The House of the Dead

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

On 23 January 1850, Dostoyevsky entered the prison fortress at Omsk, Western Siberia, to begin a four-year term of penal servitude for his part in the Petrashevist conspiracy. In 1854, some ten months after his release from prison, he wrote to his younger brother Andrey: ‘…I consider those four years as a time during which I was buried alive and shut up in a coffin. Just how horrible that time was I have not the strength to tell you…it was an indescribable, unending agony, because each hour, each minute weighed upon my soul like a stone.’

In the prison Dostoyevsky’s sufferings were compounded by the fact that, for at least the first year of his sentence, he found himself almost totally isolated. He was a ‘nobleman’, while nearly all the other convicts seemed to belong to the peasantry and the artisan classes. The full horror of his experience of prison is given vivid utterance in the first letter he wrote after his release. It was addressed to his brother Mikhail:

‘I had got to know something of the convict population back in Tobolsk; here in Omsk I was to live for four years in close proximity to it. These men were coarse, irritable and malicious. Their hatred of the nobility knew no limits, and so they received us noblemen with hostility and a gleeful schadenfreude. If they had had half a chance they would have devoured us. Consider for yourself what sort of protection we had against them, when we had to live, drink, eat and sleep with them for several years, and when to complain was impossible, given the myriad variety of the insults and affronts to which we were exposed. “You’re noblemen, iron noses, you nosed us to death. When you were a gentleman you used to make our lives a misery, now you’re worse off than the lowest trash among us, you’re our brother now”: such was the refrain they repeated to me in chorus for four years on end. A hundred and fifty enemies never wearied of persecuting us; this was their amusement, their entertainment, their occupation, and the only thing that saved us from this misery was our equanimity, our moral superiority, which they could not help but comprehend and which they respected as a sign that we were not subservient to their will. They always acknowledged our superiority to them. They had no inkling of what our crime might have been. We ourselves never said anything about this, and so we had to put up with all the persecution and vindictiveness which they brought to their dealings with the nobility, and which were the very breath of life for them. Our living conditions were terrible. A military prison is much tougher than a civilian one. Throughout those four years I lived nowhere but within the confines of the prison, leaving it only in order to go to work. The work we had to do was physically arduous (although not always, however), and it would happen that I would grow exhausted in the rain, the wet, the sleet or, during winter, in the intolerable cold. I once spent four hours on special emergency work when the mercury in the thermometer had frozen and the temperature must have been forty below. I got frost-bite in one of my legs. We lived all of a heap, crowded together in one barrack. Imagine, if you will, this dilapidated old wooden building which had long ago been scheduled for demolition, and which was now quite unfit for use. In summer the airlessness inside was intolerable, likewise the cold in winter. All the floors had rotted through. The floor was covered in nigh on two inches of muck; it was easy to slip and fall. In winter the small windows were covered in hoar-frost, making it almost impossible to read for much of the day. The ice on the windowpanes was also nearly two inches thick. There were leaks in the roof, and a constant draught prevailed. We were packed in like herrings in a barrel. Only six logs were used to heat the stove; there was no warmth (the ice in the room barely melted at all), but terrible fumes – and this went on all winter. The convicts washed their linen in the barracks, and the whole of the small room would be fairly awash with water. There was no space to turn round in. From dusk to dawn no one could go outside to relieve himself, as the barracks were locked up; instead, a tub was placed in the passage, and the stink was intolerable. All the convicts stank like pigs, and they would say that they could not help behaving like pigs, that “man is only human”. We slept on a bare plank bed, and were permitted one pillow. We had to cover ourselves with our short sheepskin coats, our legs sticking out all night uncovered. All night we shivered. There were fleas, lice and cockroaches by the bushel. In winter we wore our short coats, which were often of the most miserable quality and which hardly kept us warm at all, and our short-legged boots – for walking about in the snow and the subzero temperatures, if you please. For food we were given bread and a cabbage soup which contained a quarter of a pound of beef per man; but the beef was ready diced, and I never saw any of it. On holidays there was kasha with practically no vegetable oil in it at all. On fast days there were cabbage leaves and water and hardly anything else. I suffered terrible stomach trouble and was ill several times. You can judge for yourself whether it would have been possible to live without money; if I had had no money, I would certainly have died and no one, not one of those convicts, could have stood such a life. But each man worked at some trade or other, sold his merchandise and made a copeck or two. I lived on tea and the occasional piece of beef which I bought for myself, and this saved me. It was also forbidden to smoke, for men might have suffocated in such airless conditions. Smoking was done on the sly. I was often a patient in the hospital. Because my nerves were upset I suffered fits of epilepsy, but these were rare. I also have rheumatism in my legs. Apart from this, I feel quite well. Add to all these delights the almost total unavailability of books – what you got, you got on the sly – the continual animosity and quarrelling around you, the cursing, the shouting, the noise, the hubbub, always being under guard, never alone, and this for four years without a break, you will, I think, forgive me for saying that life was terrible.’

Dostoyevsky’s involvement with Petrashevism has been seen in varying lights by different biographers and commentators: by some as an expression of youthful idealism, by others as a misconceived and self-destructive flirtation with radical politics. Some have even gone so far as to assume that Dostoyevsky was innocent of the charge of conspiracy that was brought against him. Yet his most important contribution to the Petrashevists’ activities was by all accounts not to the relatively innocuous Petrashevist circle proper, with its eccentric, Fourierist leader and its endless debates on questions of Fourierist theory, but to one of its satellite groupings, the mysterious Palm-Durov circle. One of the charges on which Dostoyevsky was convicted was ‘the attempt, along with others, to write works against the government and circulate them by means of a home lithograph’; although the attempt failed, it gave rise to another, much more serious conspiracy that included the setting-up of a secret printing press and a call for the violent overthrow of the monarchy. This conspiracy, which never came to the attention of the authorities, was organized by the revolutionary terrorist Nikolay Speshnyov under cover of the Palm-Durov circle of the group, and although there is no direct evidence to show that Dostoyevsky was one of the conspirators, it is probable that he knew about the plot and sympathized with its aims. His assertion in the Diary of a Writer for 1873 that ‘I could never have become a Nechayev, but a Nechayevist, this I do not vouch; it is possible, I too could have become one…in the days of my youth’ should not be taken lightly. The nature of his relation to Speshnyov is shrouded in mystery. Yet one thing seems certain: at some point shortly before his arrest, Dostoyevsky had, at least temporarily, accepted many of Speshnyov’s ideas, including the need for a violent overthrow of the ruling order. Many years later, Speshnyov was to emerge in fictional form as the hero of Dostoyevsky’s novel Devils, in the person of Nikolay Vsevolodovich Stavrogin.

Before the catastrophe of his arrest and imprisonment, Dostoyevsky had been a writer of novels and short stories that took their subject-matter primarily from the dreams of individuals oppressed by a hostile social environment. He had concentrated on the depiction of unhealthy, morbid states of mind, fusing these with a vision of another, brighter but unattainable sphere. His heroes had been sovereigns in a world of fantasy, and he had shown how, as they soared in airy realms they lost touch with the earth and their personalities became increasingly unreal. In The Landlady, Ordynov’s love for Katerina is a grotesque compound of uncontrolled emotion, delirium and physical reality – what begins as an ennobling impulse ends as delusion and sickness. The dreamer of White Nights attains his ‘moment of bliss’ in the love he feels for Nastenka, only to sink back once more within the dim, faded walls of his room at the conclusion of the tale. Above all, such dreaming is seen as an absurd arrogance – the ridiculous, eccentric dreamer imagines himself to be a mighty conqueror whose power is limitless. The political dreamer, too, must have occupied Dostoyevsky’s thoughts in the months that preceded his arrest. ‘It would truly be very difficult to explain many of his oddities,’ he wrote in his deposition on the subject of Mikhail Petrashevsky. ‘Often you would meet him in the street and ask him where he was going and on what errand, and he would give you some odd reply, describe some strange plan which he was just about to put into action; you would not know what to think, either about the plan or about Petrashevsky himself. He would sometimes make such a terrible fuss about some business which was really of no significance whatsoever that you would have thought his entire estate was at stake. On another occasion he might be hurrying off somewhere for half an hour to clinch some little matter, when in actual fact it would have taken two years to clinch the little matter in question. He was forever on the move, always busy with something…’ It is the dreamer’s self-absorption, his pride, his vanity, his inability to take account of others and of practical reality that constitute his weakness. Later on in the deposition, Dostoyevsky describes the attitude of many of the members of the circle during the heated political debates that. took place in it: ‘…personal vanity, too, comes to the aid of the speaker and eggs him on, as does his desire to please each and all; sometimes, for the sake of show, it makes the orator agree with an idea he does not share at all – he agrees with it in the hope that in return some sincerely cherished idea of his own will not be assailed. Finally, there is the self-regard that excites a man and makes him demand the floor repeatedly, so that he awaits impatiently the next such evening, when he will be able to refute his antagonists. In other words, for many (for very many, in my sincere opinion), these evenings, these speeches, these debates are about as serious an occupation as are cards, chess, and so forth, which also undeniably divert a man and which play in the same manner on the same whims and passions. I think that very many deceived and confused themselves at this game in Petrashevsky’s house, mistaking the game for something that was serious.’

But while Petrashevsky and the ‘antagonists’ were one thing, Speshnyov and his ‘activists’ were quite another. Dr S. D. Yanovsky, who treated Dostoyevsky for epilepsy, wrote that between the end of 1848 and the time of his arrest some three months later, his patient ‘grew rather melancholy, more irritable, more ready to take offence, to quarrel over the slightest matter, and very frequently complained of dizziness’. Yanovsky tried to set Dostoyevsky’s mind at rest by telling him that there was no organic cause for these symptoms, and by suggesting that the depressed mood would probably soon disappear. To which Dostoyevsky retorted: ‘No, it won’t, it will torment me for a long time to come. I’ve borrowed money from Speshnyov (he named a sum of five hundred rabies) and now I am with him and am his… I’ll never be able to repay a sum like that, and he’ll never accept a repayment – that’s the kind of man he is.’ And several times Dostoyevsky repeated the sentence: ‘Do you realize that from now on I have my own Mephistopheles?’

Quite clearly, Speshnyov was associated in Dostoyevsky’s mind with a force of evil. Is it too much to suppose that this force was Speshnyov’s political activism, with its concomitant atheism, terrorism and communism? Was the episode concerning the loan merely the trigger which set off an extended moral and spiritual crisis in the writer, one that was to last for several years, almost until the time of his release from prison? Whatever may have been the case, there can be little doubt that the rade and violent events that accompanied his arrest, trial, sentencing and imprisonment were not experienced by him simply as an awakening from dream to harsh reality, but also as a visitation from God – a God on whom he had come perilously close to turning his back – for having sinned against the Russian people and himself. After ten months of agonized waiting in the Peter and Paul Fortress, after being sentenced to death and being given a last-minute reprieve on the place of execution itself, he was sent for a term in hell.

Dostoyevsky began to plan his new novel, whose full title, literally translated, is Notes from the House of the Dead, while he was still in prison. Although for the most part he was deprived of the possibility of writing, during one of his hospital visits a certain Dr Troitsky allowed him to make notes. These jottings, together with remembered material added subsequently, form the Siberian Notebook, a series of 522 entries consisting of isolated phrases, catchwords and songs overheard in the convicts’ day-to-day life. Each of these items was associated with a given situation, character or story. More than 200 of them were utilized by Dostoyevsky when he came to write his novel. Thus, for example, the scene in which the convicts first meet Isay Fomich (1,9) is constructed out of one short phrase and two phrase-sequences (entries 91, 92 and 202), while the slanging-match between the two convicts (I, 2) is constructed on the basis of one entry (90). The directness and undoubted authenticity of all this material give The House of the Dead a freshness and spontaneity which are immediately evident, and which constitute an entirely new element in Dostoyevsky’s writing of this period.

The writer’s term in prison was followed by five years of compulsory military service in the Seventh Line Battalion in the West Siberian garrison town of Semipalatinsk. Although he began to write again during this period, completing the tale Uncle’s Dream and the comic novel The Village of Stepanchikovo in preparation for his return to a literary career at the end of his deportation, it was not until 1859 that he began serious work on this book. It was conceived as a novel in two parts and was first published in serial form during 1860 in the newspaper Russian World. It met with a huge critical and popular success.

In order to understand the significance of the style and structure of the book, it is necessary to bear in mind that it was the result of a terrible mental, spiritual and physical ordeal. Once again we should recall the characterization of his imprisonment given by Dostoyevsky to his brother Andrey: ‘…I consider those four years as a time during which I was buried alive and shut up in a coffin’. During the years in Semipalatinsk, Dostoyevsky occasionally alluded to the notes he was making about his convict experiences. In 1856 he wrote to A. N. Maykov: ‘At times when I have nothing else to do I write down some of my memories of penal servitude, the more interesting ones, that is. However, there is little that is purely personal in them.’ In October 1859 he wrote to his brother Mikhail: ‘These Notes from the House of the Dead have now assumed a complete and definite plan in my head. This will be a short book of some six or seven printed sheets. My personality will disappear from view. These are the notes of an unknown; but I can vouch for their interest.’ The intensity of the suffering undergone by the writer seems to have been such that he was unable to approach its recollection in personal terms. In order to write his memories down, he had to construct a ‘novel’, with a fictitious narrator-hero, the ‘unknown’ referred to in the letter: the former convict Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov.

What can we decipher of Goryanchikov’s personality? In many respects, his character as outlined in the novel’s introduction bears many similarities to earlier creations of Dostoyevsky’s fantasy: he is pale, withdrawn, unsociable, with a reputation for eccentric behaviour, and is even suspected of lunacy. His chief aim in life seems to be ‘to hide as far away as possible from the rest of the world’. In his past lie the murder of his wife out of jealousy and the nightmare years of his imprisonment and deportation. At nights a light is to be seen burning in his windows. ‘What was he doing sitting up until dawn? Could he be writing? And if so, what?’ The publisher of the book gives an account of his discovery of Goryanchikov’s scribblings: ‘But here there was one fat, voluminous exercise book, filled with microscopic handwriting and unfinished, perhaps abandoned and forgotten by the author himself. This was a description, albeit an incoherent one, of the ten years of penal servitude which Aleksandr Petrovich had undergone. In places this description was interrupted by another narrative, some strange, terrible reminiscences scribbled down in irregular, convulsive handwriting, as if following some compulsion. I read these fragments through several times and was almost persuaded they had been written in a state of madness. But the notes on penal servitude – “Scenes from the House of the Dead” as he calls them somewhere in his manuscript – seemed to me not without interest.’

Much has been made of the documentary authenticity of the novel, of its closeness to the actual conditions in the prison at Omsk, as described by Dostoyevsky in the letter to his brother Mikhail and as corroborated by independent accounts such as that of Szymon Tokarzewski (Siedem lat katorgi, Warsaw, 1907). Of course, it is undeniable that much of it is essentially autobiographical reminiscence, and that Dostoyevsky was relying on the documentary impact of the work as an important element in securing large sales for it, sales which it most certainly achieved. As Konstantin Mochulsky has observed, the book has ‘an unusually adept structure. The description of prison life and of the convicts’ temperaments, the robbers’ histories, the characteristics of individual criminals, the reflections regarding the psychology of crime, a picture of conditions in the gaol, journalism, philosophy and folklore – all this complex material is distributed freely, almost without order. Meanwhile all the details are calculated and the particulars subordinated to a general plan. The principle of composition in the Notes is not static, but dynamic.’ In the first part, the picture of the prison is built up very rapidly, yet the cyclical, rhythmic movement of its life is maintained, with chronological descriptions of the visit to the bath-house, the feast of Christmas, the stage show. In the second part, the chronological principle is abandoned, and the events of the subsequent years are summarized, although the overall impression is still one of intense vividness and authenticity.

Yet it would be a mistake to view the novel simply as a work of documentary realism. It is important to realize that the book also describes an inner crisis – a spiritual death and an awakening. Dostoyevsky is correct when he predicts that in the book his personality ‘will disappear from. view’. The tormented, eccentric Goryanchikov is all that’ the book contains by way of a characterized central figure. Even this fictional T suffers from an inner contradiction: while Goryanchikov is supposed to have been deported and imprisoned for murdering his wife, a remark Akim Akimych makes in the second chapter of Part One implies that Goryanchikov is a political prisoner, like Dostoyevsky himself. The point about the novel, however, is that it charts the reawakening of a man without a personality: it is the personalities of the convicts, men who create their own freedom even in captivity out of their own violence, vulgarity and cruel will to life, that dominate the work. Only gradually, under their influence, does the T of the narrative, locked away in speechless suffering, ‘shut up in a coffin’, begin to respond to their vital stimulus. The letter to Mikhail quoted at the beginning of this introduction contains an important passage which seems to contradict the extreme negativity of Dostoyevsky’s initial remarks about his fellow-convicts. It is a passage that has a profound relevance to the novel: ‘Even in penal servitude, among thieves and bandits, in the course of four years I finally succeeded in discovering human beings. Can you believe it: among them there are deep, strong, magnificent characters, and how cheering it was to find the gold under the coarse surface. And not one, not two, but several. Some it is impossible not to respect, others are quite simply magnificent. I taught a young Circassian (who had been sent to prison for banditry) to read and write Russian. With what gratitude he enveloped me! Another convict wept when he said goodbye to me. I had given him some money – it was not much. But his gratitude was boundless. In the meanwhile, however, my own character deteriorated; I was off-hand, impatient with them. They respected the mental and spiritual condition I was in, and bore it all without a murmur. Apropos: How many popular types and characters I have brought with me out of penal servitude! I grew accustomed to them, and for this reason I think I know them pretty well. How many stories of vagrants and bandits and all that black, wretched existence. I have enough for whole volumes. What a wonderful people. My time has not been wasted. Even if I have not come to know Russia, I have come to know the Russian people better than many know it, perhaps.’

Like Goryanchikov, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, is convicted of a civil murder and is deported to Siberia, where he languishes in a penal colony. Like Goryanchikov, and like Dostoyevsky himself, he suffers the venom and malice of the other convicts because he is a ‘nobleman’, a ‘gentleman’. But Raskolnikov is exposed to yet another form of torment:

‘You’re a gentleman,’ they used to say to him. ‘You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.’

During the second week in Lent his turn came to go to Mass with the other convicts in his barracks. He went to church and prayed with the others. He did not know how it happened, but one day a fight occurred: they fell upon him all together in a frenzy.

‘You’re an atheist!’ they shouted: ‘You don’t believe in God! You ought to be killed!’^*

We are told that even when Raskolnikov had been contemplating suicide, ‘he had perhaps been dimly aware of the great lie in himself and his convictions’. Dostoyevsky continues: ‘He did not understand that that vague feeling could be the precursor of the complete break in his future life, of his future resurrection, his new view of life’.^†

There seems little doubt that for Dostoyevsky, the ‘great lie’, the crime against himself and against God that had lain at the root of his flirtation with radical politics and his ensnarement by his ‘Mephistopheles’, Speshnyov, was equivalent to, even worse than the crime of hatchet-murder. The crime was also an offence against the Russian people. The novel is to some extent an act of atonement. Not only does it contain the quasi-expressionistic portrait of Gazin, the psychopathic child murderer; in the figure of the Schismatic, the old man from the settlements at Starodubye, Dostoyevsky draws the first sketch in a line of portraits that includes such transfigured emanations of the Russian national and spiritual consciousness as Bishop Tikhon (Devils) and the elder Zosima (Brothers Karamazov).

At the end of the book, Goryanchikov describes his emotions as his fetters are removed:

The fetters fell to the ground. I picked them up. I wanted to hold them in my hand, to have a last look at them. Already I could hardly believe they had ever been on my legs at all.

‘Well, God go with you!’ said the convicts in voices that were curt, gruff, but somehow also pleased.

Yes, God go with you! Freedom, a new life, resurrection from the dead…What a glorious moment!

The ‘glorious moment’ is the one at which, with freedom, the divine gift of personality is restored to the hero. Without freedom, there can be no personality. This individual ‘resurrection from the dead’ is the beginning of a long road that leads from the ‘new life’ mentioned here, through the ‘gradual regeneration’ referred to in the final paragraph of Crime and Punishment, and the purgatory of Devils, to the confession of faith in a universal resurrection of mankind that concludes Brothers Karamazov.