Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

One long autumn evening, when the wind was whistling and howling in the chimney-flues and he had had enough of pacing up and down his cell, he sat down on his bunk, and realizing that he could not go on struggling any longer, that the devils were too strong for him, he gave in to them. For some time he had had his eye on the stove-pipe. If he could wind some thin cord or some thin strips of cloth round it, it ought to hold. But he would need to go about it cleverly. So he set to work, and for two days he worked away to get some strips of linen from the palliasse he slept on (when the guard came in he covered the bunk with his dressing-gown). He tied the strips together with knots, double ones so that they would hold the weight of his body without pulling away. While he was busy with this task his torments abated. When everything was ready he made a noose, placed it round his neck, climbed up on to the bed and hanged himself. But his tongue had only just begun to protrude when the strips of cloth gave way, and he fell to the floor. Hearing the noise, the guard came running in. They summoned the medical orderly and took him off to the hospital. By the next day he was quite recovered, and was discharged from the hospital and placed not in a solitary cell, but in a communal one.

In the communal cell he lived as one of twenty inmates, but he lived there just as if he had been alone, seeing nobody, talking to nobody, and suffering the same mental torments as before. It was particularly bad for him when everyone else was sleeping and he could not, and as before he kept seeing her and hearing her voice, and then again the black devils would appear, with their dreadful eyes, mocking him.

Again, as before, he recited his prayers, and as before they were of no use.

On one occasion when, after he had said his prayers, she again appeared to him, he started to pray to her, to her little soul, praying that it would let him go, that it would forgive him. And when towards morning he collapsed on to his flattened straw palliasse, he fell fast asleep, and in his sleep he dreamt that she came towards him with her scraggy, wrinkled throat, all cut open.

‘Please, will you forgive me?’

She looked at him with her meek look, and said nothing.

‘Will you forgive me?’

And three times in the same way he begged her to forgive him. But she still said nothing. And then he woke up. From that time on he began to feel better: it was as though he had come to himself, and he looked round him, and for the first time he began to make friends with his cell-mates and to talk to them.

III

One of the prisoners in Stepan’s communal cell was Vasily, who had again been caught stealing and had been sentenced to exile; another was Chuyev, who had likewise been sentenced to forcible resettlement. Vasily spent his time either singing songs in his splendid voice or telling his cell-mates the story of his adventures. Chuyev, on the other hand, was always working, or sewing away at some item of clothing or underwear, or reading the Gospels or the Psalms.

To Stepan’s question as to why he was being exiled, Chuyev replied that it was because of his true faith in Christ and because the false priests could not bear to hear the spirit speaking through people such as he, who lived according to the Gospel, and thus showed up the priests for what they were. And when Stepan asked Chuyev what this Gospel law was, Chuyev explained to him how they had found out about this true faith from a one-legged tailor when they were sharing out some land.

‘All right then, so what happens if you commit evil deeds?’ asked Stepan.

‘It tells you all about that.’ And Chuyev proceeded to read to him: