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Chapter One - The Scaffold and the Rod: Dostoevsky on the Death Penalty and Corporal Punishment
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19 Chapter One The Scaffold and the Rod: Dostoevsky on the Death Penalty and Corporal Punishment I N T H E C H A P T E R “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 Chapter One 20 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).1 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.2 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.3 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.”4 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...