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If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time
guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told
that in forty years interrogation by torture would be [routinely] practiced
in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron
rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they
would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod
heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (“the secret
brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of
a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible of circumstances,
prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by
thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays
would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to
an insane asylum.
—Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 May 1999, on page 21 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/dostoevsky-morson-2-2865
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