Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (173 page)
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Authors: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Not a bit of it! “ cried Masloboev hotly, starting up. “No, I won’t let him off like that. I shall begin all over again, Vanya. I’ve made up my mind to. What if I have taken two thousand? Hang it all! I took it for the insult, because he cheated me, the rascal; he must have been laughing at me. He cheated me and laughed at me, too! No, I’m not going to let myself be laughed at…. Now, I shall start with Nellie, Vanya. From things I’ve noticed I’m perfectly sure that she has the key to the whole situation. She knows all — all about it! Her mother told her. In delirium, in despondency, she might well have told her. She had no one to complain to. Nellie was at hand, so she told Nellie. And maybe we may come upon some documents,” he added gleefully, rubbing his hands. “You understand now, Vanya, why I’m always hanging about here? In the first place, because I’m so fond of you, of course; but chiefly to keep a watch on Nellie; and another thing, Vanya, whether you like it or not, you must help me, for you have an influence on Nellie!…”
“To be sure I will, I swear!” I cried. “And I hope, Masloboev, that you’ll do your best for Nellie’s sake, for the sake of the poor, injured orphan, and not only for your own advantage.”
“What difference does it make to you whose advantage I do my best for, you blessed innocent? As long as it’s done, that’s what matters! Of course it’s for the orphan’s sake, that’s only common humanity. But don’t you judge me too finally, Vanya, if I do think of myself. I’m a poor man, and he mustn’t dare to insult the poor. He’s robbing me of my own, and he’s cheated me into the bargain, the scoundrel. So am I to consider a swindler like that, to your thinking? Morgen fruh!”
BUT OUR FLOWER FESTIVAL did not come off next day. Nellie was
worse and could not leave her room.
And she never did leave that room again.
She died a fortnight later. In that fortnight of her last agony she never quite came to herself, or escaped from her strange fantasies. Her intellect was, as it were, clouded. She was firmly convinced up to the day of her death that her grandfather was calling her and was angry with her for not coming, was rapping with his stick at her, and was telling her to go begging to get bread and snuff for him. She often began crying in her sleep, and when she waked said that she had seen her mother.
Only at times she seemed fully to regain her faculties. Once we were left alone together. She turned to me and clutched my hand
with her thin, feverishly hot little hand.
“Vanya,” she said, “when I die, marry Natasha.”
I believe this idea had been constantly in her mind for a long time. I smiled at her without speaking. Seeing my smile, she smiled too; with a mischievous face she shook her little finger at me and at once began kissing me.
On an exquisite summer evening three days before her death she asked us to draw the blinds and open the windows in her bedroom. The windows looked into the garden. She gazed a long while at the thick, green foliage, at the setting sun, and suddenly asked the others to leave us alone.
“Vanya,” she said in a voice hardly audible, for she was very weak by now, “I shall die soon, very soon. I should like you to remember me. I’ll leave you this as a keepsake.” (And she showed me a little bag which hung with a cross on her breast.) “Mother left it me when she was dying. So when I die you take this from me, take it and read what’s in it. I shall tell them all to-day to give it to you and no one else. And when you read what’s written in it, go to him and tell him that I’m dead, and that I haven’t forgiven him. Tell him, too, that I’ve been reading the Gospel lately. There it says we must forgive all our enemies. Well, I’ve read that, but I’ve not forgiven him all the same; for when mother was dying and still could talk, the last thing she said was: ‘I curse him.’ And so I curse him, not on my own account but on mother’s. Tell him how mother died, how I was left alone at Mme. Bubnov’s; tell him how you saw me there, tell him all, all, and tell him I liked better to be at Mme. Bubnov’s than to go to him…”
As she said this, Nellie turned pale, her eyes flashed, her heart began beating so violently that she sank back on the pillow, and for two minutes she could not utter a word.
“Call them, Vanya,” she said at last in a faint voice. “I want to say good-bye to them all. Good-bye, Vanya!”
She embraced me warmly for the last time. All the others came in. Nikolay Sergeyitch could not realize that she was dying; he could not admit the idea. Up to the last moment he refused to agree with us, maintaining that she would certainly get well. He was quite thin with anxiety; he sat by Nellie’s bedside for days and even nights together. The last night he didn’t sleep at all. He tried to anticipate Nellie’s slightest wishes, and wept bitterly when he came out to us from her, but he soon began hoping again that she would soon get well. He filled her room with flowers. Once he bought her a great bunch of exquisite white and red roses; he went a long way to get them and bring them to his little Nellie… He excited her very much by all this. She could not help responding with her whole heart to the love that surrounded her on all sides. That evening, the evening of her good-bye to us, the old man could not bring himself to say good-bye to her for ever. Nellie smiled at him, and all the evening tried to seem cheerful; she joked with him and even laughed…. We left her room, feeling almost hopeful, but next day she could not speak. And two days later she died.
I remember how the old man decked her little coffin with flowers, and gazed in despair at her wasted little face, smiling in death, and at her hands crossed on her breast. He wept over her as though she had been his own child. Natasha and all of us tried to comfort him, but nothing could comfort him, and he was seriously ill after her funeral.
Anna Andreyevna herself gave me the little bag off Nellie’s neck. In it was her mother’s letter to Prince Valkovsky. I read it on the day of Nellie’s death. She cursed the prince, said she could not forgive him, described all the latter part of her life, all the horrors to which she was leaving Nellie, and besought him to do something for the child.
“She is yours,” she wrote. “She is your daughter, and you know that she is really your daughter, I have told her to go to you when I am dead and to give you this letter. If you do not repulse Nellie, perhaps then I shall forgive you, and at the judgement day I will stand before the throne of God and pray for your sins to be forgiven. Nellie knows what is in this letter. I have read it to her, I have told her all; she knows everything, everything.
But Nellie had not done her mother’s bidding. She knew all, but she had not gone to the prince, and had died unforgiving.
When we returned from Nellie’s funeral, Natasha and I went out into the garden. It was a hot, sunny day. A week later they were to set off. Natasha turned a long, strange look upon me.
“Vanya,” she said, “Vanya, it was a dream, you know.”
“What was a dream?” I asked.
“All, all,” she answered, “everything, all this year. Vanya, why did I destroy your happiness?”
And in her eyes I read:
“We might have been happy together for ever.”
THE END
Translated by Constance Garnett
The House of the Dead
was published in 1862 and portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp. The novel is a loosely-knit collection of facts and events connected to life in a Siberian prison, organised by “theme” rather than as a continuous story. Dostoyevsky himself spent four years in exile in such a camp following his conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky circle. This experience allowed him to describe with great authenticity the conditions of prison life and the characters of the convicts.
The narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, has been sentenced to deportation to Siberia and ten years of hard labour. Life in prison is particularly hard for Aleksandr Petrovich, since he is a “gentleman” and suffers the malice of the other prisoners, nearly all of whom belong to the peasantry. Gradually Goryanchikov overcomes his revulsion at his situation and his fellow convicts, undergoing a spiritual re-awakening that culminates with his release from the camp.
The House of the Dead
is a work of great humanity, as Dostoyevsky portrays the inmates of the prison with sympathy for their plight, expressing admiration for their energy, ingenuity and talent, regardless of their social background. He concludes that the existence of the prison, with its absurd practices and savage corporal punishments is a tragic fact, both for the prisoners and for Russia itself.
Prisoners at an Amur Cart Road camp, Katorga — near where Dostoyevsky was imprisoned for four years
THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER I
TEN YEARS A CONVICT
Among the mountains and impenetrable forests of the Siberian desert one comes from time to time across little towns of a thousand or two inhabitants. They are built entirely of wood and are very ugly, with two churches-one in the centre of the town, the other in the cemetery. These places are, in fact, much more like good-sized villages on the outskirts of Moscow than towns properly so called, and are generally administered by an inspector of police, a body of assessors, and some minor officials. It is cold in Siberia, but the great advantages of Government service compensate for that. The inhabitants are simple folk without liberal ideas; their manners are old-fashioned, solid, and unchanged by time. The officials who, of course, form the nobility in Siberia, either belong to the country, deep-rooted Siberians, or have migrated from Russia. The latter come straight from the large cities, tempted by the high pay, the extra allowance for travelling expenses, and by hopes (not less seductive) for the future. Those who know how to adapt themselves to conditions in Siberia almost always remain there; the abundant and richly flavoured fruit which they gather recompenses them amply for what they lose.
As for the others, light-minded persons who are unable to deal with the problem, they are soon bored in Siberia, and ask themselves with regret why they were so foolish as to come. They impatiently kill the three years for which they are obliged by their sentence to remain, and as soon as their time is up they ask to be sent back, and return to their original homes, decrying and ridiculing Siberia. They are wrong; for it is a happy country, not only as regards the Government service, but
also from many other points of view.
The climate is excellent, the merchants are rich and hospitable, the Europeans in easy circumstances are numerous. As for the girls, they are like roses and their morality is irreproachable. Game is to be found in the streets, and throws itself upon the sportsman’s gun. People drink champagne in prodigious quantities. The caviare is astonishingly good and most abundant. In a word, it is a blessed land, out of which it is only necessary to be able to make profit; and much profit is in fact made.
It was in one of these little towns-gay and perfectly self-satisfied, whose population left upon me the most agreeable impression-that I met an exile, Alexander Petrovitch Goriantchikoff, formerly a landed proprietor in Russia. He had been condemned to hard labour of the second degree for assassinating his wife. After undergoing his punishment often years’ hard labour, he lived quietly and unnoticed as a colonist in the little town of K. To tell the truth, he was on the register of a neighbouring district; but he resided at K, where he managed to get a living by giving lessons to children. In the towns of Siberia one often meets exiles thus engaged: they are not looked down upon, for they teach the French language which is so necessary in life, and of which without them no one in the distant parts of Siberia would have the least idea.
