Fyodor Dostoevsky: At Gun Point
by Joel Savishinsky

It cannot be that much trouble just to stand up
and face forward. Any able-bodied person,
even those who are hand- and tongue-tied,
even Dostoevsky, can surely do that.
This is how a person plays a part
       in his own execution.

Sounds more abrupt than metaphors
punctuate the waiting, the boots clacking
on the ground, heavy bolts rubbing
their curved sides into the breach. Suddenly,
an order from St. Petersburg arrives in the damp air,
sharp and short in its wording, toying with
       the fate of the blind-folded men.

It is old-style stage-craft, the uniformed squad
standing a dozen yards away, somewhere beyond
the line of thought. Each long-coated soldier,
issued a single shell, knows that one man
has been secretly given a blank,
       absolving all from the act of killing.

When the Czar’s decree comes on
a rattling cart, the command to commute
the prisoners’ sentences – though read out
just in time – is still too late. For even
without death, condemned souls cannot
erase their final moment’s memories,
only conjure new ones from those minutes
when eternity opened its arms and,
in place of an embrace or a bullet,
it shrugged like corporals
       told to rest their rifles.

In that theater of mock murder, what could
have been the end was meant to be
a new beginning, shocking the convicted
out of their former selves, turning the drama
of Dostoevsky’s own life – and those of the characters
he would one day imagine – into a new politics,
a new art. The authorities, who had once gambled
with his existence, now wagered that in Siberia, he would
re-invent himself. And in ways beyond rational design,
prison – followed by exile and a reading of the Gospels –
transformed Dostoevsky from dissident and nihilist
       into a reflective man of faith.

After a decade in Siberia, he rendered the prison stories of
his “compulsory coexistence” into the semi-autobiographical
Notes from A Dead House, and traded journalism
for the liberties of narrative. The masterpieces
that followed – Crime and Punishment,
The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov – wrestled with
justice and passion, innocence and evil, the conflicts
between religion and doubt, autonomy and order,
and their creator’s own struggles with epilepsy.
They became meditations on the nature of personality,
the limits of reason, the workings of the mind,
       and the moral weight of language and silence.

A novel, Dostoevsky once said, is really “a work of poetry,”
a claim borne out not only by the way his men and women
speak both to be understood and to understand themselves,
but also – one suspects – so that their author,
like all great writers, could himself gain self-knowledge
through the very act of writing. In the process, perhaps
echoing his character Raskolnikov, he first wanted
to “declare,” but then decided to “confess” and,
       finally, to “give testimony.”

The once-condemned radical, the roulette addict,
the ex-prisoner and former exile, this self-styled
man “from underground,” now looked up and
took stock of the revolutionaries and idealists
of his time, finding them sincere but naïve, as if
they had turned into avatars of a yurodivy, a holy fool,
unwitting and all-too-trusting versions of his indelible,
       compelling and tragic invention, Prince Myshkin.

Here and in his other fictions, Dostoevsky himself
became the “Grand Inquisitor,” interrogating
society’s purpose and norms, its humanity,
its conceits and cruelties, arguing that
without God, everything is possible, and
reminding us that we continue to read him
because he asks the questions we ourselves
ponder each time we face the firing squad
       of the daily news.



 

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