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 émigrés 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 case under a larch, which he was some time in learning to distinguish from a pine.
The flowers which he gathered (whose names he did not know) he wrapped in cigarette paper and sent to his son Misha, who acquired that way “a small herbarium of the Vilyuisk flora”: thus did Princess Volkonski in Nekrasov’s poem about the Decembrists’ wives bequeath her grandchildren “a collection of butterflies, plants of Chita.” Once an eagle appeared in his yard … “it had come to peck at his liver,” remarks Strannolyubski, “but did not recognize Prometheus in him.”
The pleasure which he had experienced in his youth from the orderly disposition of the St. Petersburg waters now received a late echo: from nothing to do he dug out canals—and almost flooded one of the Vilyuisk residents’ favorite roads. He quenched his thirst for spreading culture by teaching manners to Yakuts, but just as before, the native would remove his cap at a distance of twenty paces and in that position would meekly freeze.
The practicality and good sense he used to advocate now dwindled to his advising the water-carrier to substitute a regular yoke of wood for the crook made of hair, which cut his palms; but the Yakut did not change his routine. In the little town where all they did was play cards and have passionate discussions about the price of Chinese cotton, his yearning for activity in public affairs led him to the Old-Believers, about whose plight Chernyshevski wrote an extraordinarily long and detailed memoir (including even Vilyuisk gossip) and coolly sent it off addressed to the Tsar, with the friendly suggestion he pardon them because they “esteem him as a saint.”
He wrote a lot but burned almost everything. He informed his relatives that the results of his “learned work” would undoubtedly be accepted sympathetically; this work was ashes and a mirage. Out of the whole heap of writings which he produced in Siberia, besides The Prologue, only two or three stories and a “cycle” of unfinished “novellas” have been preserved.… He also wrote poems. In texture they are no different from those versificatory tasks which he had once been given in the seminary, when he had reset a psalm of David in the following manner:
Upon me lay one duty only—
To mind my father’s flock of sheep,
And hymns I early started singing
For to extol the Lord withal.
In 1875 (to Pypin) and again in 1888 (to Lavrov) he sends “an ancient Persian poem”: a ghastly thing! In one of the strophes the pronoun “their” is repeated seven times (“Their country is barren, Their bodies are fleshless, And through their torn garments their ribs one can tell. Their faces are broad, and their features are flattened; Upon their flat features the soul does not dwell”) while in the monstrous chains of the genitive case (“Of howls of the ache of their craving for blood”) now, at the parting with literature, under a very low sun, there is evidence of
