Wages of Evil: Dostoevsky and Punishment

Introduction

3 Introduction “And what other torments have you got in that world, besides the quadrillion?” Ivan interrupted with some strange animation. “What other torments? Ah, don’t even ask: before it was one thing and another, but now it’s mostly the moral sort, ‘remorse of conscience’ and all that nonsense. That also started because of you, from the ‘mellowing of your mores.’” —F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov IN HIS 1922 ESSAY that serves as an introduction to his catalog of Dostoevsky’s library, Leonid Grossman remarks on the “jurist’s vein” (zhilka iurista) pulsating in Dostoevsky’s works. “Behind his journalistic writings,” Grossman writes, “one can feel a state theorist [gosudarstvennik], behind the novels—a criminologist.”1 That Dostoevsky was fascinated with the problems of crime and punishment is a universally recognized and widely discussed fact of his biography as a man and an artist. We know that Dostoevsky drew on real-life cases from court chronicles and commented extensively on the institution of the jury and its role in Russian public life, that he attended criminal trials and got personally involved in legal cases, that he knew the rules of criminal procedure, and that he was acquainted with the leading lawyers of his time. But for all the attention that these themes have received in Dostoevsky criticism, one area of his thought remains underexamined : his views on punishment—particularly on juridical punishment imposed by law—and their relationship to penal politics of his time. To be sure, critics have commented on such matters as Dostoevsky’s reflections on the death penalty, his rebuttals of theories of environmental behaviorism, his insistence on personal accountability and the resulting need for punishment. They have also discussed what Robert Louis Jackson calls “a distinctly Sadean” enjoyment of a tormentor subjecting his victim to the violence of corporal punishment.2 But the question of punishment per se, both in its philosophical and historical contexts, has been for the most part Introduction 4 subsumed under more general discussions of Dostoevsky’s ideas about freedom and responsibility, faith and morality, and occasionally, law and legal ethics. To my knowledge no attempt has yet been made to consider Dostoevsky ’s views on punishment more systematically or to make them the subject of discussion in its own right. And this is precisely what I wish to do in this book. Traditionally Dostoevsky’s views on crime and criminal responsibility have been treated in the context of the Judicial Reform of 1864 and the introduction of the jury trial. What has been much less recognized is that the last two decades of Dostoevsky’s life were also the years when Russia was going through significant changes in its penal politics—“the mellowing of the mores” that Ivan’s devil references, with more than a touch of irony, in the epigraph above. Although punishment reform had been slowly underway even in prior decades, the liberation of the serfs created a new sense of urgency. Flaying the flesh of free citizens—the most common form of punishment for the peasant masses before the Great Reforms—was much harder to justify than beating serfs. But if corporal punishment was to be abolished, how was Russia to deal with its common criminals? Was it ready for its modern substitute—correctional imprisonment? And how was it to adapt the Western example to Russian conditions? All of these questions were vigorously debated, not only in official circles and on the pages of specialized literature but also in the Russian press, and were well known to Dostoevsky. Just as Dostoevsky scholars have largely neglected this history, historians of Russian punishment in turn have little to say about Dostoevsky. Even such thorough and informative studies as Bruce Adams’s The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863–1917 and Abby Schrader’s Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia devote, between the two of them, less than a couple of pages to Dostoevsky. Similarly, Frances Nethercott’s recent study of legal culture after the Judicial Reform of 1864, a subject to which Dostoevsky paid considerable attention, makes only a few occasional references to Dostoevsky.3 This book, in contrast, seeks to spotlight specifically the question of punishment in Dostoevsky’s writings and to broaden the scope of its investigation to consider his views in relation to previously overlooked contexts. Above all, these contexts are the debates on punishment theory and practice unfolding during Dostoevsky’s lifetime. But I will occasionally draw...