Resurrection - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (interesting novels in english .TXT) 📗

of people cannot stand

solitary confinement,” said Novodvoroff. “Now, I never gave my

imagination vent when in solitary confinement, but arranged my

days most systematically, and in this way always bore it very

well.”

 

“What is there unbearable about it? Why, I used to be glad when

they locked me up,” said Nabatoff cheerfully, wishing to dispel

the general depression.

 

“A fellow’s afraid of everything; of being arrested himself and

entangling others, and of spoiling the whole business, and then

he gets locked up, and all responsibility is at an end, and he

can rest; he can just sit and smoke.”

 

“You knew him well?” asked Mary Pavlovna, glancing anxiously at

the altered, haggard expression of Kryltzoff’s face.

 

“Neveroff a dreamer?” Kryltzoff suddenly began, panting for

breath as if he had been shouting or singing for a long time.

“Neveroff was a man ‘such as the earth bears few of,’ as our

doorkeeper used to express it. Yes, he had a nature like crystal,

you could see him right through; he could not lie, he could not

dissemble; not simply thin skinned, but with all his nerves laid

bare, as if he were flayed. Yes, his was a complicated, rich

nature, not such a— But where is the use of talking?” he added,

with a vicious frown. “Shall we first educate the people and then

change the forms of life, or first change the forms and then

struggle, using peaceful propaganda or terrorism? So we go on

disputing while they kill; they do not dispute—they know

their business; they don’t care whether dozens, hundreds of men

perish—and what men! No; that the best should perish is just

what they want. Yes, Herzen said that when the Decembrists were

withdrawn from circulation the average level of our society sank.

I should think so, indeed. Then Herzen himself and his fellows

were withdrawn; now is the turn of the Neveroffs.”

 

“They can’t all be got rid off,” said Nabatoff, in his cheerful

tones. “There will always be left enough to continue the breed.

No, there won’t, if we show any pity to them there,” Nabatoff

said, raising his voice; and not letting himself be interrupted,

“Give me a cigarette.”

 

“Oh, Anatole, it is not good for you,” said Mary Pavlovna.

“Please do not smoke.”

 

“Oh, leave me alone,” he said angrily, and lit a cigarette, but

at once began to cough and to retch, as if he were going to be

sick. Having cleared his throat though, he went on:

 

“What we have been doing is not the thing at all. Not to argue,

but for all to unite—to destroy them—that’s it.”

 

“But they are also human beings,” said Nekhludoff.

 

“No, they are not human, they who can do what they are doing—

No— There, now, I heard that some kind of bombs and balloons

have been invented. Well, one ought to go up in such a balloon

and sprinkle bombs down on them as if they were bugs, until

they are all exterminated— Yes. Because—” he was going to

continue, but, flushing all over, he began coughing worse than

before, and a stream of blood rushed from his mouth.

 

Nabatoff ran to get ice. Mary Pavlovna brought valerian drops and

offered them to him, but he, breathing quickly and heavily,

pushed her away with his thin, white hand, and kept his eyes

closed. When the ice and cold water had eased Kryltzoff a little,

and he had been put to bed, Nekhludoff, having said good-night to

everybody, went out with the sergeant, who had been waiting for

him some time.

 

The criminals were now quiet, and most of them were asleep.

Though the people were lying on and under the bed shelves and in

the space between, they could not all be placed inside the rooms,

and some of them lay in the passage with their sacks under their

heads and covered with their cloaks. The moans and sleepy voices

came through the open doors and sounded through the passage.

Everywhere lay compact heaps of human beings covered with prison

cloaks. Only a few men who were sitting in the bachelors’ room by

the light of a candle end, which they put out when they noticed

the sergeant, were awake, and an old man who sat naked under the

lamp in the passage picking the vermin off his shirt. The foul

air in the political prisoners’ rooms seemed pure compared to the

stinking closeness here. The smoking lamp shone dimly as through

a mist, and it was difficult to breathe. Stepping along the

passage, one had to look carefully for an empty space, and having

put down one foot had to find place for the other. Three persons,

who had evidently found no room even in the passage, lay in the

anteroom, close to the stinking and leaking tub. One of these was

an old idiot, whom Nekhludoff had often seen marching with the

gang; another was a boy about twelve; he lay between the two

other convicts, with his head on the leg of one of them.

 

When he had passed out of the gate Nekhludoff took a deep breath

and long continued to breathe in deep draughts of frosty air.

 

CHAPTER XIX.

 

WHY IS IT DONE?

 

It had cleared up and was starlight. Except in a few places the

mud was frozen hard when Nekhludoff returned to his inn and

knocked at one of its dark windows. The broad-shouldered labourer

came barefooted to open the door for him and let him in. Through

a door on the right, leading to the back premises, came the loud

snoring of the carters, who slept there, and the sound of many

horses chewing oats came from the yard. The front room, where a

red lamp was burning in front of the icons, smelt of wormwood and

perspiration, and some one with mighty lungs was snoring behind a

partition. Nekhludoff undressed, put his leather travelling

pillow on the oilcloth sofa, spread out his rug and lay down,

thinking over all he had seen and heard that day; the boy

sleeping on the liquid that oozed from the stinking tub, with his

head on the convict’s leg, seemed more dreadful than all else.

 

Unexpected and important as his conversation with Simonson and

Katusha that evening had been, he did not dwell on it; his

situation in relation to that subject was so complicated and

indefinite that he drove the thought from his mind. But the

picture of those unfortunate beings, inhaling the noisome air,

and lying in the liquid oozing out of the stinking tub,

especially that of the boy, with his innocent face asleep on the

leg of a criminal, came all the more vividly to his mind, and he

could not get it out of his head.

 

To know that somewhere far away there are men who torture other

men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman

degradation and sufferings on them, or for three months

incessantly to look on while men were inflicting these

humiliations and sufferings on other men is a very different

thing. And Nekhludoff felt it. More than once during these three

months he asked himself, “Am I mad because I see what others do

not, or are they mad that do these things that I see?”

 

Yet they (and there were many of them) did what seemed so

astonishing and terrible to him with such quiet assurance that

what they were doing was necessary and was important and useful

work that it was hard to believe they were mad; nor could he,

conscious of the clearness of his thoughts, believe he was mad;

and all this kept him continually in a state of perplexity.

 

This is how the things he saw during these three months impressed

Nekhludoff: From among the people who were free, those were

chosen, by means of trials and the administration, who were the

most nervous, the most hot tempered, the most excitable, the most

gifted, and the strongest, but the least careful and cunning.

These people, not a wit more dangerous than many of those who

remained free, were first locked in prisons, transported to

Siberia, where they were provided for and kept months and years

in perfect idleness, and away from nature, their families, and

useful work—that is, away from the conditions necessary for a

natural and moral life. This firstly. Secondly, these people were

subjected to all sorts of unnecessary indignity in these

different Places—chains, shaved heads, shameful clothing—that

is, they were deprived of the chief motives that induce the weak

to live good lives, the regard for public opinion, the sense of

shame and the consciousness of human dignity. Thirdly, they were

continually exposed to dangers, such as the epidemics so frequent

in places of confinement, exhaustion, flogging, not to mention

accidents, such as sunstrokes, drowning or conflagrations, when

the instinct of self-preservation makes even the kindest, most

moral men commit cruel actions, and excuse such actions when

committed by others.

 

Fourthly, these people were forced to associate with others who

were particularly depraved by life, and especially by these very

institutions—rakes, murderers and villains—who act on those who

are not yet corrupted by the measures inflicted on them as leaven

acts on dough.

 

And, fifthly, the fact that all sorts of violence, cruelty,

inhumanity, are not only tolerated, but even permitted by the

government, when it suits its purposes, was impressed on them

most forcibly by the inhuman treatment they were subjected to; by

the sufferings inflicted on children, women and old men; by

floggings with rods and whips; by rewards offered for bringing a

fugitive back, dead or alive; by the separation of husbands and

wives, and the uniting them with the wives and husbands of others

for sexual intercourse; by shooting or hanging them. To those who

were deprived of their freedom, who were in want and misery, acts

of violence were evidently still more permissible. All these

institutions seemed purposely invented for the production of

depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other

conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this

condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.

 

“Just as if a problem had been set to find the best, the surest

means of depraving the greatest number of persons,” thought

Nekhludoff, while investigating the deeds that were being done in

the prisons and halting stations. Every year hundreds of

thousands were brought to the highest pitch of depravity, and

when completely depraved they were set free to carry the

depravity they had caught in prison among the people. In the

prisons of Tamen, Ekaterinburg, Tomsk and at the halting stations

Nekhludoff saw how successfully the object society seemed to have

set itself was attained.

 

Ordinary, simple men with a conception of the demands of the

social and Christian Russian peasant morality lost this

conception, and found a new one, founded chiefly on the idea that

any outrage or violence was justifiable if it seemed profitable.

After living in a prison those people became conscious with the

whole of their being that, judging by what was happening to

themselves, all the moral laws, the respect and the sympathy for

others which church and the moral teachers preach, was really set

aside, and that, therefore, they, too, need not keep the laws.

Nekhludoff noticed the effects of prison life on all the convicts

he knew—on Fedoroff, on Makar, and even on Taras, who, after two

months among the convicts, struck Nekhludoff by the want of

morality in his arguments. Nekhludoff found out during his

journey how tramps, escaping into the marshes, persuade a comrade

to escape with them, and then kill him and feed on his flesh. (He

saw a living man who was accused of this