What becomes of the human spirit when faced with captivity?

Humans are social creatures by nature — the desire to connect with others is one that the human spirit depends on. Still, our society permits—even approves of—sanctioned captivity in the form of incarceration. In order to explain the cruelty of such a system, one must understand the experience of captivity—what it does to the physical, the mental and the sense of one’s self. This experience can be explored through two pieces of Russian literature, “Blue Notebook No.10” by Daniil Kharms and “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Nikolai Leskov. The piece “Blue Notebook No. 10”, when read as a comment on the prison system and captivity, sees the main character slowly broken, and his identity, autonomy and humanity dissolved into nothingness. “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” also illustrates this point through the protagonist, Katerina Lvovna, as she finds herself after a lifetime of boredom and slowly loses her sense of self again in a system that segregates and apathetically denies such selfhood. These characters bring alive the experiences of the ‘harm’, themselves becoming the victims of captivity’s implicit denial of humanity. Kharms’s poem “Blue Notebook 10” provides a metaphorical framework through which readers can analyze Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and parse meaning out of the destruction of Katerina’s internal refuge, her inner life, which can be applied to the experience of captivity.

         The simplicity of Kharms’s poem, “Blue Notebook No.10”, read as a prison text, depicts the delicate unraveling of the imprisoned human, little by little, through the experience of captivity. The main character’s red hair, a defining trait, is erased — it is “arbitrary” (Kharms 117). The absence of his eyes and ears — more literally, the experience of a cell as something that not only segregates one from his fellow human beings but deprives the senses of sight and sound. His mouth—his representation, ideas, opinions, personality—also taken. His arms and legs, which represent his agency, and his back and spine, which represent his stability, are slowly discarded. Piece by piece, he is denied of these fundamental attributes that not only make up the physical human, but grant autonomy to a person in society. Finally, once the physical has been erased, his “innards” are also taken (117). The destruction of the ‘innards’ may be read as the destruction of an inner life. An inner life is fundamental to the freedom of the human being; it is a place where one harbors identity, dreams, desires, creativity, morality, and personality and it is a place unknown to exist in any other life form to the extent which we enjoy. The destruction of the inner life represents the destruction of what is most unique—most human—about us; it is a fundamental denial of humanity. The once redheaded man has finally been reduced to nothingness, so that, “we don’t even know who we’re talking about,” (117). And the final sentence, which delivers the redheaded man’s final sentence, “It’s better that we don’t talk about him anymore,” (117) is a powerful and devastating comment on all that this redheaded man has lost: his ‘outward’ identity, his senses, his voice, his physical agency, and his inner life, all stripped away, until he is even denied his humanity by those who would rather talk about other things. It is no wonder then, that the person in captivity struggles to hold on to the fundamental parts of the physical and mental self, refused that social nature that the human spirit relies on.

         The Kharms text, read as a comment on the experience of the captive, is powerful in its simplistic analogies. However, Leskov’s short story, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”, presents this idea in a longer, more descriptive form, through the character Katerina Lvovna, who is held metaphorically captive by her husband’s callousness and her obsessive love for Sergei and physically, by the prison she is held in by the end of the story. Leskov presents Katerina as a young woman “with a neck that could have been sculpted from marble…graceful shoulders and a firm bosom… [a] nose [which] was straight and fine…eyes [which were] black and lively…[a] high white forehead and black, almost blue-black hair” (Leskov 3). From this description we sense her as intimidatingly statuesque yet spirited. The more the reader is introduced to her character, and she, in turn, becomes acquainted with Sergei, the more we find out that this marble exterior has simply been built up by a life of “Russian boredom” (5) and is not actually a reflection of her true personality. Katerina sheds her cold exterior and her strong personality shines, through her flagrance for the rules and her passionate love for Sergei. The freedom from her husband’s oppressive coldness introduces Katerina to a side of herself that has been locked away for so long, even feeling, “…a sudden longing to let her hair down, to swap saucy jokes and have a good laugh” (7) at the slightest warmth directed towards her. She comes alive through her affair, and we start to understand her, privy to the thoughts which betray her strong personality- most of which see Katerina basking in Sergei’s love, her stony persona having melted away to reveal a vibrant young woman afflicted by the idea of a life of servitude and loneliness. And then her flame is extinguished. In the second half of Leskov’s short story, Katerina experiences the emptiness of prison life and the loneliness that comes with it. She returns to her “Russian boredom”, only it’s worse — she’d found a purpose for her life in the form of Sergei, and his bitter mockery reminds her relentlessly of all that she became through her affair and all that she’s lost. Katerina becomes a shell of the former self she’d finally obtained, her physical self imprisoned and her inner state fundamentally denied by the separation she feels from a now-distant, embittered Sergei.

Katerina's transformation from a fiery, albeit homicidal, young woman to a weak shell of her former self, catalyzed by her and Sergei’s arrests, can be elucidated in the destruction of three fundamental aspects of Katerina: her vibrant inner life (seen through her relationship with the audience), her physical strength, and her personality. Like the subject of Kharms’s “Blue Notebook No.10”, these aspects of Katerina are continually reduced by the experience of isolation and captivity intrinsic to prison life. These three attributes are echoed by Kharms, who also writes of the destruction of the prisoner’s innards, limbs, and mouth, respectively, Once a prisoner, Katerina experiences both the physical and emotional separation intrinsic to incarceration. And while she doesn’t seem as affected by her physical separation from the outside world, the emotional begins to destroy her, peeling away at the layers of identity and agency she has built up through her relationship with Sergei. This change is abundantly clear to the reader when Katerina reacts to situations that threaten her relationship to Sergei,- the one constant which stays important to her throughout the story. Katerina under duress exposes her deep dependence on and love for him. Her internal monologue is rich, passionate, and characteristic of a woman afraid to lose the affection she is finally receiving. Katerina’s mind reels with the thought of losing Sergei and she obsessively ruminates, “'It just isn't right…When I think of all I've suffered, of the burden of sin I've taken upon my soul!” (38). While settling into prison life, Katerina becomes worried by Sergei’s sudden apathy towards her. Leskov writes, “Sometimes…Katerina Lvovna bit[e] her lips till they bled, and sometimes, in the darkness of these nocturnal meetings, tears of anger and resentment would well up in her usually dry eyes; yet she put up with everything, never answered back and went on trying to deceive herself” (50). The latter description is so fundamentally different from the Katerina whose earlier internal monologues betray her fiery personality.

Her physical strength, a source of immense pride for her as a woman with a peasant upbringing, has also deteriorated a great deal in captivity. This parallels the deteriorating strength of the redheaded man, who experiences the loss of his arms, legs, back and spine. When she is first acquainted with Sergei, Katerina is unable to hold herself back from bragging about her strength. Although she isn’t able to best Sergei in an even match, she is still able to “g[i]ve him a shove in the chest and, from the force of her push” cause him to “stagger[ed] back nearly two yards” (8), which earns her praise from the servants. In the prison, Sergei subjects Katerina to a beating in order to please Sonya, his new mistress. A shadow of her former self, Katerina “struggle[s] to break free, but to no avail: a burly convict was sitting on her shoulders and pinning down her arm” (57). The strength she was once so proud of, which connected her to her peasant upbringing and instilled in her sense of power in a powerless situation, has been diminished.

Katerina's strength does not end with her physical prowess but also provides the foundation for the richness of her inner life. Her adoration of Sergei is present in the strength of her resolve to “…follow [him] through hell and high water, to prison or cross. He had so enthralled her that her devotion to him was absolute. She was mad with happiness; her blood was on fire and she could no longer go on listening” (23). Her love for Sergei is boundless and alive, and she proudly flaunts her affair before the eyes of a surprised public, “—-strutt[ing] about, order[ing] people around., and never let[ting] Sergei leave her side” (15). In contrast, Katerina’s emotional state while incarcerated is the epitome of instability. She is no longer in control of her emotions, “burst[ing] into tears, involuntarily praying for that palm to be lying beneath her own head and that other arm to be embracing her own violently trembling shoulders” (53). Her despair, while incarcerated, is the direct fault of Sergei’s ridicule; but her inner life, the foundational part of the human which grounds one in self-identity, which once was plagued by “Russian boredom” and had been liberated by Sergei too, is so greatly diminished that it is almost destroyed. Their separation and his bitter mockery of everything she was leaves her with “no innards at all” (Kharms 17). Katerina’s suicide is her last drastic attempt at gaining back what she’s lost. Grabbing Sonya, the woman who has won Sergei’s affections, she dives off of the transport boat into the water. And while her boldness is reminiscent of the personality she once possessed, Katerina, like the redheaded man, is still relegated to oblivion, her physical body disappearing like the redheaded man’s underneath the waves. 

Bibliography

Kharms, Daniil. Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. Trans. Matvei Yankelevich. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007. Print.

Leskov, N. S. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: A Sketch. Trans. Robert Chandler. London: Hesperus, 2003.