Imprisoned in Russia: Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn (& Me)
Fyodor Dostoevsky crafted his 1860 semi-autobiographical work, The House of the Dead, as a harrowing memoir that exposes the brutal realities of Russian imprisonment, all through the eyes of a man condemned for murdering his wife. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn followed suit in 1962 with his poignant novella, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a stark representation of the daily struggles within a concentration camp. Both authors illuminate the grim landscape of Russia as a prison in their respective eras— the 1850s and 1950s—each rife with suffering under authoritarian rule, a relentless theme echoing in today's world. My own narrative, Of Russia: A Year Inside, chronicles my experience working in Russia, vividly recounting a brief yet agonizing episode of my incarceration while teaching in Voronezh, Russia.
Authoritarianism: “the enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.”
Dostoevsky's formative years were steeped in storytelling, nurtured by a nanny who filled his nights with heroic sagas and fairy tales. His parents utilized the Bible to teach him the fundamentals of reading and writing, and, during his military days, the New Testament became his sole companion. Influenced by literary giants such as Pushkin, Gogol, and Karamzin, as well as a vast array of Western philosophers from Plato to Hegel, he navigated an educational path fraught with challenges due to his fragile health and introverted nature. Despite his aversion to formal schooling, he persevered through a military academy, ultimately becoming a mechanical engineer. His passion for the arts—attending plays and operas—was ignited further by his brother Mikhail, who introduced him to the world of gambling, a habit that would haunt him throughout his life.
Dostoevsky’s involvement in a writers’ group sparked his engagement with themes of freedom and dissent against czarist authority, culminating in his views on the political landscape. His radical thoughts brought him into the Petrashevsky Circle, a group that fiercely debated issues of liberty, censorship, and the abolition of serfdom. Detained for disseminating anti-state material, Dostoevsky faced execution.
On that fateful day, guards dragged Fyodor from his cell into the blinding morning light. Chains weighed heavily on his limbs as he walked, blindfolded, alongside three fellow conspirators, shackled to their poles. As he stood at the last pole, a firing squad took aim. “Five, four…” rang out, and his fellow prisoners fell. When it was his turn, as rifles aimed at his heart, a commando intervened, halting the execution. Instead, Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a labor camp, followed by six grueling years in a military barracks—ten years in total of incarceration.
The stark reality of his imprisonment is encapsulated in his words: “In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten; filth an inch thick… We were packed like sardines, unable to turn around... From dusk till dawn, we lived like pigs… Fleas, lice, and beetles by the bushel.”
Post-incarceration, Dostoevsky penned twelve novels. Crime and Punishment, a title recognizable even to those who haven’t read it, explores the psyche of Raskolnikov, a young man who justifies the murder of a malevolent pawnbroker. The transformation he undergoes post-murder unravels the complex depths of morality and madness within the human psyche, inviting readers to confront the shadows of their own nature. Dostoevsky’s vivid experiments in philosophical literature illuminate terror and dissect human psychology, prompting Nietzsche to declare him “the only person who has ever taught me anything about psychology.”
In addition to his novels, Dostoevsky crafted sixteen short stories, navigating the choppy waters of personal afflictions and the human experience with poignant realism. His imprisonment forged a literary voice that resonated with the struggles of life—social, political, and sexual. Dostoevsky's profound insights are encapsulated in quotable lines, yet his narratives also stretch on for thousands of pages.
“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Ernest Hemingway remarked on Dostoevsky's ability to captivate with "unbelievable, yet profoundly true" depictions of human frailty and madness. Franz Kafka claimed Dostoevsky as a kindred spirit in their shared pursuit of the darker facets of existence, while Maxim Gorky referred to him as “our evil genius.” Dostoevsky's novels and stories strike the soul with piercing truths, delivering a visceral punch against the backdrop of his own tumultuous life experiences—marked by gambling debts that left him in destitution, yet he emerged as a figure of the struggling proletariat. He passed away in 1881.
Solzhenitsyn's journey began as a fervent Marxist-Leninist patriot serving in the Red Army during World War II. His arrest came for expressing dissent in a personal letter, leading to eight harrowing years in a gulag. Released during the "Khrushchev Thaw," he chronicled life under Stalin's iron grip in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicting the men’s desperate hope that the thermometer would read below -40°C, sparing them from labor. Their workdays were filled with grueling tasks—manual labor in inhospitable conditions, underscoring the horrors of Stalinism with a mere glimpse into the lives trapped within the camp's walls.
A decade later, his audacious work, The Gulag Archipelago, unveiled the atrocities of the Soviet penal system, blending poignant narratives with rigorous documentation of brutal realities. The attempts to publish the monumental three-volume work were fraught with peril, as KGB agents shadowed Solzhenitsyn throughout the process, forcing him to navigate underground channels for its release.
“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago awakened the Western world to the grim realities of life within the Soviet system, earning Solzhenitsyn the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature for his unwavering moral courage. However, he spent much of his life in exile, only returning to a new Russia in his final years before passing away in 2008.
Writing under the pseudonym Brant Antonson, my book, Of Russia: A Year Inside, recounts my own harrowing experiences—including a personal run-in with the law during my 2001 teaching stint in Voronezh. My narrative seeks to echo the literary legacies of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, highlighting the continued suffering faced by countless Russians who dare to cross paths with authoritarianism.
During my time teaching English at the Institute of Law and Economics and the State University of the Russian Federation, a seemingly innocuous task led me to peril. While cleaning, I discovered six rolls of undeveloped film, naively disregarding the rules surrounding what could be photographed. When I developed all six rolls—an unusual act for anyone in Russia at that time—I unknowingly attracted unwanted attention. Meeting with the elderly residents of my apartment building to share my prints from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, I was blissfully unaware of the gravity of my transgression.
My innocence quickly revealed itself as sheer naiveté, a quality that was no longer defensible in my situation. The film processing shop had reported me to the authorities. In a heartbeat, two police officers rounded the corner, arresting me and confiscating my photographs. They forcefully marched me across the street to a cramped jail cell, hidden away amidst a bustling array of kiosks.
Inside that cold cell, as I sat bewildered, groups of police officers—always four in a car—cruised by, scrutinizing my photos. Their laughter echoed around me, jarring my senses as they pointed and jeered. My limited grasp of the Russian language proved futile in this dire moment. As dusk fell, exhaustion overtook me, and I succumbed to sleep shrouded in the oppressive dark.
I was jolted awake in another realm of darkness, only to find myself packed into the unyielding rear of a windowless paddy wagon. The vehicle lurched and rattled over the road, covering four or five kilometers before screeching to a halt at a precinct. As I prepared to face whoever awaited me, a police officer seized the collar of my trench coat and ruthlessly hurled me down a long flight of concrete stairs. The impact knocked me unconscious.
When I regained consciousness, I found myself enveloped in an abyss of darkness, my body smeared with blood, enduring an onslaught of merciless beatings. Stripped down to my underwear, I was disoriented, unable to gauge how long I had been lost to unconsciousness. A group of men hoisted me against the wall by my ribcage and let me fall, again and again. My legs succumbed to numbness as they slammed their hands over my ears, leaving me with two perforated eardrums and a harrowing case of tinnitus. They choked me, spat on me, and dragged me along the ground by my lifeless legs, breaking my ribs and warping my sternum, rendering me temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.
Eventually, they pulled me before a man of authority, distinguished by the chevrons adorning his uniform. I had no place to sit and was forced to cling to the edge of a desk. One by one, we examined each of the 144 photographs and negatives. My meager Russian vocabulary illuminated the precarious depths of my situation. I had unwittingly placed my job and safety in jeopardy by capturing images of forbidden subjects in Russia, ranging from innocent classroom snapshots and students, to pictures of the airport, military installations, tanks, the chaotic open market, beggars, passing police officers at the train station, and even intimate moments with naked girlfriends. The gravity of my transgressions dawned on me; the oppressive weight of the Iron Curtain had never truly felt real until now.
As the scrutiny of my photos came to an end, I was shoved back into my cell, where a police officer's taunt reverberated ominously: “shpion,” meaning “spy.” The beatings resumed intermittently until dawn broke, and I was dragged to reclaim my clothes. To my horror, $80 USD went missing, along with many of my photographs.
Summoning every ounce of strength, I painfully climbed the same twelve stairs I had been hurled down the previous night, my legs too weak to walk. I scurried towards freedom, locking my knees together as best I could, dragging my battered body away from the precinct. The world around me buzzed with painful static, my head plagued by a concussion. Broken in spirit and wallet, I hitched a ride back to my flat, where my girlfriend was anxiously waiting, fearing the worst.
When the head of security from the institute I worked at ventured to the police station in search of answers about my horrific ordeal, he found nothing—no records, no notes, no report reflecting my time in the Russian prison system. There I was, partially paralyzed and determined to pack a year’s worth of belongings into my luggage, desperate to catch the first flight out once I acquired an Exit Visa. The process was convoluted, requiring the support of my colleagues to navigate hospitals and obtain necessary documents.
Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago stand as my literary beacons regarding the Russian and Soviet systems of imprisonment. Their works unveiled the injustices faced in their respective epochs, illuminating the atrocities of the Soviet gulags. Without their powerful narratives, we might remain in the dark about the horrors of Russian imprisonment, a haunting reminder echoed in today's ongoing concerns about authoritarianism and its manifestations in Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
OF RUSSIA: A Year Inside
Brent (Brant is the Russian version) Antonson has seen a Russia few foreigners have. Indeed, few Russians. This young Canadian ventured to Voronezh, eleven hours south of Moscow by train, to spend a year inside a country torn by strife, fresh into a new century, and struggling with the clash between history and future. Tasked with teaching English to students at one university, and then a second, his story is riddled with romance and deception, and punctuated with near disaster and disappointment. Antonson's candor and insights set Russia on the edge of failure and achievement – much like the students he educated, filled with a dash of hope and a lump of fear. His wit did as much to get him in trouble as it did to keep him out of it.