsky Learned About Freedom and Murder From His Fellow Convicts in Siberia

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Dostoevsky was fascinated by the ways people found freedom in Siberia. He took a special interest in Grandpa, the old Raskolnik in his barracks, and listened. “At the end of the world the river of fire shall flow, to the doom of sinners, to the cleansing of saints. All cliffs and mountains shall become flat. For mountains are made by the demons.” Dostoevsky thought of Raskolniks as dogmatic, but he admired Grandpa’s honesty and fervor. Suffering is what kindled it, Dostoevsky realized. Suffering was a strength-giving virtue. A hard-labor prison was a blessing.

Most prisoners pursued another kind of liberation. “Money is minted freedom,” Dostoevsky said of life in a Siberian prison. It felt liberating even if it remained in your pocket, like some quantum of power standing by. It promised at least a small measure of comfort and dignity beyond government-issue essentials. This was why the convicts worked so assiduously in the evenings with their forbidden tools, carving, gluing, and hammering by candlelight to fill orders from the townspeople—Omsk had no craftsmen to speak of. One  prisoner was making beautiful half boots for an official’s wife. Dostoevsky admired the handiwork until he noticed the mouse-colored fur lining the boots and was horrified. It was Kultyapka.

Nothing was safe in the fortress prison. He watched men nearly kill one another over a foot rag. Stealing was a form of freedom, too. There really was a liberating power in taking something, simply making it yours. Major Krivtsov took anything valuable from new prisoners, selling what he could and keeping what he wanted, like wool suits and satin pillows. Dostoevsky paid a prisoner for a small chest with a lock for his valuables. By the time he discovered his empty chest the next day, the thieves were already sobering up from their spree. Prisoners stole from Dostoevsky continually, without hesitation, as if his carelessness deserved punishment.

One day he realized his Bible was missing. He had let Shalomentsev borrow it, he remembered, and so it was Shalomentsev who had to tell him that his Bible— bound in leather, priced at two rubles and twenty- five kopecks— was long gone. And it was such a pitiful sight, really, watching the poor nobleman trying to account for that big book of his. He just wouldn’t stop looking for it.

Some men gambled for money. In the middle of the night, a handful of men would squat over greasy cards and little piles of coppers strewn about on a small rug. They’d pay someone a kopeck to watch for guards in the freezing entryway. Throughout the night they’d play three leaves. Anyone who lost could take his miserable foot rag or spoon to the barracks pawnbroker for a fraction of the object’s value and retrieve it at ruthless interest if his luck turned. But walking away with money wasn’t the only victory. The convicts felt free just getting away with it, seizing the night hours for themselves.

Out here, in Siberia, freedom was not some rational achievement of history. It was not some World Spirit sweeping away chaos and tyranny. Freedom was flinging away all the dirty coppers you’d saved in your chest or had given to Grandpa to hide. A prisoner wants money, Dostoevsky observed, in order to “throw it away like wood chips.” Freedom had been whittled down to abandonment. And the greatest, most spectacular abandonment in the hard labor prison was a rollicking, drunken binge.

Dostoevsky was amazed at how a prisoner would work and save for months so that one morning he could dress up in fine clothes— a Siberian caftan or a calico shirt with a brass-studded belt, borrowed or purchased precisely for this day. He would buy food (beef and Siberian dumplings) and eat it conspicuously. He would get a cup of overpriced vodka from a tapster, drink it down, and buy more, each cup more diluted than the last. He would hire a musician. One of the Polish prisoners would play dances on his violin and follow the reveler as he sauntered through all the barracks. The guards would look the other way. Everyone instinctively respected the ritual’s importance. The prisoners would bear the carouser’s jibes, steer him away from trouble, compliment his outfit, and give him space until the whole procession slackened into stumbling and the fine clothes got traded for the last, watery cups and the other prisoners finally put him to bed.

The reckless freedom that the prisoners found in binges seemed to echo their criminal histories. There was a pattern. A prisoner would be well behaved for years, and then suddenly— “as if some devil has gotten into him,” Dostoevsky wrote— he’d become unruly or turn violent. “Suddenly something in him comes unhinged.” Dostoevsky listened to stories of murder that he would never write about (possibly for fear of censorship), but he never forgot them. One convict, a serf, told him about how his landlord raped his wife on his wedding night, so the serf took an ax from the shed, concealed it on his body, and waited. As the gentleman strolled alone in his garden, the serf hopped over a low fence and crept up to him on the grass. But he wanted the lord to see him, to know why it was happening. So he coughed. The lord turned around and felt a flash of recognition before the serf swung the ax down and the blood and the brains sprayed out. Everything changed after that. The serf killed a captain on his convoy to Siberia with a folding knife he had traded for a shirt. The convicts were exhausted, he explained, and he began protesting when no one fed them. “Where’s the rioter?” the captain shouted after hearing of the complaints. The serf cut him from his gut to his throat.

During the long evening hours, without a Bible to read, Dostoevsky was left to ply the only craft he knew: ruminating over the lives of the people around him, working his way into the thoughts of killers. A person murders to exact justice, Dostoevsky thought, but once he crosses the line, it’s as if all restraints vanish by some demonic fiat, and the murderer can “revel in the most boundless and unbridled freedom.” So he begins to murder indiscriminately, “for fun, for a rude word, for a glance, for a trifle.” He binges on the intoxicating horror of himself. All that mattered was feeling one brief moment of abandon, something so intense that it could vitalize you by taking you to the brink of your obliteration. Or maybe it was like being buried alive, Dostoevsky thought, like waking up in a coffin and pounding on the dreaded planks, pushing helplessly against the earth. You know you’ll never escape, but logic doesn’t matter: “It’s convulsions.”

Weren’t many crimes like that? Surely revolutionary fervor could be fleeting, unintended, and illogical. That, after all, is how Dostoevsky had described his own crimes to the Commission of Inquiry. “I never acted with malice or premeditation against the government,” he insisted. “What I did do was done thoughtlessly on my part and much of it almost accidentally.” Taking someone’s life seems like a grotesque act of will, but perhaps it was nearly devoid of any deliberate willpower whatsoever.

The murderous convulsion was difficult to articulate, so paradoxical and intense, but Dostoevsky kept trying. He imagined it as the feeling of standing on the ledge of a tower, longing for the rushing wind, the brief, embracing emptiness, and actually doing it. Stepping off and feeling alive. A person kills, Dostoevsky wrote, out of a “convulsive display of his personality, an instinctive longing for his own self, a desire to declare himself.” The serf pulls out the ax so that the lord will look him in the eye at last, so that the final message flitting across his still-intact brain will be a defiant serf’s declaration: I exist.

***

Dostoevsky did not go on drunken sprees in prison. Nor did he gamble or steal or lash out. Dostoevsky declared his existence by writing. While the other convicts were fighting over rags or playing cards, he hoarded scraps of paper. He had somehow gotten hold of a pen and ink, and he would jot down a few words whenever it was safe. “The iron beaks have pecked us to death.” It had to be fast. “On your word we’ll see daylight, father.” He wrote down the ingenious curses and insults, like the ones about the Turkish sabers and slurping shchi from a shoe.

The argot helped him sketch convicts’ lives. He recorded idioms and expressions, like the devil wearing out three pairs of shoes to gather them all together. There were songs he’d never heard, prison proverbs, and observations. “An old tree creaks but lives.” “Nobody sows our kind, the fools, we spawn all by ourselves.” He was amassing hundreds of small pieces like tiles for a mosaic. There were bits of arguments and dialogue. “Don’t you act like a devil in a suitcase!” “Look at the fatso! The devil must be feeding you cannonballs.” One note captured the zeal for bingeing: “Hey, you! You have money, but you’re sleeping!”

They would appear harmless if a guard ever found them. “Haven’t been home, but I know everything!” was one hastily scrawled line. “Godfather! Timoshka! Executioner!” was another. But they were consequential. He was trying to smuggle the experience of a Siberian fortress prison back to St. Petersburg. He wanted to render not just a “new type” but a new culture—or, more accurately, a rich blend of cultures assembling across one of the largest empires in history— and he had to do it with bits of text small enough to hide from Eight Eyes and all the guards. Each colorful fragment risked severe punishment. The guards conducted surprise searches in the middle of the night, and people caught with this type of contraband— an inkwell would’ve been enough— were typically beaten.

Dostoevsky escaped the searches by writing and stashing his notes in the prisoners’ ward of the military hospital, half a kilometer from the fortress, where the medical staff was sympathetic to the exiled novelist, a physician’s son. The hospital was a drab yellow building on Sorrowful Street. Armed soldiers stood guard in the corridor and outside the barred windows, and the doors were locked with iron bolts. Each of the two wards was a long narrow room with a couple dozen green wooden beds along the walls. It smelled of sickness and medications. Convicts paced in their slippers, caps, and brown hospital robes. A man with blackened tooth stumps hacked up phlegm and smeared it on his robe so he could preserve his handkerchief. Tubercular patients coughed up blood. Some men had smallpox-disfigured faces. Some were carried into the ward screaming, manic or violent. Some were put in straitjackets or bounced from ward to ward or removed indefinitely to who knows where.

The ward was nevertheless a vacation from the barracks. It was high ceilinged and comparatively clean. It had a stove that the staff actually fed, and the beds had straw mattresses. Most important, the staff would lend Dostoevsky books, though he accepted them only when the temptation was irresistible, like when Russian translations of Charles Dickens— The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield— finally made it to Omsk. No English-language novelist was more popular in Russia than Dickens. Reformers admired his compassion and his implicit calls to ease urban hardships, while tsarists and conservatives could feel vindicated by his jabs at Parliament and laissez-faire capitalism. Dickens was just safe enough to be permissible in Russia, and in Siberia a Dickens novel was a rare privilege.

Word got around that the hospital’s chief doctor was lenient with the political prisoners (letting them convalesce longer than necessary, slipping them special provisions), and before long a special envoy— a criminal chamber counselor from Tobolsk— arrived to investigate. He interrogated the hospital staff and various prisoners, and at one point his probe turned to Dostoevsky, who was questioned about the suspected laxity in Omsk. Had he written anything in prison or while he was in the hospital?

“I have not written nor am I writing anything, but I am gathering material for future writings.”

“And where are these materials stored?”

“In my head.”

Someday, he hoped, the tsar would let him be a writer again. That possibility was worth lying for, worth bracing for investigations and night searches. It was worth the trembling fear each time he dipped his pen in ink to jot down an ingenious retort or a scene from a story.

The prison and the hospital were his workshops, where he could read and think, observe and listen. Dostoevsky wanted the prisoners’ stories even more than Dickens’s. They were reluctant to talk about their crimes, but there was something about the hospital— its eased restrictions, perhaps, or the relief from hard labor, or the proximity of death, or all three— that loosened the tongue. They whispered about the past at night to neighboring patients, who listened or half listened while smoking. Dostoevsky would look at someone for extended periods of time (sometimes a whole hour, he claimed) and imagine what he was thinking. He would jot down a sentence or two whenever he had a chance.

“I look, I see a man who’s taken a bad turn (he’s all pale).” He wrote just enough to conjure a memory years later.

“Give it all up, and it won’t be enough (what would you have of me!).”

“Here, sir, it’s the tenth year now since I’ve gone wandering.”

“Changed his fate.”

Prison also gave him time to scrutinize himself. He no longer had to rush, and he could pursue ideas to their ends. He replayed his memories, calling forth as many details as possible, scraping the bottom of every moment. The hedgehogs and dead leaves of Darovoe. Standing in Vissarion Belinsky’s apartment, and the furrows in the critic’s forehead when he implored the young man to cherish his gift, to “remain faithful to it, and be a great writer.” He recalled that moment repeatedly. He feared that he would forget himself, that his creativity would “turn cold” after so many years out on the Siberian steppe. He feared that even if the tsar allowed him to be a writer again, it would be too late.

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Excerpted from THE SINNER & THE SAINT by Kevin Birmingham courtesy of Penguin Press.

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