The ache of his own heart

Near the end of the third chapter of The House of the Dead, Dostoyevsky raises a question and a drum cuts him off. Goryanchikov, the gentleman convict whose notes make up the book, admits that one thought "haunted me persistently all the time I was in prison": the inequality of punishment for the same crime. Starting with crimes, one man kills for an onion; another kills a tyrant who has dishonored his sister, and both are sent to the same penal servitude. Then he turns to people. "One man will pine, waste away like a candle in prison," while another discovers there "a pleasant club of spirited companions." He continues:

"Or take the case of an educated man with an awakened conscience, intelligence, heart. The mere ache of his own heart will kill him by its torments sooner than any punishment."

Beside him Goryanchikov places a convict who has never once thought about the murder he committed and beside that one a peasant who commits crimes on purpose to be sent to prison because inside there is more bread than he ever had outside. "Is the punishment equally felt in these two cases?" he asks, and then: "But why trouble oneself with unanswerable questions! The drum beats, it is time to be back in our wards."

I finished the book and keep pondering on this question. It isn't really answerable, Goryanchikov says as much himself, right before the drum, but does the educated prisoner suffer more than the uneducated one, simply because he is more aware?

Goryanchikov argues yes, more than once, and each time a little differently. In the fourth chapter the argument is about loss: when a peasant goes to prison he finds "the company of his equals, perhaps even of his superiors," and though he has lost a great deal, "his environment is the same." The educated man condemned to the same punishment "often loses infinitely more." He must "learn to breathe a different air." He is "a fish out of water," and so "a punishment supposed to be equal in law is ten times as cruel for him."

By the second part of the book, in the chapter called "The Complaint", the argument has shifted to solitude. Two hours after arriving, an ordinary convict is "on the same footing as all the rest." The gentleman "will for years be hated and despised by all; he will not be understood, and what is more he will not be trusted." Even after the insults stop and they take years to stop, "he will never be one of them, and will forever be painfully conscious that he is solitary and remote from all."

Then Goryanchikov does something surprising: he refuses the explanation his own question seems to invite. "I don't say this on the grounds that the gentleman, the man of education may be supposed to be more refined and delicate in his feelings, that he is more developed. There is no standard by which to measure the soul and its development. Even education itself is no test." Among "these utterly uneducated and downtrodden sufferers" he met "instances of the greatest spiritual refinement," men whose souls, in an unguarded moment, showed "such a vivid understanding of its own suffering, and of the suffering of others" that he could hardly believe what he had seen.

So in his account the gentleman's extra suffering is positional, not constitutional. He has lost a whole former life. He lives among men who will never let him in. He judges himself more harshly than any court. A peasant can be just as aware, Goryanchikov insists; what the peasant usually has is somewhere to stand. Describing convicts flogged for crimes against officers, he writes that such a man "knows and never doubts that he will be acquitted by the verdict of his own class... His conscience is clear and with that he is strong and not morally disturbed... He feels, as it were, that he has something to rest upon." The educated man with the awakened conscience has no such verdict to lean on. His own class has expelled him and the men around him do not count him as one of theirs.

How big a part does awareness itself play? Early in the book, in "The First Month", Goryanchikov catches himself doing something strange. On his third day he tells himself that he may one day regret leaving this place and he says it "not without an element of that malignant pleasure which at times is almost a craving to tear open one's wound on purpose, as though one desired to revel in one's pain, as though the consciousness of one's misery was an actual enjoyment." The next sentence: "The idea of ever regretting this hole struck me with horror: I felt even then how monstrously a man may get used to things."

Two things are happening in those lines at once. He reopens the wound in order to feel it and he foresees his own adaptation and is horrified by it. "Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him." Every convict gets used to the prison. The self-watching convict gets used to it while observing himself getting used to it: he suffers the place and then he suffers the knowledge that the place is becoming bearable.

Dostoyevsky pushed this figure further a few years later in Notes from Underground, whose narrator swears "that to be too conscious is an illness" and that everyday life needs only "half or a quarter" of the consciousness that falls to "a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century." He was hardly alone in holding the view. "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow" (Ecclesiastes 1:18). Erasmus has Folly cite the same verse in The Praise of Folly (1511), where she argues that the happiest people are natural fools, the simple-minded men princes kept at court: "They are not tormented with the conscience of evil acts... They are not distracted with the fear of evils to come nor the hopes of future good."

J.S. Mill tried to answer all this in the second chapter of Utilitarianism in a strange way. He concedes the whole point: "The being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied," while a highly endowed being "will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect." Then he refuses to care. "Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." The trick is a distinction he insists on between happiness and content: he hands discontent to the higher faculties and declines to treat it as the measure of a life. By his lights the educated convict is almost certainly less content.

The modern word for the craving to tear open one's wound is rumination and the psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent much of her career on it. She described ruminative responses as thoughts and behaviors that keep a person focused on depressive symptoms and on their possible causes and consequences and her work tied the habit to depression that runs longer and deeper. In 2003 Wendy Treynor, Richard Gonzalez and Nolen-Hoeksema split the standard rumination questionnaire in two. One part they called brooding, a moody, passive comparison of one's situation with some standard one has failed to reach. The other they called reflective pondering, a turning inward to work a problem through. Brooding predicted depression. Reflection was linked to more depressive symptoms at the time of measurement but, in their sample, to fewer symptoms later. Later studies have not always reproduced the split and none of this research was done on prisoners. Yet it points to something Goryanchikov's show: the same mind can point its attention in two directions, one that reopens the wound and one that looks at the hole, the men and the work, and writes them down.

The fullest modern version of this argument can be said to be conducted by two men who had been in the same camp. Jean Améry, an Austrian-born essayist, and Primo Levi, a chemist from Turin, were both prisoners at Auschwitz-Monowitz. Améry wrote "At the Mind's Limits" in the mid-1960s; Levi answered it two decades later in "The Intellectual in Auschwitz", a chapter of The Drowned and the Saved.

Améry begins by defining his terms with care: "An intellectual, as I wish to define him here, is a person who lives within what is a spiritual frame of reference in the widest sense," a habit of living inside ideas and art. His verdict is mostly bleak. In the camp, "the intellect very abruptly lost its basic quality: its transcendence." His proof is a single evening. Marching back from the IG-Farben site to the Kapo's "left, two, three, four," he saw a flag in front of a half-built building and a stanza of Hölderlin rose in him: "The walls stand speechless and cold, the flags clank in the wind." He repeated it louder and waited for the feeling the poem had always brought. "But nothing happened. The poem no longer transcended reality."

"Perhaps the Hölderlin feeling, encased in psychic humus, would have surfaced if a comrade had been present whose mood would have been somewhat similar and to whom I could have recited the stanza. The worst was that one did not have this comrade." Goryanchikov's solitude again, eighty years later and far worse. The poem failed in part because there was no one to say it to.

Améry goes further, in two directions that pull against each other. The first concerns faith. The believers among the prisoners, "whether they were militant Marxists, sectarian Jehovah's Witnesses, or practicing Catholics," and whether educated or not, had "that firm foothold in the world from which they spiritually unhinged the SS state." They "survived better or died with more dignity than their irreligious or unpolitical intellectual comrades." Dostoyevsky's peasant with "something to rest upon," turning up in a darker century. The second direction concerns the intellect turning on itself. The trained mind, which had always tried to understand everything, began to understand its tormentors, and "absolute intellectual tolerance and the methodical doubting of the intellectual became factors in his autodestruction." Once his first resistance flagged, "with all his knowledge and analyses he had less with which to oppose his destroyers than the unintellectual," who fought back "more spontaneously and effectively through systematic skulking and cleverly executed thefts." Here awareness becomes not just a burden but a way of conceding. At the end of the essay Améry lists what he brought out of the camp: "we didn't leave Auschwitz wiser and deeper, but we were no doubt smarter."

Viktor Frankl's account reads almost like a reply, though he wrote it first. In Man's Search for Meaning he describes columns leaving the camp before dawn to the shout of "Left-2-3-4!" On one such march the man beside him whispered a few words about their wives and Frankl spent the rest of the march with his wife's image, hearing her answer him, her look "more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise." Just before that scene he states his thesis: "Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom." He offers this as the reason for "the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature."

Two men march to the same left-2-3-4 count. One reaches for a poem and finds nothing there; the other is handed a thought by a comrade, reaches for a person, and finds her. Frankl wrote within a year of liberation, with a therapeutic doctrine to illustrate; Améry wrote twenty years on, with a refusal to be consoled. The inner life that held seems to have been the one that had an addressee.

Frankl also makes a distinction: he separates pain from damage. The sensitive prisoner, in his telling, felt more pain and took less damage. If that's right, "suffer more" was two questions all along.

Levi's reply to Améry: in Monowitz some chemists were put to work in their profession, Levi among them. He describes living his camp year in a state of exceptional spiritedness, with "the curiosity of the naturalist" set down in a world that was "monstrous, but new, monstrously new." Perhaps because he was younger and more ignorant than Améry and "less conscious" ("less aware"), he almost never had time to devote to death. He had other things to think about. Bread to find, heavy work to dodge, shoes to mend, a broom to steal, faces to read.

So the survivor who defended the mind most warmly credits part of his survival to having less of it, or less leisure for it. The curiosity that kept him alive was attention pointed outward at the next task and the next face; the consciousness he was glad to be spared was attention pointed at his own death. Reflection and brooding again, in a far harder place.

Solzhenitsyn, in the part of The Gulag Archipelago he calls "The Ascent", writes of prison: "I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: 'Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!'" He immediately lets the dead answer him: "It is very well for you to say that," they reply, since he came out alive. In the next chapter he quotes Varlam Shalamov, who spent seventeen years in Kolyma and would have none of it. The camp, Shalamov wrote, "is wholly and consistently a negative school of life. There is nothing either necessary or useful that anyone derives from it. The prisoner learns flattery, falsehood, and petty and large-scale meanness."

The difference between prison and camp, as Solzhenitsyn draws it, is margin. In a cell a man "confronts his grief face to face," and "he has to find space inside himself for it." In the camp the bread is thrown on a pile for the strongest to grab. Solzhenitsyn even mocks Dostoyevsky's prison for its comforts, convicts strolling the courtyard after work, geese wandering the compound unharmed, and he notes one thing the camp did to the educated in particular: the "constant, clinging (and, for an intellectual, torturing) lack of privacy." Awareness can become a resource only where some room is left for it. Where none is left, the question about awareness stops mattering because there is no longer anyone in a condition to be aware.

Adapting is one question, Goryanchikov's horror at getting used to things. Damage, Frankl's word, what the years do to the self, is another. What a man carries out the gate is a third. An educated prisoner could rank higher on one of these and lower on another and the passage on pointless labour shows how hard it is to assign even one of them by class. "If one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly," Goryanchikov writes, "one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character"; a man made to "pour water from one vessel into another and back, over and over again" would hang himself within days. He means any convict. The convict at his digging and plastering "sometimes even grows keen over it." What education may add is a sharper eye for senselessness, along with more ways to make meaning out of it. Such as describing it.

Then there is the problem of comparison itself. Goryanchikov has already said there is "no standard by which to measure the soul." Mill offered a test: only someone who knows both sides of a comparison can judge it, and "if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question." But in the same chapter where he defends the gentleman's suffering, Goryanchikov admits he cannot know the other side. A gentleman may live among peasants for forty years; still, "you will never know them really. It will all be an optical illusion and nothing more." His judgment that the peasant suffers less is made across a gulf he has just called impassable.

If the same sentence produces unequal suffering, is it the same punishment? Dostoyevsky answered that it is "ten times as cruel" for some. A century and a half later the legal scholar Adam Kolber put the same point in the language of sentencing theory. In "The Subjective Experience of Punishment" (2009) he imagines two offenders, Sensitive and Insensitive, who commit the same crime and serve the same term; one finds prison hard but bearable, the other is tormented by it. Kolber argues that a successful justification of punishment must take offenders' subjective experience into account when it measures severity, that we have some duty to consider it at sentencing, at least where that can be done at reasonable cost. Otherwise "the same sentence" is a phrase about the calendar.

John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco and Jonathan Masur, in "Happiness and Punishment", pushed the point further using research on hedonic adaptation. People adjust surprisingly well to many features of prison life; they adjust poorly to what usually follows it: unemployment, broken social ties. The harm of a sentence is therefore not proportional to its length because much of it lands after release, outside the period the court thinks it is measuring. Dostoyevsky saw the first half of this from inside a barracks where man can get used to anything. The second half shows up in the frame of his own book, where Goryanchikov's suffering continued after his term ended.

So far every argument has been about what awareness costs the prisoner. If it adds to his suffering, the same sentence weighs more on him. An older counter-argument says the man who knew better deserves more.

A good example is the parable in Luke about a steward who abuses the household placed in his charge. "And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required" (Luke 12:47-48). At its strongest the argument says blame follows the quality of a choice. A man who has read history and philosophy can see where his act leads and what it costs others; he usually has more alternatives and fewer pressures than a man who steals to eat, so when he does wrong anyway, the choice is more completely his own. Two details in the parable are worth keeping. The servant who did not know is still beaten, only with fewer stripes.

Aristotle weighs in from the third book of the Nicomachean Ethics. Ignorance of what one ought to do excuses nothing, "for that men are blamed." He even defends punishing ignorance a man could have avoided, "as when penalties are doubled in the case of drunkenness." So Aristotle backs the moralist on one point, that a man can be blamed for not knowing what he could easily have learned, and undercuts him on another: everyone is held to the general knowledge of what one ought to do, so blame does not depend on education. The man who killed for an onion knew that killing is wrong. What the gentleman knows beyond that, his history and his philosophy, is a different kind of knowledge.

Modern law, interestingly, keeps both halves of Aristotle's answer. The Model Penal Code grades guilt by four states of mind toward the act (purpose, knowledge, recklessness, negligence), and negligence, the one built on what a person should have known, is measured against "a reasonable person... in the actor's situation." Whose situation, exactly? Not his mind's: the drafters' commentary says "the heredity, intelligence or temperament of the actor" would not count. Congress went further in the other direction, telling the Sentencing Commission that its guidelines must "reflect the general inappropriateness of considering the education" of a defendant and must be "entirely neutral" as to socioeconomic status (28 U.S.C. § 994(d), (e)). On paper, the law is almost aggressively uninterested in how much a defendant knows.

Well, almost. If he "abused a position of public or private trust, or used a special skill, in a manner that significantly facilitated the commission or concealment of the offense," his offense level rises by two, a special skill being one "usually requiring substantial education, training or licensing," a pilot's, a lawyer's, a chemist's. This is Luke's parable in its narrowest form. The trusted steward and the skilled hand pay extra but only when the trust or the skill did part of the work. A doctor who poisons a patient with what medical school taught him pays for the training; a doctor who steals a car is sentenced like anyone else. Knowledge counts when it was an instrument of the crime and only then.

Dostoyevsky's own case shows a law that saw rank and used it. Arrested in April 1849 with members of the Petrashevsky circle, he was charged among other things with reading Belinsky's banned letter to Gogol aloud at one of the circle's evenings and passing it on to be copied; when the Omsk fortress entered him in its register of state criminals, the stated offense included circulating "the letter of the writer Belinsky, filled with insolent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the supreme authority." His crime was, in part, an act of reading.

His punishment stripped him of all the rights of his estate. Ordinary convicts lost theirs as well but for a nobleman the same words took away his nobility. On 22 December 1849 the condemned men were led out to the Semyonov parade ground and he wrote to his brother: "There the sentence of death was read to all of us, we were told to kiss the Cross, our swords were broken over our heads, and our last toilet was made (white shirts)." The broken sword was the sign that those rights were gone; a peasant had no sword to break. In the Omsk register the column for trade and literacy reads: "Unskilled laborer; literate." Goryanchikov says the gentlemen convicts "are deprived of all the rights of their rank and are put on exactly the same level as the other prisoners." On paper the leveling was complete. The chapters on the gentleman's solitude describe everything the paper could not record.

The same letter shows he already knew where some of the pain would come from: "The head which was creating, living with the highest life of art, which had realized and grown used to the highest needs of the spirit, that head has already been cut off from my shoulders. There remain the memory and the images created but not yet incarnated by me. They will lacerate me, it is true!" On the day of the mock execution he already expected some of the laceration to come from inside. In April 1857 an imperial decree restored his hereditary nobility.

The argument for leniency tends to picture the uneducated prisoner as a man whose pain stops at his skin, who lives only in the present, Folly's portrait of her natural fools, carried over onto the poor. Everything discussed here tells a different story. Goryanchikov found "instances of the greatest spiritual refinement" among the unlettered and called his own knowledge of them an optical illusion. Levi's "less conscious" described attention turned outward, to bread and shoes and faces. The reflective prisoner may pay a higher price, though not always.

The last argument holds that the law has no instrument for inner states and should not try to see them. But the law measures minds all the time. At the act it separates purpose from knowledge and recklessness from negligence; it asks whether the defendant was sane; at sentencing it rewards one who "clearly demonstrates acceptance of responsibility." The better question is which inner states it chooses to see, and when. California's regulations, for instance, count "Signs of Remorse" toward release, including a prisoner "indicating that he understands the nature and magnitude of the offense." How anyone is supposed to determine understanding is left, as far as I can tell, to the reader.

Then there is the question of whether punishment aims at reform. If the aware prisoner reforms faster, a sentence measured by reform would end sooner for him. For a long time, reform was the aim; that line has since been reconsidered. In Tapia v. United States (2011) the Supreme Court described the old system as "premised on a faith in rehabilitation": a convict "should generally remain in prison only until he was able to reenter society safely." Congress abandoned it in 1984. One reason was a form of the inequality that haunted Goryanchikov: "[s]erious disparities in [the] sentences" imposed on similarly situated defendants. Another was doubt that parole officers could "determine accurately whether or when a particular prisoner ha[d] been rehabilitated." A federal judge must now recognize "that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation" (18 U.S.C. § 3582(a)), and Tapia held that a court may not impose or lengthen a prison term to promote rehabilitation. Goryanchikov reached the same verdict in his first chapter: "Of course, prisons and penal servitude do not reform the criminal; they only punish him and protect society from further attacks on its security." Just before it he reports that in several years he "never saw one sign of repentance among these people."

In the introduction, a narrator who barely knew Goryanchikov describes his last years as a settler in a small Siberian town. He taught children French. He avoided visitors. His landlady says he walked up and down his room all night, brooding, sometimes talking to himself; he died alone that autumn without sending for a doctor and she had already torn up two of his exercise books before the papers were rescued. The surviving manuscript is the book we read. It hardly mentions the murder of his wife. Nearly all of it looks outward at other men.

Near the end of the notes, in the chapter called "An Escape", Goryanchikov describes his last years inside. "I was fearfully lonely, and at last I grew fond of that loneliness." In that solitude he "brooded over" his past and "judged myself sternly and relentlessly"; he even "blessed fate for sending me this solitude," and made resolutions for the life ahead. "It hurts me to recall now my spiritual condition at that time," he adds.

The moralist wants courts to judge the educated offender more severely because he knew better. Goryanchikov judged himself severely without being asked and blessed the solitude because without it "I could not have judged myself like this." He wrote all this, he says, "because I think everyone will understand it, for the same thing must happen to everyone, if he is sent to prison for a term of years in the flower of his youth and strength." His everyone makes no exception for the peasants.

Turned outward, that faculty made the notes, the most vivid record we have of the men he believed suffered less than he did. Turned inward, it walked the room all night. I do not know which of those was the cost and which was the gift. Possibly both and cannot be told apart.

Nearly every witness I have called is an educated man: Goryanchikov, Dostoyevsky behind him, Améry, Levi, Frankl, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov. The onion-murderer did not write a book. Neither did the peasant who came to prison for the bread, or the convicts with "something to rest upon." What we know of their suffering we know from the man who said he could never really know them, which means the evidence comes almost entirely from one side of the question, and this essay is part of the problem it describes. Then the drum beat. It was time to go back to the wards.