Kryltzoff's death

Anatole Kryltzoff, a consumptive young revolutionary condemned to hard labor, dies in the prison infirmary of a Siberian halting station, his death witnessed by Nekhludoff as a stark emblem of the state's systematic destruction of its finest spirits. His end, coming after a long decline hastened by prison conditions, crystallizes the novel's indictment of a judicial and penal system that grinds up the best of its generation.

Background and Revolutionary Career

Kryltzoff was the only son of a rich landed proprietor in the south of Russia, raised by his mother after his father's early death. He excelled at the university, finishing first in the mathematical faculty, and was offered a choice between remaining in academia or going abroad. He hesitated, torn between a budding romance and the prospect of rural administration. His entry into revolutionary activity was almost accidental: fellow students asked him for money for a "common cause" — which he did not know was revolutionary — and he gave it out of comradeship and vanity. When the recipients were caught, a note traced the money to Kryltzoff, and he was arrested. In prison he met the famous Petroff (who later killed himself with a piece of glass at the fortress) and others, and was gradually drawn into the movement. The decisive moment came when he witnessed the execution of two fellow prisoners, Lozinsky and Rozovsky, who had been condemned to death for a minor attempt to escape from the convoy. Rozovsky was a boy of seventeen who looked fifteen, with black, sparkling eyes and a fine singing voice. Kryltzoff saw them led out, heard Rozovsky's screams and sobs as he was dragged to the gallows, and later learned from a watchman how the hangman had to force the boy's head into the noose. "From that time I became a revolutionist," he told Nekhludoff. He joined the Narodnaya Volya party and became head of a disorganising group whose aim was to terrorise the government into surrendering power. He travelled to Petersburg, Kiev, Odessa, and abroad, and was everywhere successful until a trusted comrade betrayed him. He was arrested, tried, kept in prison for two years, and condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to hard labor for life.

Illness and Decline on the March

By the time Nekhludoff met him in Ekaterinburg, Kryltzoff was already in an advanced stage of consumption, a disease contracted in prison. On the march to Siberia he grew steadily weaker. He wore felt boots and sat doubled up, shivering, with his arms folded in the sleeves of his cloak. The jolting of the cart exhausted him; he could barely speak without coughing, and a stream of blood sometimes rushed from his mouth. Mary Pavlovna Schetinina attended him devotedly, and when his condition worsened she wrote to Nekhludoff asking him to arrange for her to stay behind with Kryltzoff, even offering to marry him if that would secure permission. The General in the next town refused, citing regulations that marriage could not improve the position of a convict sentenced to hard labor. Kryltzoff was carried on, lying on a heap of hay in one of the carts, with a pillow under his head and Mary Pavlovna by his side.

Death and Discovery in the Mortuary

On the evening of the day when Nekhludoff visited the prison with the Englishman, Kryltzoff was found dead in the infirmary. The Englishman, having finished his tour of the cells, asked to see the mortuary. The inspector led them to an ordinary cell, not very large, where a small lamp dimly lit four dead bodies on the bed-shelves. The third body wore something lilac, and the colour struck Nekhludoff as familiar. He came nearer and recognised the features: the small, pointed beard sticking upwards, the firm, well-shaped nose, the high, white forehead, the thin, curly hair. It was Kryltzoff. The face, which yesterday had been angry, excited, and full of suffering, was now quiet, motionless, and terribly beautiful. Nekhludoff thought: "Why had he suffered? Why had he lived? Does he now understand?" and felt faint. He left the mortuary without taking leave of the Englishman, overwhelmed by the sense that there seemed to be no answer, nothing but death.

Thematic Significance

Kryltzoff's death is the novel's most concentrated indictment of the Tsarist penal system. He was a man of exceptional moral and intellectual gifts — "such as the earth bears few of," as his doorkeeper had said — destroyed not by any crime but by the state's determination to crush its most principled opponents. His story, told to Nekhludoff in full, reveals the mechanism by which the government systematically eliminates the best of its generation: first through imprisonment and exile, then through the slow attrition of disease and despair. The execution of Lozinsky and Rozovsky, which Kryltzoff witnessed from his cell, is the primal scene that transforms him into a revolutionary; his own death, years later in a Siberian prison infirmary, is the logical endpoint of that same logic of destruction. Nekhludoff, standing over the body, is forced to confront the question that haunts the entire novel: whether the system that produces such deaths can ever be reformed, or whether it must be utterly rejected. Kryltzoff's final words to Nekhludoff — a whispered joke about "the problem of the three bodies" (the relations between Nekhludoff, Maslova, and Simonson) — show that even in his extremity he retained the intellectual playfulness that made him so alive, and so vulnerable.