The Gift

he is even alleged to have offered to arrange her husband’s escape, but the latter resolutely refused. In short, the constant presence of this shameless man made things so difficult (and what plans we had made!) that Chernyshevski himself persuaded his wife to set out on the return journey, and this she did on August 27th, having stayed thus, after a three-month journey, only four days—four days, reader!—with the husband whom she was now leaving for seventeen odd years. Nekrasov dedicated Peasant Children to her. It is a pity he did not dedicate to her his Russian Women.

During the last days of September, Chernyshevski was transferred to Aleksandrovski Zavod, a settlement twenty miles from Kadaya. He spent the winter there in prison, together with some Karakozovites and rebellious Poles. The dungeon was equipped with a Mongolian specialty—“stakes”: posts dug vertically into the ground and surrounding the prison in a solid ring. In June of the following year, having completed his probationery term, Chernyshevski was released on parole and took a room in the house of a sexton, a man who looked very much like him: gray purblind eyes, a sparse beard, long, tangled hair…. Always a little drunk, always sighing, he would sorrowfully answer the questions of the curious with “The dear fellow keeps writing and writing!” But Chernyshevski stayed there no more than two months. His name was taken in vain at political trials. The half-witted artisan Rozanov testified that the revolutionaries wanted to catch and cage “a bird with royal blood in order to ransom Chernyshevski.” Count Shuvalov sent the Irkutsk Governor-General a telegram: THE AIM OF THE EMIGRES IS TO FREE CHERNYSHEVSKI (STOP) PLEASE TAKE ALL POSSIBLE MEASURES IN REGARD TO HIM. Meanwhile the exile Krasovski, who had been transferred at the same time as he, had fled (and perished in the taiga, after having been robbed), so that there was every reason to jail dangerous Chernyshevski once again and to deprive him for a month of the right to correspondence.

Suffering intolerably from drafts, he never removed either his fur-lined dressing gown or his lambskin shapka. He moved about like a leaf blown by the wind, with a nervous stumbling gait, and his shrill voice could be heard now here and now there. His trick of logical reasoning was intensified—“in the manner of his father-in-law’s namesake,” as Strannolyubski so whimsically puts it. He lived in the “office”: a spacious room divided by a partition; along the entire wall in the larger part there ran a low “sleeping shelf,” in the nature of a platform; there, as if on a stage (or the way in zoos they exhibit a melancholy beast of prey among its native rocks) stood a bed and a table, which were essentially the natural furnishings of his whole life. He used to get up after midday, would drink tea all day and lie reading the whole time; he would sit down to do some real writing only at midnight, since during the day his immediate neighbors, some nationalist Poles who were completely indifferent to him, would indulge in fiddling and torture him with their unlubricated music: by profession they were wheelwrights. To the other exiles he used to read on winter evenings. They noticed once that although he was calmly and smoothly reading a tangled tale, with lots of “scientific” digressions, he was looking at a blank notebook. A gruesome symbol!

It was then that he wrote a new novel. Still full of the success of What to Do? he expected much from it—most of all he expected the money which, printed abroad, the novel was supposed one way or another to bring in for his family. The Prologue is extremely autobiographical. When referring to it once, we spoke of its peculiar attempt to rehabilitate Olga Sokratovna; it conceals a similar attempt, in Strannolyubski’s opinion, to rehabilitate the author’s own person, for, underlining on the one hand Volgin’s influence, which reaches the point where “high dignitaries sought his favors through his wife” (because they supposed he had “connections with London”; i.e., with Herzen, of whom the newly fledged liberals were mortally afraid), the author on the other hand insists obstinately on Volgin’s suspiciousness, timidity and inactivity: “To wait and wait as long as possible, to wait as quietly as possible.” One gets the impression that the stubborn Chernyshevski wants to have the last word in the quarrel, putting firmly on record what he had repeatedly said to his judges: “I must be considered on the basis of my actions and there were no actions and could not have been any.”

Concerning the “light” scenes in The Prologue we had better keep silent. Through their morbidly circumstantial eroticism one can make out such a throbbing tenderness for his wife that the least quotation from them might appear to be exaggerated derision. Instead let us listen to this pure sound—in his letters to her during those years: “My dearest darling, I thank you for being the light of my life.”… “I would be even here one of the happiest men in the world if it did not occur to me that this fate, which is very much to my personal advantage, is too hard in its effects on your life, my dear friend.”… “Will you forgive me the grief to which I have subjected you?”

Chernyshevski’s hopes for literary profits were not realized: the emigres not only misused his name but also pirated his works. And entirely fatal for him were the attempts made to free him, attempts which were in themselves courageous but which seem senseless to us, who can see from the hilltop of time the disparity between the image of a “fettered giant” and the real Chernyshevski whom these efforts by his would-be saviors only enraged: “These gentlemen,” he said later, “didn’t even know that I can’t ride a horse.” This inner contradiction resulted in nonsense (a particular shade of nonsense already long known to us). It is said that Ippolit Myshkin, disguised as a gendarme officer, went to Vilyuisk where he demanded of the district police chief that the prisoner be handed over to him, but spoiled the whole business by putting his shoulder knot on the left side instead of the right. Before this, namely in 1871, there was Lopatin’s attempt in which everything was absurd: the way he suddenly abandoned the Russian translation of Das Kapital that he was making in London, in order to get for Marx, who had learned to read Russian, “den grossen russischen Gelehrten”; his journey to Irkutsk in the guise of a member of the Geographical Society (with the Siberian residents taking him for a government inspector incognito); his arrest following a tip-off from Switzerland; his flight and capture; and his letter to the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia in which he told him all about his project with inexplicable frankness. All this only worsened Chernyshevski’s situation. Legally his settlement was supposed to begin on August 10, 1870. But only on December 2nd was he moved to another place, to a place which turned out to be far worse than penal servitude—to Vilyuisk.

“Forsaken by God in a dead end of Asia,” says Strannolyubski, “in the depths of the Yakutsk region, far to the northeast, Vilyuisk was nothing but a hamlet standing on a huge pile of sand heaped up by the river, and surrounded by a boundless bog overgrown by taiga scrub.” The inhabitants (500 people) were: Cossacks, half-wild Yakuts, and a small number of low middle-class citizens (whom Steklov describes very picturesquely: “The local society consisted of a pair of officials, a pair of clerics and a pair of merchants”—as if he were talking about the Ark). There Chernyshevski was lodged in the best house, and the best house turned out to be the jail. The door of his damp cell was lined with black oilcloth; the two windows which anyway were right up against the palisade were barred up. In the absence of any other exiles, he found himself in complete solitude. Despair, helplessness, the consciousness of having been deceived, a dizzy feeling of injustice, the ugly shortcomings of arctic life, all this almost drove him out of his mind. On the morning of July 10, 1872, he suddenly began to break the door lock with a pair of tongs, shaking all over, and mumbling, and crying out: “Has the sovereign or a minister come that the police sergeant dares to lock the door at night?” By winter he had calmed down a bit, but from time to time there were certain reports… and here we are granted one of those rare correlations that constitute the researcher’s pride.

Once (in 1853), his father had written him (regarding his A Tentative Lexicon of the Hypatian Chronicle): “You would do better to write some tale or other… tales are still in fashion in good society.” Many years afterwards Chernyshevski informs his wife that he has thought up in his prison and wants to set down in writing “an ingenious little tale” wherein he will portray her in the form of two girls: “It will be quite a good little tale [repeating his father’s rhythm]. If only you knew how much I have laughed to myself when depicting the various noisy frolics of the younger one, how much I cried with tenderness when depicting the pathetic meditations of the elder!” “At night Chernyshevski,” reported his jailers, “sometimes sings, sometimes dances and sometimes weeps and sobs.”

The mail went out of Yakutsk once a month. The January number of a St. Petersburg magazine was received only in May. He tried to cure the illness he had developed (goiter) with the aid of a textbook. The exhausting catarrh of the stomach that he had known as a student now returned with new peculiarities. “I am nauseated by the subject of ‘peasants’ and ‘peasant ownership of the land,’ ” he wrote to his son, who had thought to interest him by sending him some books on economics. The food was repulsive. He ate almost nothing but cooked cereals: straight from the pot—with a silver tablespoon, of which almost a quarter was worn away on the pot’s earthenware sides during the twenty years that he himself was wearing away. On warm summer days he would stand for hours with his trousers rolled up in a shallow stream (which could hardly have been beneficial); or, with his head wrapped in a towel against the mosquitoes, which made him look like a Russian peasant woman, he would stroll along forest paths with his plaited mushroom basket, never plunging into the denser wildwood. He would forget his cigarette