What Siberia Made of Dostoevsky
In December 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was led into Semyonovsky Square in St. Petersburg, bound to a post with two other condemned men, and prepared for execution by firing squad. He was 28. He had been convicted of involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of liberal intellectuals who had read and discussed banned texts, and the sentence was death. He had been in the Peter and Paul Fortress for eight months. The execution order was read aloud. The white hood was placed over his head.
The order was a fake. Tsar Nicholas I had secretly commuted the sentences before the ceremony was arranged; the mock execution was a psychological punishment designed to break the prisoners. One of the men standing beside Dostoevsky in the square went permanently insane. Dostoevsky survived the episode and was sent to a labor camp in Omsk, in western Siberia, for four years, followed by four years of compulsory military service in the region. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, ten years after the square.
The four novels he wrote after Siberia — Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868-1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) — are among the most psychologically and theologically probing works in any language. The ten years in Siberia made them possible. Not because suffering ennobles — Dostoevsky was precise about this — but because the specific nature of what he had experienced gave him a purchase on human extremity that could not be invented.
The Omsk labor camp held approximately 250 convicts, most of them from the peasant class, and Dostoevsky — educated, a former member of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia — was the only man of his background there. He was despised for it, by both the guards and the prisoners. The experience forced a sustained contact with people his formation had prepared him to theorize about rather than actually know: the murderer in the next bunk, the man who had killed his children, the con artist, the religious visionary, the professional recidivist, the men who were simply poor and unlucky. He later said that the four years in Omsk were worth more to him than any education he had received in his previous life.
The House of the Dead (1861-1862), his fictionalized memoir of the camp, is the direct record of those four years. It is also a systematic dismantling of the Enlightenment assumption that criminality is a product of environment and education that the right social conditions can correct. The men Dostoevsky lived with were not misunderstood citizens temporarily displaced from their better selves. They were fully formed human beings with interior lives of great complexity, capable of cruelty, tenderness, ingenuity, and resignation in combinations that refused all tidy categorization. He did not romanticize them. He also did not reduce them.
The mock execution in Semyonovsky Square produced something specific in his thinking: an absolute conviction that the nature of human consciousness could not be derived from first principles or social theory. A man who has stood with a hood over his head waiting to be shot has been in a place where theories of human nature go to find out whether they are true. Dostoevsky concluded, in that square and across the following decade, that they are not — that the human being is irreducibly individual, irreducibly free in the worst sense, capable of choosing evil in full knowledge of its evil and choosing it specifically because it is evil, because freedom requires the possibility of the destructive choice or it is not freedom at all.
This is the argument that drives Raskolnikov to the pawnbroker’s room in Crime and Punishment, that drives Stavrogin through the nihilism of Demons, and that Ivan Karamazov articulates most precisely in the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov — perhaps the most concentrated statement in literary history of the case against the God who created a world containing the suffering of children. Dostoevsky did not write Ivan as a man to be refuted. He wrote him as a man to be reckoned with. The refutation, such as it is, comes in Alyosha’s silence and then in the elder Zosima’s life, not in any counter-argument.
He came back from Siberia with epilepsy — he had likely had it before, but the camp made it worse — with a ruined first marriage, with debts that would pursue him for the next twenty years, and with a gambling addiction that drove him to write The Gambler in 26 days to meet a contract deadline while simultaneously writing Crime and Punishment. The productivity of the 1860s and 1870s happened under constant financial pressure, in poor health, with an increasingly complicated spiritual and political worldview that made him enemies across the Russian intelligentsia.
The Brothers Karamazov, his last novel, finished five months before he died in 1881, is usually considered the summit of his achievement. It was intended as the first part of a longer work. He did not live to write the second.
What Siberia gave him was not wisdom, exactly. It was specificity — the knowledge that abstract ideas about human nature have to survive contact with actual humans, in actual extremity, before they can be trusted. His novels survive because the contact was real.