NATASHA

church. She was weeping for her little infant child, her only one, whom God had also taken. 'Don't you know,' said the saint to her, 'how bold and fearless these little ones are before the throne of our Lord? There's none bolder or more fearless than they in the Kingdom of Heaven: Thou, O Lord, hast given us life, they say to God, and no sooner had we looked upon it than Thou didst take it away. And so boldly and fearlessly do they ask and demand an explanation that God gives them at once the rank of angels. And therefore,' said the saint, 'you, too, Mother, rejoice and do not weep, for your little one is now with the Lord in the company of his angels.' That's what the saint said to the weeping mother in the olden days. And he was a great saint and he would not have told her an untruth… I shall mention your little boy in my prayers. What was his name?'

'Aleksei, Father.'

'A sweet name. After Aleksei the man of God?'

'Of God, Father, of God. Aleksei the man of God.'

'He was a great saint! I shall mention him in my prayers, Mother, I shall. And I shall mention your sorrow in my prayers, too, and your husband that he may live and prosper. Only you should not have left your husband. You must go back to him and look after him. Your little boy will look down on you and, seeing that you've forsaken his father, he will weep over you both: why do you destroy his bliss? For don't forget, he's living, he's living, for the soul lives for ever, and though he is no longer in the house, he's always there unseen beside you. How do you expect him to come home if you say you hate your house? To whom is he to go, if he won't find you, his father and mother, together? You see him in your dreams now and you grieve, but if you go back he will send you sweet dreams. Go to your husband, Mother, go back to him today.'⁶⁷

Dostoevsky was a man who yearned for faith. But the death of little children was a fact he could not accept as a part of the divine plan. His notebooks from when he was working on The Brothers Karamazov are filled with agonizing commentaries on incidents of awful cruelty to children which he had read about in the contemporary press. One of these true stories appears at the centre of The Brothers Karamazov and

its discourse about God. It involved a general whose hunting dog was wounded when a serf boy on his estate threw a stone. The general had the serf boy arrested, stripped naked in front of the other villagers, and, to the cries of his desperate mother, torn to shreds by a pack of hunting dogs. This incident is cited by Ivan, the rationalist philosopher among the three Karamazov brothers, to explain to Alyosha, his younger brother and a novice at the monastery, why he cannot believe in the existence of a God if his truth entails the suffering of little innocents.

'I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price. I do not want a mother to embrace the torturer who had her child torn to pieces by his dogs… Is there in the whole world a being who could or would have the right to forgive? I don't want harmony. I don't want harmony, out of a love for mankind, I don't want it.'⁶⁸

In a letter to a friend Dostoesvky said that Ivan's argument was 'irrefutable'.⁶⁹ In terms of moral feeling it was unacceptable to leave such torture unavenged, and even Alyosha, who tries to follow Christ's example of forgiveness, agrees with Ivan that the general should be shot. Here was the fundamental question which Dostoevsky posed, not just in this novel, but in all his life and art: How could one believe in God when the world created by him was so full of suffering? It was a question he was bound to ask when he looked at the society in which he lived. How could God have made Russia?

Dostoevsky came, in his own words, from a 'pious Russian family' where 'we knew the Gospel almost from the cradle'.⁷⁰ The teaching of the Gospels always remained at the core of Dostoevsky's personality and even when, in the 1840s, he became a socialist, the type of socialism to which he subscribed had a close affinity with Christ's ideals. He agreed with Belinsky that if Christ appeared in Russia he 'would join the socialists'.⁷¹ In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of a radical underground movement which met at the house of the young socialist Mikhail Petrashevsky in St Petersburg. His offence was to have read out Belinsky's by-then famous but forbidden letter to Gogol of 1847 in which the literary critic had attacked religion and called for social reform in Russia. It was even forbidden to circulate or read handwritten copies of the letter as Dostoevsky did. Dostoevsky and

his comrades were condemned to death, but at the final moment, when they were on the parade ground waiting to be shot, they received a reprieve from the Tsar. Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of prison labour in Siberia, followed by service as a private soldier in a front-line Siberian regiment.

Dostoevsky's years in the Omsk prison camp were to be the turning point of his life. They brought him face to face with the roughest and most brutal of the common people and gave him what he thought of as a special insight into the hidden depths of the Russian soul. 'All in all, the time hasn't been lost', he wrote to his brother in 1854. 'I have learned to know, if not Russia, then at least her people, to know them, as perhaps very few know them.'⁷² What Dostoevsky found among his fellow convicts was a level of depravity that shook him from his old intelligentsia belief in the people's innate goodness and perfectibility. In this underworld of murderers and thieves he found not a shred of human decency - only greed and guile, violent cruelty and drunkenness, and hostility to himself as a gentleman. But the most depressing aspect of it all, as he describes it in The House of the Dead (1862), was an almost total absence of remorse.

I have already said that for a period of several years I saw among these people not the slightest trace of repentance, not one sign that their crime weighed heavily on their conscience, and that the majority of them consider themselves to be completely in the right. This is a fact. Of course, vanity, bad examples, foolhardiness and false shame are the causes of much of it. On the other hand, who can say that he has fathomed the depths of these lost hearts and has read in them that which is hidden from the whole world? It must surely have been possible over so many years to have noticed something, to have caught at least some feature of these hearts that bore witness to inner anguish, to suffering. But this was absent. Yet, it seems that crime cannot be comprehensible from points of view that are already given, and that its philosophy is rather more difficult than is commonly supposed.⁷³

This dark vision of the human psyche was the inspiration for the murderers and thieves who populate the pages of Dostoevsky's post-Siberian novels, beginning with Crime and Punishment (1866).

And yet at the depths of his despair came a vision of redemption to

restore the writer's faith. The revelation appeared, as if by a miracle, at Easter time, if we are to believe Dostoevsky's own later recollection in A Writer's Diary.⁷⁴ The prisoners were drinking, fighting and carousing, and Dostoevsky was lying down on his plank bed to escape. Suddenly, a long-forgotten incident from his childhood came into his mind. When he was aged nine he was staying at his family's country home, and one August day he wandered off alone into the woods. He heard a sound, thought that someone shouted 'There's a wolf!' and ran terrified into a nearby field, where one of his father's serfs, a peasant called Marey, took pity on the boy and tried to comfort him:

'Why you took a real fright, you did!' he said, wagging his head. 'Never mind, now, my dear. What a fine lad you are!'

He stretched out his hand and suddenly stroked my cheek.

'Never mind, now, there's nothing to be afraid of. Christ be with you. Cross yourself, lad.' But I couldn't cross myself; the corners of my mouth were trembling, and I think that particularly struck him. He quietly stretched out a thick, earth-soiled finger with a black nail and gently touched it to my trembling lips.

'Now, now,' he smiled at me with a broad, almost maternal smile. 'Lord, what a dreadful fuss. Dear, dear, dear!'⁷⁵

Remembering this 'maternal' act of kindness magically transformed Dostoevsky's attitude towards his fellow prisoners.

And so when I climbed down from my bunk and looked around, I remember I suddenly felt I could regard these unfortunates in an entirely different way and that suddenly, through some sort of miracle, the former hatred and anger in my heart had vanished. I went off, peering intently into the faces of those I met. This disgraced peasant, with shaven head and brands on his cheek, drunk and roaring out his hoarse, drunken song - why he might also be that very same Marey; I cannot peer into his heart, after all.⁷⁶

Suddenly it seemed to Dostoevsky that all the Russian convicts had some tiny glimmer of goodness in their hearts (although, always the nationalist, he denied its existence in the Polish ones). Over Christmas some of them put on a vaudeville, and at last, in a gesture of respect,

they sought his help as an educated man. The convicts might be thieves, but they also gave their money to an Old Believer in the prison camp, who had earned their trust and whose saintliness they recognized. Now, to