All utopian ideologies presuppose that human nature is fundamentally good and simple: evil and apparent complexity result from a corrupt social order. People do not live by bread-or, what philosophers called the maximalization of “advantage”-alone.
Real human beings differed fundamentally from what these philosophies presumed.Īt the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up. The sadism of both prisoners and guards taught him that the sunny view of human nature presumed by utilitarianism, liberalism, and socialism were preposterous. His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared.
The mock-execution and the years in Siberian prison-thinly fictionalized in his novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860)-changed Dostoevsky forever. The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.Īccounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white a second went mad and never recovered his sanity a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake.
They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps-their funeral shrouds-and offered last rites. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. O n December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months.
0 kommentar(er)
