Resurrection - Leo Tolstoy (me reader TXT) 📗

The third part of his business was to help the convicts, who applied more and more often to him. At first when he came in contact with the prisoners, and they appealed to him for help, he at once began interceding for them, hoping to lighten their fate, but he soon had so many applications that he felt the impossibility of attending to all of them, and that naturally led him to take up another piece of work, which at last roused his interest even more than the three first. This new part of his business was finding an answer to the following questions: What was this astonishing institution called criminal law, of which the results were that in the prison, with some of the inmates of which he had lately become acquainted, and in all those other places of confinement, from the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petersburg to the island of Sakhalín, hundreds and thousands of victims were pining? What did this strange criminal law exist for? How had it originated?

From his personal relations with the prisoners, from notes by some of those in confinement, and by questioning the advocate and the prison priest, Nekhlúdoff came to the conclusion that the convicts, the so-called criminals, could be divided into five classes. The first were quite innocent people, condemned by judicial blunder. Such were the Menshóffs, supposed to be incendiaries, Máslova, and others. There were not many of these; according to the priest’s words, only seven percent, but their condition excited particular interest.

To the second class belong persons condemned for actions done under peculiar circumstances, i.e., in a fit of passion, jealousy, or drunkenness, circumstances under which those who judged them would surely have committed the same actions.

The third class consisted of people punished for having committed actions which, according to their understanding, were quite natural, and even good, but which those other people, the men who made the laws, considered to be crimes. Such were the persons who sold spirits without a license, smugglers, those who gathered grass and wood on large estates and in the forests belonging to the Crown; the thieving miners; and those unbelieving people who robbed churches.

To the fourth class belonged those who were imprisoned only because they stood morally higher than the average level of society. Such were the sectarians, the Poles, the Circassians rebelling in order to regain their independence, the political prisoners, the Socialists, the strikers condemned for withstanding the authorities. There was, according to Nekhlúdoff’s observations, a very large percentage belonging to this class; among them some of the best of men.

The fifth class consisted of persons who had been far more sinned against by society than they had sinned against it. These were castaways, stupefied by continual oppression and temptation, such as the boy who had stolen the rugs, and hundreds of others whom Nekhlúdoff had seen in the prison and out of it. The conditions under which they lived seemed to lead on systematically to those actions which are termed crimes. A great many thieves and murderers with whom he had lately come in contact, according to Nekhlúdoff’s estimate, belonged to this class. To this class Nekhlúdoff also reckoned those depraved, demoralised creatures whom the new school of criminology classify as the criminal type, and the existence of which is considered to be the chief proof of the necessity of criminal law and punishment. This demoralised, depraved, abnormal type was, according to Nekhlúdoff, exactly the same as that against whom society had sinned, only here society had sinned not directly against them, but against their parents and forefathers.

Among this latter class Nekhlúdoff was specially struck by one Okhótin, an inveterate thief, the illegitimate son of a prostitute, brought up in a dosshouse, who, up to the age of thirty, had apparently never met with anyone whose morality was above that of a policeman, and who had got into a band of thieves when quite young. He was gifted with an extraordinary sense of humour, by means of which he made himself very attractive. He asked Nekhlúdoff for protection, at the same time making fun of himself, the lawyers, the prison, and laws human and divine.

Another was the handsome Fédoroff, who, with a band of robbers, of whom he was the chief, had robbed and murdered an old man, an official. Fédoroff was a peasant, whose father had been unlawfully deprived of his house, and who, later on, when serving as a soldier, had suffered much because he had fallen in love with an officer’s mistress. He had a fascinating, passionate nature, that longed for enjoyment at any cost. He had never met anybody who restrained himself for any cause whatever, and had never heard a word about any aim in life other than enjoyment.

Nekhlúdoff distinctly saw that both these men were richly endowed by nature, but had been neglected and crippled like uncared-for plants.

He had also met a tramp and a woman who had repelled him by their dullness and seeming cruelty, but even in them he could find no trace of the criminal type written about by the Italian school, but only saw in them people who were repulsive to him personally, just in the same way as some he had met outside the prison, in swallowtail coats wearing epaulettes, or bedecked with lace. And so the investigation of the reasons why all these very different persons were put in prison, while others just like them were going about free and even judging them, formed a fourth task for Nekhlúdoff.

He hoped to find an answer to this question in books, and bought all that referred to it. He got the works of Lombroso, Garofalo, Ferry, List, Maudsley, Tard, and read them carefully. But as he read he became more and more disappointed. It happened to him as it always happens to those who turn to science not in order to play a part in it, nor to write,