THE OFTEN ABSURD THEATRICS of state authority are now familiar to us all. Saying you will do one thing while deliberately doing another is what passes for modern political genius, and using the power of the state to enforce the conceit is merely the banal denouement. Today, the state’s intellectual credibility extends only to the edge of the political proscenium. But once, the world was a stage.
By MICHAEL HOLLINGTON [Synthesis] – Were I to choose any one single episode in the life of a modern writer to fit the “truth is stranger than fiction” bill, it would be a central incident in the life of Dostoevsky that took place in December 1849. In April of that year he had been arrested and imprisoned as a member of the Petrashevsky circle supposedly conspiring to depose the Tsar and overthrow the Russian government. Following the subsequent investigations, and despite a report to the Tsar to the effect that, whilst the group certainly organised discussion of desirable changes to the existing structure of authority, there was little evidence of any coherent or concrete plan to effect such changes, Dostoevsky and fourteen others were condemned to death by firing squad on November 16, 1849.
On December 22, without having been hitherto informed of this decision, the 15 were led out to Semonovsky Square in St. Petersburg to a scaffold on which three posts had been erected. Each man saw that he was to be tied to one of these and shot. The first three were led out, blindfolded, and tied to the stake in front of a firing squad at the ready during a one-minute drum roll. At the end of this minute the drums started to beat in a different rhythm the tattoo of retreat, and it became clear that the men would not be executed. A galloping horseman arrived with the Tsar’s reprieve and the substitution of various lesser sentences of penal servitude in Siberia (Frank, The Years of Ordeal 49-66).
These facts in themselves would be enough to sustain a claim that what happened on that day was like some work of fiction, which surpassed by some distance anything a writer might invent. Contemporary novelists were indeed interested in the representation of the last hours of a condemned man’s life, often as part of a campaign against public capital punishment. Hugo’s Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné is the most famous example of such writing, but students of English literature will also remember Dickens’s vivid portrayal of the last hours of Fagin’s life in Oliver Twist, often compared with the Hugo, or later, the depiction of Sydney Carton’s final moments in A Tale of Two Cities. Dostoevsky himself in fact had Hugo in mind at this moment of trauma: immediately upon returning to his cell, he wrote his brother a letter describing what had happened which is remarkable for its elation at the reprieve, even though he would be forbidden to write during his banishment and imprisonment. In it he quotes from Hugo: “I still have my heart and the same flesh and blood, and these too can live, suffer, desire and remember, and that, after all, is also life. On voit le soleil!” Frank comments that the details of Hugo’s text “had surged back into Dostoevsky’s memory as he stared death in the face” (The Years of Ordeal 61).
But the intensity of Hugo’s conception and its obvious significance for Dostoevsky in this moment of time starts to take something of a back seat when one contemplates further the manifold layers of this extraordinary event.
Continued at Synthesis | Read de Vogüé’s commentary on this episode | More Chronicle & Notices.
