(_Phosphorescent Gleams of Spiritual Putrefactions_) BEN HECHT Since reading the recent translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book which is called _The House of the Dead_[1] I have suffered from a distressing ambition. I would like to go to Russia and there commit some naive atrocity and be sent to a Siberian prison for at least ten years. I have an unpatriotic prejudice and a lack of illusion concerning American criminals or I would commit my atrocity on American soil. They, American criminals, are as a rule a petty lot given to sentimental regrets and griefs and reforms and periodicals. There is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its virtues. The American citizen even when about to be hanged is unable to rise above the commonplace reactions “imagined” for his predicament by such authors as belong to the Indiana Society. I have hunted the American criminal with the police, been present at his confession, watched him at his trial, sat with him in his death cell and listened to him recite psalms and sermonize as the nervous sheriff adjusted the noose around his neck. He is an artificial and uninteresting disappointment. It would be as extreme a punishment to spend ten years in his society behind the bars as to live in a State Street Studio Building or join the Y. M. C. A. for a similar period. But the “prison that stood at the edge of the fortress grounds close to the fortress wall” and the primitive, debauched children who inhabited it! The swaggering monstrosities that swilled on vodka and wept at the stars. The bestial grotesques who delighted in the murder of infants for the sake of the warm blood that bathed their hands. The filthy saints and nonchalant parricides. The Herculean villains, the irritable gargoyles innocently steeped in insatiable perversion and dripping with infamy. The arrogant, sadistic artists of torture, human as children, with their pitifully crippled souls; praying before the prison ikons, stealing their comrade’s clothes and washing his feet; hating and loving with the simplicity of Pagan gods and the ramified cunning of continental diplomats. The nerveless flagellants, the heartbreaking humorists, the fierce, fanciful executioners. There’s a company for you! A purifying company in the very dregs of its depravities. They stand alone in literature. Only Christ could have written of them as well as Dostoevsky. Was Dostoevsky dreaming of a new religion when he filled the pages with his human crucifixions? Probably not. But his artistry and his painstaking, searching minute psychology have illumined _The House of the Dead_ so that for him who is not afraid it is as holy and human a source of inspiration as the loving sacrifices of the Nazarene Thaumaturgist.