I would not like my words to be taken as harsh. Still, I will risk speaking my mind and say plainly: with strict punishment, prison, and hard labor you would have saved perhaps half of them. You would have eased their burden, not increased it. Purification through suffering is easier – easier, I say, than the lot you assign to many of them by wholesale acquittals in court. You only plant cynicism in their hearts; you leave them with a seductive question and with contempt for you yourselves. You don’t believe it? They have contempt for you and your courts and for the justice system of the whole country! Into their hearts you pour disbelief in the People’s truth, in God’s truth; you leave them confused . . . The criminal walks out of the court thinking: ‘So that’s how it is now; they’ve gone soft. They’ve gotten clever, it seems. Maybe they’re afraid. So I can do the same thing again. It’s clear enough: I was in such a hard pinch, I couldn’t help stealing.’
And do you really think that when you let them all off as innocent or with a recommendation for mercy you are giving them the chance to reform? He’ll reform, all right! Why should he worry? ‘It looks like I didn’t do anything wrong at all’ – this is what he thinks in the final analysis. You yourselves put that notion in his head. The main thing is that faith in the law and in the People’s truth is being shaken.
Not long ago I spent several years living abroad. When I left Russia the new courts were only in their infancy. How eagerly I would read in our newspapers there everything concerning the Russian courts. With real sorrow I also observed Russians living abroad and their children, who did not know their native language or who were forgetting it. It was clear to me that half of them, by the very nature of things, would eventually become expatriates. I always found it painful to think about that: so much vitality, so many of the best, perhaps, of our people, while we in Russia are so in need of good people! But sometimes as I left the reading room, by God, gentlemen, I became reconciled to the temporary emigration and emigrés in spite of myself. My heart ached.
I would read in the newspaper of a wife who murdered her husband and who was acquitted. The crime is obvious and proven; she herself confesses. ‘Not guilty.’ A young man breaks open a strongbox and steals the money. ‘I was in love,’ he says, ‘very much in love, and I needed money to buy things for my mistress.’ ‘Not guilty.’ It would not be so terrible if these cases could be justified by compassion or pity; but truly I could not understand the reasons for the acquittal and I was bewildered.
I came away with a troubled feeling, almost as if I had been personally insulted. In these bitter moments I would sometimes imagine Russia as a kind of quagmire or swamp on which someone had contrived to build a palace. The surface of the soil looks firm and smooth, but in reality it is like the surface of some son of jellied green-pea aspic, and once you step on it you slip down to the very abyss. I reproached myself for my faintheartedness; I was encouraged by the thought that, being far away, I might be mistaken and that I myself was the kind of temporary emigré I spoke of; that I could not see things at first hand nor hear clearly . . .
And now I have been home again for a long while.
‘But come now – do they really feel pity?’ That’s the question! Don’t laugh because I put so much stress on it. At least pity provides some sort of explanation; at least it leads you out of the darkness, and without it we comprehend nothing and see only gloomy blackness inhabited by some madman.
A peasant beats his wife, inflicts injuries on her for many years, abuses her worse than his dog. In despair to the point of suicide and scarcely in her right mind, she goes to the village court. They send her away with an indifferent mumble: ‘Learn to live together.’ Can this be pity? These are the dull words of a drunkard who has just come to after a long spree, a man who is scarcely aware that you an standing in front of him, who stupidly and listlessly waves you away so you won’t bother him; a man whose tongue doesn’t work properly, who has nothing in his head but alcohol fumes and folly.
The woman’s story, by the way, is well known and happened only recently. We read about it in all the newspapers and, perhaps, we still remember it. Plainly and simply, the wife who suffered from her husband’s beatings hanged herself; the husband was tried and found deserving of mercy. But for a long time thereafter I fancied I could see all the circumstances of the case; I see them even now.
I kept imagining his figure: he was tall, the reports said, very thickset, powerful, fair-haired. I would add another touch: thinning hair. His body is white and bloated; his movements slow and solemn; his gaze is steady. He speaks little and rarely and drops his words like precious pearls, cherishing them above all else. Witnesses testified that he had a cruel nature: he would catch a chicken and hang it by its feet, head down, just for his own pleasure. This amused him – a most characteristic trait! For a number of years he had beaten his wife with anything that was at hand – ropes or sticks. He would take up a floorboard, thrust her feet into the gap, press the board down, and beat and beat her.
I think he himself did not know why he was beating her; he just did it, probably from the same motives for which he hung the chicken. He sometimes also starved her, giving her no bread for three days. He would place the bread on a shelf, summon her, and say: ‘Don’t you care touch that bread. That’s my bread.’ And that’s another remarkably characteristic trait! She and her ten-year-old child would go off begging to the neighbours: if they were given bread they would eat; if not, they went hungry. When he asked her to work she did everything with never a hesitation or a murmur, intimidated, until finally she became a virtual mad woman. I can imagine what she looked like: she must have been a very small woman, thin as a rail. It sometimes happens that very large, heavy-set men with white, bloated bodies marry very small, skinny women (they are even inclined to choose such, I’ve noticed), and it is so strange to watch them standing or walking together.
It seems to me that if she had become pregnant by him in her final days it would have been an even more characteristic and essential finishing touch; other wise the picture is somehow incomplete. Have you seen how a peasant beats his wife? I have. He begins with a rope or a strap. Peasant life is without aesthetic pleasures such as music, theaters, and magazines; it is natural that this void be filled with something. Once he has bound his wife or thrust her feet into an opening in the floorboards, our peasant would begin, probably methodically, indifferently, even sleepily; his blows are measured; he doesn’t listen to her cries and her pleading; or rather, he does listen, and listens with delight – otherwise what satisfaction would there be in beating her?
Do you know, gentlemen, people are born in various circumstances: can you not conceive that this woman, in other circumstances, might have been some Juliet or Beatrice from Shakespeare, or Gretchen from Faust? I’m not saying that she was – it would be absurd to claim that – but yet there could be the embryo of something very noble in her soul, something no worse, perhaps, than what could be found in a woman of noble birth: a loving, even lofty, heart; a character filled with a most original beauty. The very fact that she hesitated so long in taking her own life shows something so quiet, meek, patient, and affectionate about her.
And so this same Beatrice or Gretchen is beaten and whipped like a dog! The blows rain down faster and faster, harder and harder – countless blows. He begins to grow heated and finds it to his taste. At last he grows wild, and his wildness pleases him. The animal cries of his victim intoxicate him like liquor: ‘I’ll wash your feet and drink the water,’ cries Beatrice in an inhuman voice.
But finally she grows quiet; she stops shrieking and only groans wildly, her breath catching constantly; and now the blows come ever faster and ever more
