17 August

The date 17 August enters the narrative not as a calendar event but as a piece of writing scratched onto a prison wall, a fragment of testimony that shatters the political prisoners' assumptions about their comrades and forces them to confront the systematic annihilation of the finest human beings by the state. Nabatoff, who moves everywhere and notices everything, discovers the note during the gang's march and brings the news to the others. The note reads: "On the 17th of August, I was sent off alone with the criminals. Neveroff was with me, but hanged himself in the lunatic asylum in Kasan. I am well and in good spirits and hope for the best." Petlin, whom everyone had thought long since reached the Kara, is revealed to have passed this way recently as the only political prisoner among criminal convicts. Neveroff's suicide in a lunatic asylum—a place of supposed care that becomes the site of his self-destruction—strikes the group with particular force.

The Shock of the News

The discovery immediately agitates the entire room. All begin discussing Petlin's position and the possible reasons for Neveroff's suicide. Emily Rintzeva recalls that her husband told her Neveroff had visions while still in the Petropavlovsky fortress, suggesting a mind already strained by solitary confinement. Novodvoroff, characteristically, dismisses the tragedy by asserting his own superiority: he never gave his imagination vent when in solitary, but arranged his days most systematically and bore it very well. Nabatoff, trying to dispel the general depression, cheerfully claims he used to be glad when locked up, because all responsibility ended and he could rest and smoke. But Kryltzoff sits silent and preoccupied, his glistening eyes fixed in front of him, and Mary Pavlovna glances anxiously at his altered, haggard expression.

Kryltzoff's Outburst

When Mary Pavlovna asks if he knew Neveroff well, Kryltzoff suddenly begins to speak, panting for breath as if he had been shouting or singing for a long time. He declares that Neveroff was a man "such as the earth bears few of," as their doorkeeper used to express it—a nature like crystal, transparent, incapable of lying or dissembling, with all his nerves laid bare as if he were flayed. Kryltzoff contrasts this complicated, rich nature with the petty disputes among the revolutionists themselves—whether to educate the people first or change the forms of life first, whether to use peaceful propaganda or terrorism—while the authorities do not dispute but simply kill. He cries out that they do not care whether dozens or hundreds of men perish, and that the best perishing is precisely what they want. He invokes Herzen's observation that when the Decembrists were withdrawn from circulation the average level of society sank, and argues that now it is the turn of the Neveroffs. Nabatoff tries to counter that they cannot all be got rid of, but Kryltzoff, raising his voice, insists that if they show any pity to "them"—the authorities—there will be no end to it. He demands a cigarette, and though Mary Pavlovna warns him it is not good for him, he lights it, immediately begins coughing and retching, and then declares that what they have been doing is not the thing at all: they must not argue but unite to destroy the oppressors. When Nekhludoff objects that the authorities are also human beings, Kryltzoff denies it, saying that those who can do what they are doing are not human. He speaks of bombs and balloons that have been invented and says one ought to go up in such a balloon and sprinkle bombs down on them as if they were bugs until they are all exterminated. Flushing all over, he begins coughing worse than before, and a stream of blood rushes from his mouth. Nabatoff runs to get ice, Mary Pavlovna brings valerian drops, but Kryltzoff pushes her away with his thin, white hand and keeps his eyes closed. Only when the ice and cold water ease him a little is he put to bed.

The Deeper Meaning of the Date

The 17 August note thus functions as a catalyst that exposes the raw nerve of Kryltzoff's trauma—the execution of Lozinsky and Rozovsky, which he had described earlier to Nekhludoff in harrowing detail. That earlier story, of the two young men hanged for attempting to escape from the convoy, and of Rozovsky's desperate struggle on the scaffold, had transformed Kryltzoff into a revolutionary dedicated to destroying the conditions that make such things possible. Now the news of Neveroff's suicide in a lunatic asylum—a death not by execution but by despair, in a place meant to confine and silence—confirms that the state's violence operates through multiple channels: the gallows, the prison, the asylum, and the slow destruction of the spirit. The date 17 August becomes a marker not of a single event but of a pattern: the systematic elimination of the most sensitive, the most gifted, the most morally alive among men. Kryltzoff's subsequent hemorrhage and his death in the mortuary, witnessed by Nekhludoff later that same evening, complete the arc: the best perish, and the system grinds on.