Resurrection by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (portable ebook reader txt) 📕

however much time he might have. It was quite different now from

what it had been. Formerly he used to be obliged to look for an

occupation, the interest of which always centred in one person,

i.e., Dmitri Ivanovitch Nekhludoff, and yet, though every

interest of his life was thus centred, all these occupations were

very wearisome. Now all his occupations related to other people

and not to Dmitri Ivanovitch, and they were all interesting and

attractive, and there was no end to them. Nor was this all.

Formerly Dmitri Ivanovitch Nekhludoff’s occupations always made

him feel vexed and irritable; now they produced a joyful state of

mind. The business at present occupying Nekhludoff could be

divided under three headings. He himself, with his usual

pedantry, divided it in that way, and accordingly kept the papers

referring to it in three different portfolios. The first referred

to Maslova, and was chiefly that of taking steps to get her

petition to the Emperor attended to, and preparing for her

probable journey to Siberia.

The second was about his estates. In Panovo he had given the land

to the peasants on condition of their paying rent to be put to

their own communal use. But he had to confirm this transaction by

a legal deed, and to make his will, in accordance with it. In

Kousminski the state of things was still as he had first arranged

it, i.e., he was to receive the rent; but the terms had to be

fixed, and also how much of the money he would use to live on,

and how much he would leave for the peasants’ use. As he did not

know what his journey to Siberia would cost him, he could not

decide to lose this revenue altogether, though he reduced the

income from it by half.

The third part of his business was to help the convicts, who

applied more and more often to him. At first when he came in

contact with the prisoners, and they appealed to him for help, he

at once began interceding for them, hoping to lighten their fate,

but he soon had so many applications that he felt the

impossibility of attending to all of them, and that naturally led

him to take up another piece of work, which at last roused his

interest even more than the three first. This new part of his

business was finding an answer to the following questions: What

was this astonishing institution called criminal law, of which

the results were that in the prison, with some of the inmates of

which he had lately become acquainted, and in all those other

places of confinement, from the Peter and Paul Fortress in

Petersburg to the island of Sakhalin, hundreds and thousands of

victims were pining? What did this strange criminal law exist

for? How had it originated?

From his personal relations with the prisoners, from notes by

some of those in confinement, and by questioning the advocate and

the prison priest, Nekhludoff came to the conclusion that the

convicts, the so-called criminals, could be divided into five

classes. The first were quite innocent people, condemned by

judicial blunder. Such were the Menshoffs, supposed to be

incendiaries, Maslova, and others. There were not many of these;

according to the priest’s words, only seven per cent., but their

condition excited particular interest.

To the second class belong persons condemned for actions done

under peculiar circumstances, i.e., in a fit of passion, jealousy,

or drunkenness, circumstances under which those who judged them

would surely have committed the same actions.

The third class consisted of people punished for having committed

actions which, according to their understanding, were quite

natural, and even good, but which those other people, the men who

made the laws, considered to be crimes. Such were the persons who

sold spirits without a license, smugglers, those who gathered

grass and wood on large estates and in the forests belonging to

the Crown; the thieving miners; and those unbelieving people who

robbed churches.

To the fourth class belonged those who were imprisoned only

because they stood morally higher than the average level of

society. Such were the Sectarians, the Poles, the Circassians

rebelling in order to regain their independence, the political

prisoners, the Socialists, the strikers condemned for

withstanding the authorities. There was, according to

Nekhludoff’s observations, a very large percentage belonging to

this class; among them some of the best of men.

The fifth class consisted of persons who had been far more sinned

against by society than they had sinned against it. These were

castaways, stupefied by continual oppression and temptation, such

as the boy who had stolen the rugs, and hundreds of others whom

Nekhludoff had seen in the prison and out of it. The conditions

under which they lived seemed to lead on systematically to those

actions which are termed crimes. A great many thieves and

murderers with whom he had lately come in contact, according to

Nekhludoff’s estimate, belonged to this class. To this class

Nekhludoff also reckoned those depraved, demoralised creatures

whom the new school of criminology classify as the criminal type,

and the existence of which is considered to be the chief proof of

the necessity of criminal law and punishment. This demoralised,

depraved, abnormal type was, according to Nekhludoff, exactly the

same as that against whom society had sinned, only here society

had sinned not directly against them, but against their parents

and forefathers.

Among this latter class Nekhludoff was specially struck by one

Okhotin, an inveterate thief, the illegitimate son of a

prostitute, brought up in a doss-house, who, up to the age of 30,

had apparently never met with any one whose morality was above

that of a policeman, and who had got into a band of thieves when

quite young. He was gifted with an extraordinary sense of humour,

by means of which he made himself very attractive. He asked

Nekhludoff for protection, at the same time making fun of

himself, the lawyers, the prison, and laws human and divine.

Another was the handsome Fedoroff, who, with a band of robbers,

of whom he was the chief, had robbed and murdered an old man, an

official. Fedoroff was a peasant, whose father had been

unlawfully deprived of his house, and who, later on, when serving

as a soldier, had suffered much because he had fallen in love

with an officer’s mistress. He had a fascinating, passionate

nature, that longed for enjoyment at any cost. He had never met

anybody who restrained himself for any cause whatever, and had

never heard a word about any aim in life other than enjoyment.

Nekhludoff distinctly saw that both these men were richly endowed

by nature, but had been neglected and crippled like uncared-for

plants.

He had also met a tramp and a woman who had repelled him by their

dulness and seeming cruelty, but even in them he could find no

trace of the criminal type written about by the Italian school,

but only saw in them people who were repulsive to him personally,

just in the same way as some he had met outside the prison, in

swallow-tail coats wearing epaulettes, or bedecked with lace. And

so the investigation of the reasons why all these very different

persons were put in prison, while others just like them were

going about free and even judging them, formed a fourth task for

Nekhludoff.

He hoped to find an answer to this question in books, and bought

all that referred to it. He got the works of Lombroso, Garofalo,

Ferry, List, Maudsley, Tard, and read them carefully. But as he

read he became more and more disappointed. It happened to him as

it always happens to those who turn to science not in order to

play a part in it, nor to write, nor to dispute, nor to teach,

but simply for an answer to an every-day question of life.

Science answered thousands of different very subtle and ingenious

questions touching criminal law, but not the one he was trying to

solve. He asked a very simple question: “Why, and with what

right, do some people lock up, torment, exile, flog, and kill

others, while they are themselves just like those whom they

torment, flog, and kill?” And in answer he got deliberations as

to whether human beings had free will or not. Whether signs of

criminality could be detected by measuring the skulls or not.

What part heredity played in crime. Whether immorality could be

inherited. What madness is, what degeneration is, and what

temperament is. How climate, food, ignorance, imitativeness,

hypnotism, or passion act. What society is. What are its duties,

etc., etc.

These disquisitions reminded him of the answer he once got from a

little boy whom he met coming home from school. Nekhludoff asked

him if he had learned his spelling.

“I have,” answered the boy.

“Well, then, tell me, how do you spell ‘leg’?”

“A dog’s leg, or what kind of leg?” the boy answered, with a sly

look.

Answers in the form of new questions, like the boy’s, was all

Nekhludoff got in reply to his one primary question. He found

much that was clever, learned much that was interesting, but what

he did not find was an answer to the principal question: By what

right some people punish others?

Not only did he not find any answer, but all the arguments were

brought forward in order to explain and vindicate punishment, the

necessity of which was taken as an axiom.

Nekhludoff read much, but only in snatches, and putting down his

failure to this superficial way of reading, hoped to find the

answer later on. He would not allow himself to believe in the

truth of the answer which began, more and more often, to present

itself to him.

CHAPTER XXXI.

NEKHLUDOFF’S SISTER AND HER HUSBAND.

The gang of prisoners, with Maslova among them, was to start on

the 5th July. Nekhludoff arranged to start on the same day.

The day before, Nekhludoff’s sister and her husband came to town

to see him.

Nekhludoff’s sister, Nathalie Ivanovna Rogozhinsky, was 10 years

older than her brother. She had been very fond of him when he was

a boy, and later on, just before her marriage, they grew very

close to each other, as if they were equals, she being a young

woman of 25, he a lad of 15. At that time she was in love with

his friend, Nikolenka Irtenieff, since dead. They both loved

Nikolenka, and loved in him and in themselves that which is good,

and which unites all men. Since then they had both been depraved,

he by military service and a vicious life, she by marriage with a

man whom she loved with a sensual love, who did not care for the

things that had once been so dear and holy to her and to her

brother, nor even understand the meaning of those aspirations

towards moral perfection and the service of mankind, which once

constituted her life, and put them down to ambition and the wish

to show off; that being the only explanation comprehensible to

him.

Nathalie’s husband had been a man without a name and without

means, but cleverly steering towards Liberalism or Conservatism,

according to which best suited his purpose, he managed to make a

comparatively brilliant judicial career. Some peculiarity which

made him attractive to women assisted him when he was no longer

in his first youth. While travelling abroad he made Nekhludoff’s

acquaintance, and managed to make Nathalie, who was also no

longer a girl, fall in love with him, rather against her mother’s

wishes who considered a marriage with him to be a misalliance for

her daughter. Nekhludoff, though he tried to hide it from

himself, though he