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| ISBN-13: | 9780810144484 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2022 |
| Series: | Studies in Russian Literature and Theory |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Wages of Evil
Dostoevsky and PunishmentBy Anna Schur
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Northwestern University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2848-4
Chapter One
The Scaffold and the Rod: Dostoevsky on the Death Penalty and Corporal Punishment
IN THE CHAPTER "Rebellion" in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan famously confronts Alyosha with a roster of crimes against children that emblematize innocent and unavenged human suffering. In Ivan's eyes, this suffering makes it impossible to accept the promise of universal reconciliation at the end of time and prompts him to "return ... the ticket" (BK, 245). Among the criminals on Ivan's roster is an unnamed general who orders an eight-year-old boy to be torn apart by a pack of dogs in front of the boy's mother. When Ivan asks Alyosha if the general ought to be shot, "for our moral satisfaction," the saintly Alyosha shockingly responds in the affirmative. Although Alyosha immediately takes this back, adding that what he said "is an absurdity," Ivan is surprised to discover that his pure brother has a "little devil" sitting in his "little heart" (BK, 243). If only for a moment, Alyosha echoes Ivan's demand that retribution take place "not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that I see it myself" (BK, 244).
Alyosha's spontaneous response indicates Dostoevsky's recognition of the power of retributive emotions in the human heart. But it would be a mistake, of course, to see Dostoevsky as an advocate of the death penalty or even, as we will see later, of a strictly retributive position. Rather, Alyosha's visceral initial response and his more considered withdrawal of this response are indicative of Dostoevsky's own position—of his firm opposition to the death penalty even if some crimes may arouse the feeling that they deserve the punishment of death.
In fact, when it comes to Dostoevsky's ideas about specific forms of punishment (as distinct from punishment more generally), it appears that we are more familiar precisely with his thoughts on the death penalty. At least, they appear to be discussed by Dostoevsky's readers more frequently. There are, of course, compelling reasons for this. Condemned to death for his participation in the Petrashevsky Circle and spared at the very last moment before the execution, Dostoevsky was in a unique position to speak from experience about the horrors of capital punishment. He did so from the moral and religious perspectives, rejecting it primarily for the unspeakable anguish to which it subjects the condemned person's soul.
AN OUTRAGE OF THE SOUL
Apart from his biography, Dostoevsky's rejection of the death penalty was also inspired by Victor Hugo's novel Le dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man). As is well known, Dostoevsky deeply appreciated Hugo's novel and was especially struck by its portrayal of the condemned man's state of mind in the days and hours before the execution, of his mental suffering, and of the agonizing last ride to the guillotine. Dostoevsky himself experienced only minutes of certain knowledge of his imminent execution. Even on the fatal morning of December 22, 1849, on the way to the Semenovsky Square for the mock execution, neither he nor his fellow Petrashevtsy (members of the Petrashevsky circle of intellectuals) suspected the worst. Only when they were brought in view of the scaffold bordered with black drape, were read the verdicts, dressed in funeral garb, and urged to make a last confession by a priest did the certainty of imminent death become inescapable. As the first three prisoners were seized and tied to the poles, their caps pulled over their faces, Dostoevsky, placed in the next group of three, firmly believed that he had only minutes to live. It is these minutes that twenty years later Prince Myshkin would describe at length in the much-quoted passage about his acquaintance who once "was to be shot for a political offence." Like Dostoevsky, the man was reprieved twenty minutes after the death verdict was announced, but he spent those twenty minutes "in the fullest conviction that he would die in a few minutes." Myshkin confesses that he was always eager to listen to the man, especially when he recalled his sensation of the passage of time:
He had only five minutes more to live. He told me that those five minutes seemed to him an infinite time, a vast wealth; he felt that he had so many lives left in those five minutes that there was no need yet to think of the last moment, so much so that he divided his time up. He set aside time to take leave of his comrades, two minutes for that; then he kept another two minutes to think for the last time; and then a minute to look about him for the last time. He remembered very well having divided his time like that. He was dying at twenty-seven, strong and healthy. As he took leave of his comrades, he remembered asking one of them a somewhat irrelevant question and being particularly interested in the answer. Then when he had said good-bye, the two minutes came that he had set apart for thinking to himself. He knew perfectly well what he would think about. He wanted to realize as quickly and clearly as possible how it could be that now he existed and was living and in three minutes he would be something—someone or something. But what? Where? He meant to decide all that in those two minutes! Not far off there was a church, and gilt roof was glittering in the bright sunshine. He remembered that he stared very persistently at that roof and the light flashing from it; he could not tear himself away from the light. It seemed to him that those rays were his new nature and that in three minutes he would somehow melt into them ... The uncertainty and feeling of aversion for that new thing which would be and was just coming was awful. But he said that nothing was so dreadful at that time as the continual thought, "What if I were not to die! What if I could go back to life—what eternity! And it would all be mine! I would turn every minute into an age; I would lose nothing, I would count every minute as it passed, I would not waste one!" He said that this idea turned to such a fury that he longed to be shot quickly. (I, 55)
The sensation of time experienced by Myshkin's acquaintance holds a promise of "eternity of life," when each moment expands into infinity, into time without end. But such experience of time is available only on the brink of death and cannot be carried into ordinary existence. Once the man is reprieved, he returns to human time that, paradoxically, obscures both the possibility of "eternal" life and of his mortality, and he "wastes many, many minutes" (I, 56).
Dostoevsky's death sentence was commuted at the very last moment to a term of hard labor. His life was spared but the experience scarred him. Brief references to the state of someone condemned to death (as in Crime and Punishment) or inset narratives reflecting on the problem of the death penalty (as in The Idiot) often appear in Dostoevsky's writings. Living through those minutes must have confirmed to Dostoevsky the accuracy of Hugo's psychological and artistic insight. Hugo succeeded in representing what those minutes must have felt like if they were extended into months of awaiting one's own execution.
For Dostoevksy, as for Hugo, the horror of capital punishment lies not in the physical pain inflicted on the body of the condemned but in the agony of the soul that knows the hour of its extermination. Myshkin says:
But the chief and worst pain may not be in the bodily suffering but in one's knowing for certain that in an hour, and then in ten minutes, and then in half a minute, then now, at the very moment, the soul will leave the body and that one will cease to be a man and that that's bound to happen; the worst part of it is that it's certain. When you lay your head down under the knife and hear the knife slide over your head, that quarter of a second is the most terrible of all. (I, 20; original emphasis)
According to Myshkin, it is the inexorable certainty of one's scheduled demise that makes the death penalty so much worse than murder. The victim of murder, Myshkin further explains, hopes to the very last moment that the killer may relent and the terrible lot may be avoided. No such hope is available to the one condemned to death by law. His death and its very moment are a certainty that consumes his soul. "Who can tell whether human nature is able to bear it without madness? Why this hideous, useless, unnecessary outrage?" (I, 20).
That moral suffering of such magnitude is unbearable for a human being is also suggested by another character in The Idiot. Echoing Myshkin, Lebedev tells the story of Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV who, on the scaffold of the guillotine, begged her executioner for "another minute." Lebedev claims to pray for her, adding that "God will forgive her; for one cannot imagine a greater misère for a human soul than that" (I, 186).
The issue of capital punishment also comes up in critical discussions of Dostoevsky's response to Ivan Turgenev's "Execution of Tropmann." A common murderer, J. B. Tropmann was sentenced to death for slaughtering eight members of the Kinck family, including five young children and their mother. He was executed in Paris in January 1870.5 Several months later, Turgenev, who had attended Tropmann's execution, published his account of the event in Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe). Dostoevsky's reaction to Turgenev's essay was sharply negative. In a peevish letter to N. Strakhov, Dostoevsky criticized Turgenev, taking particular offense at his averting the gaze at the very moment of Tropmann's death, when the knife of the guillotine severed the criminal's head from the body. To Dostoevsky, the gesture represents Turgenev's selfish concern that his own emotional equilibrium not be upset by unpleasant images. Even in the presence of the severed head, Dostoevsky suggests, Turgenev worries only about his emotional balance. This narcissistic fixation on himself spills over into the essay. According to Dostoevsky, Turgenev's main purpose in writing it is to parade his own refinement and delicacy of feeling.
Whatever the cause of Dostoevsky's bitterness, it could not be the result of Turgenev's position on the issue itself. Like Dostoevsky's own works, Turgenev's essay makes it abundantly clear that he, too, opposes the death penalty and abhors public executions. The revolting spectacle is presented in Turgenev's essay as an unquestionable evil that degrades, corrupts, and brutalizes all the participants. In fact, his representation of the minute details of the ritual, his focus on the crowd, on the villain, and on himself as an observer of the event, complement Myshkin's narratives in striking ways. In contrast to Turgenev's heightened attention to the "sociology" of the execution, Dostoevsky is primarily interested in the psychology of the condemned man. He does not describe the last toilet of the condemned, the grim erection of the guillotine, or the elemental life of the crowd on the eve of the execution. Instead, Dostoevsky's images evoke the notion of apocalypse and recall the suffering of Christ in the last hours before crucifixion. In spite of Tropmann's moral monstrosity, Turgenev is forced to acknowledge that the condemned man is "a being like us," whose thoughts, although inaccessible to Turgenev, run along lines familiar to an ordinary mortal. For Dostoevsky, the condemned man enters, as it were, a different realm of being. As it lies on the scaffold of the guillotine, the condemned man's head, which Myshkin suggests as a subject for Adelaida's painting, "knows everything" (vse znaet) and is incinerated by the knowledge that ought to remain foreclosed to human understanding (I, 60; translation modified; original emphasis).
These are the general outlines of critical discussions that consider Dostoevsky's views on the death penalty. To add to these, below I place Dostoevsky's ideas in the context of contemporary debates on capital punishment as they are outlined in "The Death Penalty," an 1863 article by O. A. Filippov. While the article appeared in Russkoe slovo (Russian Word), Filippov was well known to Dostoevsky as a contributor to Vremia (Time) and later to Epokha (Epoch), the journals Dostoevsky published with his older brother, Mikhail. For these journals, Filippov wrote several articles on penal history, theory, and practice. A brief discussion of Filippov's article will serve two purposes at once. On the one hand, it will help to bring out some rarely discussed aspects of Dostoevsky's position on capital punishment. On the other hand, Filippov's survey of main theories of punishment that he uses to frame his discussion of pro-and anti-death-penalty arguments will be our first glimpse of the debates that will appear frequently throughout the book.
Filippov's article, which is a review of two European and two Russian publications, displays a very strong anti-death-penalty bias. Echoing a widely held sentiment in Russia at the time, Filippov begins by suggesting that the death penalty can only be regarded as a remnant of medieval times. If the death penalty exists to this day, Filippov writes, it is understood and defended in terms of state necessity (gosudarstvennoi neobkhodimosti), not in terms of justice.
It is something of a contradiction therefore that later on in the article Filippov speaks of Kant and Hegel, both of whom argue for capital punishment not on political grounds but from the standpoint of just retribution. For these philosophers and their disciples, Filippov explains, there exist crimes so heinous that they simply demand the punishment of death. He pays particular attention to Hegel, who sees punishment as resulting from the "necessity of development of the idea of truth [vsledstvie neobkhodimosti razvitiia idei pravdy]." This idea, according to Hegel, "is negated by untruth; punishment, on the other hand, is negation of negation, that is restoration of truth." For Filippov such an abstract "mess" (sumbur) could have sprung only from the mind of a German philosopher, "desiccated" by "dead theories." If crime is evil, punishment carried out only for the sake of its negation is also evil. It is nothing other than vengeance and violence, and can hardly be seen as justice "in our time," Filippov concludes.
Another theory mobilized by many defenders of the death penalty is the theory of punishment as an instrument of deterrence. This theory, Filippov explains, assumes that while life in prison is a joyless prospect for a criminal, it does not affect him to the same extent as does the thought of capital punishment as a future penalty for his crime. Filippov criticizes this theory by pointing out that the would-be criminal may not be familiar with the criminal code and thus ignorant of specific punishment that would be his due. But besides such practical considerations, in Filippov's view, this theory also suffers from a deeply mistaken understanding of the human heart. It assumes that a criminal thoroughly analyzes his actions, carefully weighing its positive effects against its negative consequences. But, Filippov argues, experience shows that this is very rarely the case. Often, criminals are driven by passions, which paralyze reason. It is unrealistic to expect that this kind of criminal would soberly and coldly analyze his intentions and actions. Still other criminals suffer from organic disorders and are propelled by idées fixes over which they have no control.
In contrast to discussions of pro-death-penalty arguments, which Filippov accompanies with critical comments, the various anti-death-penalty theories are presented in his article with approbation, although Filippov steers clear of explicitly adjudicating among them. To set up this discussion, Filippov alludes to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment theorist Cesare Beccaria as the first modern thinker to lay out systematic objections to the notion of capital punishment. As Filippov explains, for Beccaria, who was a proponent of the idea of social contract, the death penalty could not have been included in this contract. According to Beccaria, it is irrational to believe that life, which is the greatest of all goods, can be contained in the smallest possible measure of individual liberty that one sacrifices for the general good of the public. Filippov follows this introduction with an overview of various anti-death-penalty arguments that emerged after the publication of Beccaria's 1764 An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, a foundational text of modern penology. Chief among these were theories of reformative punishment, which argued that the most important, if not the only, legitimate function of punishment was the idea of moral reformation of the criminal and his subsequent reintegration into society. As a form of punishment that did not seek these outcomes, in the eyes of these writers, the death penalty could lay no claim to rationality, legitimacy, or even social usefulness.
Filippov stresses that the commitment to the principle of reformation and the concomitant rejection of the death penalty were embraced by thinkers of different persuasions. Thus "idealists" advocated the principle of reformation on the grounds that "the law of brotherly love" did not reject anybody, including the criminal, and demanded that society attempt to reform him even against his own will, if necessary. For "materialists," the emphasis on reformation was intimately linked to the idea that human conduct is determined by the social conditions of one's environment. One indication that Filippov himself might have favored this theory above others was his profound admiration for the Welsh social reformer and utopian socialist Robert Owen. For Owen, who shared a similar understanding of crime as a product of poverty and social injustice, the key to remaking individual moral character lay in education and creating an environment conducive to positive moral change. In an experimental commune that Owen established and ran in the early nineteenth century in New Lanark, he eliminated all punishment, merely banishing the transgressor from the community.
Dostoevsky's reflections on punishment reverberate with the echoes of all of these debates. As we will see in subsequent chapters, his own writings work through many of the same problems: from punishment justifications to commensurability between crimes and punishments to the idea of reformative punishment. Even the name of Beccaria, referenced above as an example of the Enlightenment approach to capital punishment, will reappear later on as a useful foil to Dostoevsky's own ideas about punishment taken more broadly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wages of Evil by Anna Schur Copyright © 2012 by Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionChapter 1: The Scaffold and the Rod: Dostoevsky on the Death Penalty and Corporal PunishmentChapter 2 : "Squaring the Circle": The Justice of PunishmentChapter 3: Foregoing Punishment: Dostoevsky’s Third Category and the Case of Ekaterina KornilovaChapter 4: "A Mummy" or a "Resurrected" Self?Chapter 5: "India Rubber," the "Living Soul," and the Process of Moral ChangeChapter 6: Approximations of Justice: The Novel in the Courtroom
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography