Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

‘So that is what the true faith is all about,’ he thought. ‘It’s only the ones who have given food and drink to the poor and visited the prisoners who will be saved, and those who didn’t do those things will go to hell. All the same, the thief only repented when he was already on the cross, and he still went to heaven.’ He saw no contradiction in this; on the contrary, the one thing seemed to confirm the other: that the merciful would go to heaven, and the unmerciful to hell – that meant that everyone had better be merciful, and the fact that Christ forgave the thief meant that Christ himself was merciful. All this was quite new to Stepan; he was merely surprised that it had remained hidden from him until now. And he spent all his spare time with Chuyev, asking questions and listening to his replies. And as he listened he began to understand. He realized that the overall meaning of this teaching was that men were brothers, and ought to love and pity each other, and then it would be well with all of them. As he listened, he perceived as something forgotten, yet familiar, everything that confirmed the overall meaning of this teaching, and he allowed everything that did not confirm it to slip past his ears, attributing it to his own lack of understanding.

And from that time onwards Stepan became a different man.

IV

Even before this happened Stepan Pelageyushkin had been a docile prisoner, but now the warden, the orderlies and his fellow-prisoners were all amazed at the change which had come over him. Without being ordered, and even when it was not his turn, he carried out all the most arduous duties, among them the cleaning out of the night-bucket. Yet despite his submissiveness his cell-mates respected and feared him, knowing his force of will and his great physical strength, especially after an incident in which two vagrants attacked him and he fought them off, breaking the arm of one of them in the process. These vagrants had set out to beat a well-heeled young prisoner at cards and had taken from him everything he owned. Stepan had stood up for him and managed to get back from them the money they had won. The vagrants had started cursing him, and then tried to beat him up, but he had overpowered them both. When the warden tried to find out the cause of the quarrel, the vagrants had maintained that it was Pelageyushkin who had set upon them both. Stepan made no attempt to justify himself, but meekly accepted his punishment, which consisted of three days in the punishment block, followed by transfer to a solitary cell.

He found it hard to be in solitary confinement because it separated him from Chuyev and the Gospels; moreover, he was afraid that his visions of the woman he had killed and the black devils might start again. But his hallucinations did not return. His entire soul was now full of a new and joyful spirit. He would even have been glad of his isolation, if only he had been able to read and if he had possessed a copy of the Gospels. That the authorities would have provided him with, but he could not read.

As a boy he had begun to learn to read in the old-fashioned way, spelling out the letters – az, buki, vyedi¹⁰ – but not being very bright he got no further than the alphabet, was quite unable at that stage to grasp how words were strung together, and so remained illiterate. Now, however, he determined to do the job properly, and asked the orderly for a copy of the New Testament. The orderly brought him one and he set to work. He was able to recognize the letters, but he could make no progress towards putting them together. However much he racked his brains to understand how words could be composed out of individual letters, he could make nothing of it. He could not sleep at night, could not stop thinking about his problem, and lost his appetite for food, falling so low in spirits that he had a bad infestation of lice and could not get rid of them.

‘Well then, have you still not got there?’ the orderly asked him one day.

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘But you know the Our Father, don’t you?’

‘Of course I know it.’

‘So, just try reading that. Look, here it is’ – and the orderly showed him the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament.

Stepan started to recite the Our Father, fitting the letters he knew to the sounds he knew. And suddenly the mystery of the combining of letters was opened to him, and he began to read. It was a tremendous joy to him. From that day he began reading, and the sense which emerged little by little from the painfully assembled words took on an even greater significance for him.

His isolation no longer weighed upon Stepan, it was a cause of rejoicing to him. He was entirely preoccupied with his task, and was not at all pleased when, to make room for some newly admitted politicals, he was moved back into the communal cell.

V