Now, condemned to a four-year imprisonment for his small part in the general disturbances of the time (which were based in a way on a blind belief in the printed word, especially the secretly printed word), Pisarev wrote about What to Do?, reviewing it bit by bit for The Russian Word as the installments appeared in The Contemporary. Although in the beginning the Senate was puzzled by the novel’s being praised for its ideas instead of being ridiculed because of its style, and expressed the fear that the praises might have a deleterious effect on the younger generation, the authorities soon realized how important it was in the present case to obtain by this method a complete picture of Chernyshevski’s perniciousness, which Kostomarov had only outlined in the list of his “special devices.” “The government,” says Strannolyubski “on the one hand permitting Chernyshevski to produce a novel in the fortress and on the other permitting Pisarev, his fellow captive, to produce articles explaining the intentions of this novel, acted with complete awareness, waiting curiously for Chernyshevski to babble himself out and watching what would come of it—in connection with the abundant discharges of his incubator neighbor.”
The business went smoothly and promised a great deal, but it was necessary to put pressure on Kostomarov since one or two definite proofs of guilt were needed, while Chernyshevski continued to boil and jeer in great detail, branding the commission as “clowns” and “an incoherent quagmire which is completely stupid.” Therefore Kostomarov was taken to Moscow and there the citizen Yakovlev, his former copyist, a drunkard and a rowdy, gave important testimony (for this he received an overcoat which he drank away so noisily in Tver that he was put in a strait-jacket): while doing his copying “on account of the summer weather in a garden pavilion,” he allegedly heard Nikolay Gavrilovich and Vladislav Dmitrievich as they were strolling arm-in-arm (a not implausible detail), talking about greetings from well-wishers to the serfs (it is difficult to find one’s way in this mixture of truth and promptings). At a second interrogation in the presence of a replenished Kostomarov, Chernyshevski said somewhat unfortunately that he had visited him only once and not found him in; then he added forcefully: “I’ll go gray, I’ll die, but I will not change my testimony.” The testimony of his not being the author of the proclamation is written by him in a trembling hand—trembling with rage rather than fright.
However that may have been, the case was coming to an end. There followed the Senate’s “definition”: very nobly it found Chernyshevski’s unlawful dealings with Herzen unproved (for Herzen’s “definition” of the Senate see below, at the end of this paragraph).
As for the appeal “To the Serfs of Landowners” … here the fruit had already ripened on the espaliers of forgery and bribes: the absolute moral conviction of the senators that Chernyshevski was the author thereof was transformed into judicial proof by the letter to “Aleksey Nikolaevich” (meaning, apparently, A. N. Pleshcheev, a peaceful poet, dubbed by Dostoevski “an all-round blond”—but for some reason no one insisted too much on Pleshcheev’s part, if any, in the matter). Thus in Chernyshevski’s person they condemned a phantasm closely resembling him; an invented guilt was wonderfully rigged up to look like the real one. The sentence was comparatively light—compared with what one is generally able to devise in this line: he was to be exiled for fourteen years of penal servitude and then to live in Siberia forever.
The “definition” went from the “savage ignoramuses” of the Senate to the “gray villains” of the State Council, who completely subscribed to it, and then went on to the sovereign, who confirmed it but reduced the term of penal servitude by half. On May 4, 1864, the sentence was announced to Chernyshevski, and on the 19th, at 8 o’clock in the morning, on Mytninski Square, he was executed.
It was drizzling, umbrellas undulated, the square was beslushed, and everything was wet; gendarmes’ uniforms, the darkened wood of the scaffold, the smooth, black pillar with chains, glossy from the rain. Suddenly the prison carriage appeared. From it emerged, with extraordinary celerity, as if they had rolled out, Chernyshevski in an overcoat and two peasant-like executioners; all three walked with swift steps along a line of soldiers to the scaffold. The crowd lurched forward and the gendarmes pressed back the front ranks; restrained cries sounded here and there: “Close the umbrellas!” While an official read the sentence, Chernyshevski, who already knew it, sulkily looked around him; he fingered his beard, adjusted his spectacles and spat several times.
When the reader stumbled and barely got out “soshulistic ideas” Chernyshevski smiled and then, recognizing someone in the crowd, nodded, coughed, shifted his stance: from beneath the overcoat his black trousers concertinaed over his rubbers. People standing near could see on his chest an oblong plaque with an inscription in white: STATE CRIMIN (the last syllable had not gone in). At the conclusion of the reading the executioners lowered him to his knees; the elder one, with a backhander, knocked the cap off his long, combed-back, light auburn hair. The face, tapering chinward, its large forehead shining, was now bent down, and with a resounding crack they managed to break an insufficiently incised sword over him.
Then they took his hands, which seemed unusually white and weak, and put them in black irons secured to the pillar: he had to stand that way for a quarter of an hour. The rain increased: the younger executioner picked up Chernyshevski’s cap and jammed it on his inclined head—and slowly, with difficulty, the chains got in his way—Chernyshevski straightened it. Behind a fence to the left one could see the scaffolding of a house under construction; workmen climbed onto the fence from the other side, one could hear the scrape of their boots; they climbed up, hung there, and abused the criminal from afar. The rain fell; the elder executioner consulted his silver watch. Chernyshevski kept turning his wrists slightly without looking up.
Suddenly, out of the better-off part of the crowd, bouquets began to fly. The gendarmes, jumping, tried to intercept them in midair. Roses exploded in the air; fleetingly one was able to see a rare combination: a policeman, wreathed. Bobbed-haired ladies in black burnouses threw racemes of lilac. Meanwhile Chernyshevski was hastily released from his chains and his dead body borne away. No—a slip of the pen; alas, he was alive, he was even cheerful! Students ran beside the carriage with cries of “Farewell, Chernyshevski! Au revoir!” He thrust his head out of the window, laughed and shook his finger at the most zealous runners.
“Alas, alive,” we exclaimed, for how could one not prefer the death penalty, the convulsions of the hanged man in his hideous cocoon, to that funeral which twenty-five insipid years later fell to Chernyshevski’s lot. The paw of oblivion began slowly to gather in his living image as soon as he had been removed to Siberia. Oh yes, oh yes, no doubt students for years sang the song: “Let us drink to him who wrote What to Do? …” But it was to the past they drank, to past glamour and scandal, to a great shade … but who would drink to a tremulous little old man with a tic, making clumsy paper boats for Yakut children somewhere in those fabulous backwoods?
We affirm that his book drew out and gathered within itself all the heat of his personality—a heat which is not to be found in its helplessly rational structures but which is concealed as it were between the words (as only bread is hot) and it was inevitably doomed to be dispersed with time (as only bread knows how to go stale and hard). Today, it seems, only Marxists are still capable of being interested by the ghostly ethics contained in this dead little book. To follow easily and freely the categorical imperative of the general good, here is the “rational egoism” which researchers have found in What to Do?
Let us recall for comic relief Kautski’s conjecture that the idea of egoism is connected with the development of commodity production, and Plekhanov’s conclusion that Chernyshevski was nevertheless an “idealist,” since it comes out in his book that the masses must catch up with the intelligentsia out of calculation—and calculation is an opinion. But the matter is simpler than that: the idea that calculation is the foundation of every action (or heroic accomplishment) leads to absurdity: in itself calculation can be heroic! Anything which comes into the focus of human thinking is spiritualized. Thus the “calculation” of the materialists was ennobled; thus, for those in the know, matter turns into an incorporeal play of mysterious forces.
Chernyshevski’s ethical structures are in their own way an attempt to construct the same old “perpetual motion” machine, where matter moves other matter. We would very much like this to revolve: egoism-altruism-egoism-altruism … but the wheel stops from friction. What to do? Live, read, think. What to do? Work at one’s own development in order to achieve the aim of life, which is happiness.
