JOSEPH FRANK
267
author himself. Moreover, it is quite in keeping with the character, a
simple-minded pensioner (a retired soldier, a man of the people) who
would naturally use Christian references in his speech. All the same, I
will risk attributing it to the author because I believe it tells us some–
thing fundamental about Dostoevsky's view of human nature and its
relation to evil. The Augustinian condemnation of humanity because of
original sin has had much less influence in the Eastern Orthodox
Church than in Roman Catholicism. There was thus very little obstacle
to Dostoevsky's acceptance of the French Utopian Socialist Christianity
that began to make headway at this time among "progressive" Russian
intellectuals . This Christianity saw nothing in human nature to prevent
translating the love-ethic of Christ into worldly, secular, and particularly
social-political terms; and it was this love-ethic that dominated all of
Dostoevsky's writings in this early period.
Dostoevsky's arrest in
1849,
and the four-year sentence he spent in a
hard-labor prison camp in Siberia, marked a crucial turning point in his
life. As he later wrote himself, it initiated what he called "the regenera–
tion of his convictions," a phrase that has been interpreted in a bewil–
dering variety of ways. But one thing is certain: whatever the effect of
these prison-camp years, it was linked to an encounter with evil for
which he was totally unprepared. Nothing had provided him with any
inkling of the moral anarchy that reigned, without any check, in the
midst of the prison-camp world into which he was thrown. "I was
astonished and upset," he wrote in
House of the Dead,
"as if until then
I had not suspected or heard anything about all that, and yet I knew it
and had learned about it. But the reality makes quite a different impres–
sion than what one learns about from books and hearsay." Most of the
convicts had committed at least one murder, if not several; they also
stole from each other incessantly, lied, cheated, and drank themselves
into stupefaction. Describing life among them, Dostoevsky speaks of
"everything being defiled and degraded."
In some sense, these four years can be seen as a test of the view of
human nature set down in "An Honest Thief"-the view that, even
among those having surrendered to the temptation of evil, repentance and
regeneration were always possible. And in the little-read but indispensable
masterpiece
House of the Dead
(Tolstoy'S favorite among Dostoevsky's
works), he portrays, along with much else about prison-camp life that
must be neglected here, the gradual passage of this test, and the reassur–
ance that human nature--even among thieves and murderers-was not
incurably corrupt. Mainly this is done indirectly-by indicating time and
again, for example, without stating it explicitly, that many of the murders
