Study from William Blake's "House of Death" 1795
I have been re-reading Dostoyevsky's "The House of the Dead" and was struck by Blake's print illustrating Despair attending the "Numbers of all diseased, all maladies of ghastly spasm... Dire was the tossing, deep the groans," taken from Paradise Lost. In the print God-the-Father/Death presides over all with a scroll on which is written when the agony will end or presumably when death will release these terrified people from their suffering. I have replaced this figure of the divine with a volcanic mountain - for me adequate symbol enough. Despair looks strangely hesitant, or guilty, in Blake's print - no doubt shamed by his lack of faith when faced with all this suffering.
I met a Russian-speaking Ukrainian last year who disowned Dostoyevsky as a Russian writer. It's mystery to me why one would want to do that, though I suppose his compassion is somewhat disordered in the breadth and depth of his exploration through the landscape of the human soul - disordered but glorious.
The prisoners described in "The House of the Dead" have their own codes which preserve their dignity, however depraved their crimes. But the executioners can become "like tigers, who thirst for blood to lick. Whoever has experienced this power, this unlimited mastery over the body, blood and spirit of another human being, his brother according to the law of Christ; whoever has experienced this control and this complete freedom to degrade, in the most humiliating fashion, another creature made in God's image, will quite unconsciously lose control of his own feelings. Tyranny is a habit; it is able to, and does develop finally into a disease. I submit that habit may coarsen and stupefy the very best of men to the level of brutes. Blood and power make a man drunk: callous coarseness and depravity develop in him; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible, and in the end pleasurable to the mind and the senses. What is more, the example, the possibility of such intransigence have a contagious effect upon the whole of society: such power is a temptation. A society which can look upon such a phenomenon with indifference is already contaminated to its foundations." Part 2, The Hospital (3), The House of the Dead, published 1861-2.
What a warning - not that to warn is to prevent.
