Notes from a Dead House

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  This inner change in Dostoevsky’s perception of the people began during his first Easter in prison with the surprise recollection of a forgotten moment from his childhood, which came to him while he was lying on his bunk with his eyes closed, trying to forget the vileness of his surroundings. Interestingly enough, he did not include this “awakening” in Notes from a Dead House, though its effects are central to the book; he wrote about it only fifteen years later, in the issue of his Writer’s Diary for February 1876, in an entry entitled “The Peasant Marey,” which we include here as an appendix. It tells of how the frightened nine-year-old Dostoevsky was comforted by one of his father’s serfs.

  Now suddenly, twenty years later, in Siberia, I remembered this whole encounter with such clarity, to the very last detail. Which means that it had embedded itself in my soul imperceptibly, on its own and without my will, and I suddenly remembered it when it was needed … And so, when I got off my bunk and glanced about, I suddenly felt that I could look at these unfortunate men with totally different eyes, and that suddenly, by some miracle, all the hatred and anger in my heart had vanished completely.

  What he saw in these “simple people” was a complexity of character, a capacity for extremes of both evil and good, that destroyed the basic assumptions of the utopian socialism he had embraced as a young man. “What had been a pitying sentimentalism towards weak and basically unassertive characters,” Joseph Frank writes, “now took on a tragic complexity as Dostoevsky’s sympathies with the unsubjugated peasant convicts stretched the boundaries of official morality to the breaking point.”*9 Early in Notes from a Dead House, the author meditates on a complex riddle that pursued him all the while he was in prison: the sameness of the crime and the sameness of the sentence, faced with the enormous variety of human characters and motives and of the effects on different characters of the same punishment. “True, there are variations in the length of the sentences. But these variations are relatively few; while the variations in one and the same crime are a numberless multitude. For each character there is a variation.” This riddle comes up again five years later in Crime and Punishment, where the remarkable investigator, Porfiry Petrovich, says to Raskolnikov:

  It must be observed that the general case, the one to which all legal forms and rules are suited, and on the basis of which they are all worked out and written down in books, simply does not exist, for the very reason that every case, let’s say, for instance, every crime, as soon as it actually occurs, turns at once into a completely particular case, sir; and sometimes, just think, really completely unlike all the previous ones, sir.

  Still later, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov confesses to his brother Alyosha:

  Too many riddles oppress man on earth. Solve them if you can without getting your feet wet … Besides, I can’t bear it that some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the ideal of the Madonna and end with the ideal of Sodom. It’s even more fearful when someone who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna either, and his heart burns with it, verily, verily burns, as in his young, blameless years. No, man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down. Devil knows what to make of him, that’s the thing!

  The epilogue of Crime and Punishment is set in a Siberian hard-labor prison closely resembling the prison in Omsk, where Raskolnikov, like the narrator of Notes from a Dead House, confronts “a new, hitherto completely unknown reality” and undergoes a “gradual regeneration.” In the early drafts of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky gave Dmitri Karamazov the name of Ilyinsky. Dmitri Ilyinsky was one of his fellow prisoners in Omsk; in the Notes he is not named; the narrator refers to him only as “the parricide.” He had been sentenced to twenty years at hard labor for murdering his father, but after serving ten years of his sentence, he was found to be innocent. Dostoevsky, who never believed in his crime, says in the Notes that he was haunted by his memory, and his last novel bears him out. In his early drafts of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky called the depraved immoralist Svidrigailov by the name of Aristov. Aristov was the A—v of Notes from a Dead House, “an example of what the carnal side of man can come to, unrestrained by any inner norm, any lawfulness … Add to that the fact that he was cunning and intelligent, good-looking, even somewhat educated, and not without abilities. No,” says the narrator, “better fire, better plague and famine, than such a man in society!”

  All of Dostoevsky’s later work grew out of his meditation on the extremes he met with in the “hitherto completely unknown reality” of the dead house. It is, finally, a meditation on human freedom. The radical social thought of his time had trouble finding a place for freedom; given the right social organization, freedom was really no longer necessary. It also excluded the irrational; it reduced good and evil to the useful and the harmful; it removed the metaphysical dimensions of human life. But Dostoevsky had seen that the extremes of good and evil, the breadth that Mitya Karamazov talks about, were innate even in the crudest men, and that they would never renounce the need to assert their freedom, bizarre and deformed as the results might be. “The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner, an outcast …,” he writes, “but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being.”

  —Richard Pevear

  * * *

  *1 See Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, by Konstantin Mochulsky, translated by Michael A. Minihan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 140.

  *2 Mochulsky, p. 140.

  *3 If youth only knew! (French).

  *4 Mochulsky, p. 156.

  *5 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 28.

  *6 Frank, p. 140.

  *7 Mochulsky, p. 184; emphasis in original.

  *8 Mochulsky, p. 186.

  *9 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 214.

  Introduction

  In the remote parts of Siberia, amidst steppes, mountains, or impenetrable forests, you occasionally happen upon small towns of one or, at the most, two thousand inhabitants, wooden, unsightly, with two churches—one in town, the other in the cemetery—towns that look more like a good-sized village near Moscow than a town. They are usually quite well supplied with police officers, assessors, and all other subaltern ranks. In general, serving in Siberia, despite the cold, is extremely warm and snug. People live simply, unprogressively; the customs are old, firm, sanctified by the ages. The officials, who by rights play the role of the Siberian aristocracy, are natives, deep-rooted Siberians, or transients from Russia, mostly from the capitals,1 enticed by the payment of tax-free wages, the double travel allowance, and tempting hopes for the future. Those who are able to solve the riddle of life almost always stay in Siberia and delight in taking root there. Later on they bear sweet and abundant fruit. But others, light-minded folk, unable to solve the riddle of life, soon weary of Siberia and ask themselves in anguish why on earth they ended up there. They impatiently serve out their term of office, three years, and once it expires, they immediately put in for a transfer and go back where they came from, denouncing Siberia and laughing at it. They are wrong: not only from the point of view of service, but from many others, one can be blissfully happy in Siberia. The climate is excellent; there are many remarkably rich and hospitable merchants, and many extremely well-to-do non-Russians. The young ladies blossom like roses and are moral in the highest degree. Wildfowl fly down the streets and right into the hunters’ arms. Unnatural quantities of champagne are drunk. The caviar is astonishing. The harvest is fifteenfold in some places … Generally, it is a blessed land. You need only know how to take advantage of it. In Siberia they know how.

  In one such merry and self-contented little town, with the most charming inhabitants, the memory of which will remain forever fixed in my heart, I met Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a settler, a Russian-born gentleman and landowner, who was later sent to
second-degree hard labor for the murder of his wife, and, on the expiration of the ten-year term laid down by the law, was living out his life humbly and inaudibly as a settler in the town of K.2 In fact, he had been assigned to the suburbs, but he lived in town, which provided him with the opportunity of earning at least some sort of living by teaching children. In Siberian towns one often meets with teachers who are exiled settlers; they are not scorned. For the most part they teach French, so necessary for making one’s way in life, and of which no one in the remote parts of Siberia would have any notion without them. I first met Alexander Petrovich in the house of Ivan Ivanovich Gvozdikov, an old-fashioned, distinguished, and hospitable official, who had five very promising daughters of various ages. Alexander Petrovich gave them lessons four times a week, at thirty silver kopecks a lesson. His appearance interested me. He was an extremely pale and thin man, not yet old, about thirty-five, small and frail. He was always dressed quite neatly, European style. When you talked to him, he would look at you very fixedly and attentively, listen to your every word with strict politeness, as if pondering it, as if by asking him a question you were setting him a task or trying to worm some secret out of him, and in the end he would answer clearly and briefly, but weighing every word of his answer so much that you would suddenly feel awkward for some reason and would finally be glad yourself that the conversation was over. I asked Ivan Ivanovich about him right then and learned that Goryanchikov led an irreproachable and moral life, and that otherwise Ivan Ivanovich would not have invited him for his daughters, but that he was terribly unsociable, hid himself from everyone, was extremely learned, read a great deal, but spoke very little, and that generally it was rather difficult to get into conversation with him. Some insisted that he was positively mad, though they also found that essentially that was not such an important failing, that many of the respected members of the town were ready to show Alexander Petrovich every kindness, that he could even be of use in writing petitions, and so on. It was supposed that he must have many relations in Russia, maybe even not among the least of people, but it was known that since his exile he had resolutely broken off all connections with them—in short, he only harmed himself. Besides, we all knew his story, knew that he had killed his wife in the first year of their marriage, had killed her out of jealousy and then turned himself in (which had lightened his punishment considerably). Such crimes are always considered a misfortune and are looked upon with pity. But despite all that, the odd fellow stubbornly shunned everyone and appeared among people only to give lessons.

  At first I paid no special attention to him, but, I don’t know why myself, he gradually came to interest me. There was something enigmatic about him. To get into conversation with him was quite impossible. Of course, he always answered my questions and even looked as if he considered it his foremost obligation; but after his answers, I found it hard to ask him anything more; besides, after such conversations, his face always showed some sort of suffering and fatigue. I remember walking home with him from Ivan Ivanych’s once on a beautiful summer evening. It suddenly occurred to me to invite him to my place for a moment to have a cigarette. I cannot describe the look of horror that came to his face; he was completely at a loss, started to mutter something incoherent, and suddenly, casting an angry glance at me, rushed off in the opposite direction. I was even surprised. From then on, whenever we met, he looked at me as if with some sort of fright. But I did not let up; something drew me to him, and a month later, for no reason at all, I went to see Goryanchikov myself. Of course, it was a stupid and indelicate thing to do. He lodged on the outskirts of town, with an old tradeswoman who had a consumptive daughter, who in turn had an illegitimate daughter, a child of about ten, a pretty and cheerful little girl. Alexander Petrovich was sitting with her and teaching her to read when I came in. Seeing me, he became as confused as if I had caught him at some crime. He was completely taken aback, jumped up from his chair, and stared at me all eyes. We finally sat down; he followed my every glance intently, as if he suspected each of them of having some special, hidden meaning. I realized that he was suspicious to the point of madness. He looked at me with hatred, all but asking: “Will you leave soon?” I began talking to him about our little town, about the current news; he kept silent and smiled angrily; it turned out that he not only did not know the most ordinary town news known to everyone, but was not even interested in knowing it. After that I talked about our region, its needs; he listened to me silently and looked into my eyes so strangely that I finally began to be ashamed of our conversation. However, I almost managed to tease him out with new books and magazines; I had them with me, just arrived in the mail, and offered them to him still uncut. He cast a greedy glance at them, but changed his mind at once and declined the offer for lack of time. I finally took leave of him and, on going out, felt that some intolerable burden had been lifted from my heart. I was ashamed, and it seemed extraordinarily stupid of me to pester a man who has made it his chief task to hide as far away as possible from the whole world. But the deed was done. I remember noticing almost no books in his room, which meant they were wrong when they said that he read a lot. However, driving past his windows once or twice very late at night, I noticed light in them. What was he doing, sitting there till dawn? Could he be writing? And, if so, what precisely?

  Circumstances took me away from our little town for about three months. Returning home when it was already winter, I learned that Alexander Petrovich had died that autumn, had died in solitude and had not even once sent for a doctor. They had already nearly forgotten him in town. His lodgings stood vacant. I immediately made the acquaintance of the deceased man’s landlady, with the aim of finding out from her what in particular her tenant had been occupied with, and whether he had been writing anything. For twenty kopecks she brought me a basket full of papers that the deceased had left behind. The old woman confessed that she had already used up two notebooks. She was a sullen and taciturn woman, from whom it was hard to draw anything sensible. Of her lodger she could tell me nothing particularly new. It seemed from what she said that he hardly ever did anything and for months did not open a book or pick up a pen; instead he paced up and down his room all night, thinking about something and sometimes talking to himself; that he loved her granddaughter Katya very much and was very affectionate with her, especially after he learned that her name was Katya; and that on St. Catherine’s day he always went to have a memorial service offered for somebody. He could not stand visitors; he left the house only to teach children; he even looked askance at her, the old woman, when she came once a week to tidy his room a least a little, and hardly ever said so much as a word to her in all those three years. I asked Katya if she remembered her teacher. She looked at me silently, turned to the wall, and began to cry. So the man had been able to make at least somebody love him.

  I took his papers and spent a whole day sorting them. Three-quarters of these papers were empty, insignificant scraps, or his pupils’ exercises in penmanship. But there was one notebook, a rather voluminous one, filled with small handwriting and unfinished, perhaps abandoned and forgotten by the author himself. It was a description, though a disjointed one, of the ten years of life at hard labor that Alexander Petrovich had endured. At times this description was interrupted by another sort of narrative, some strange, horrible memories, jotted down roughly, convulsively, as if under some sort of constraint. I reread those passages several times and was almost convinced that they had been written in madness. But the notes on hard labor—“Scenes from a Dead House,” as he himself calls them somewhere in his manuscript—seemed to me not without interest. The totally new world, unknown till then, the strangeness of some facts, certain particular observations about those lost people, fascinated me, and I read some of it with curiosity. Of course, I may be mistaken. As a test, I will begin by selecting two or three chapters; let the public judge …

  I

  The Dead House

  Our prison stood at the edge of the fortress, right
by the fortress rampart. You could look at God’s world through the chinks in the fence: wouldn’t you see at least something? But all you could see was a strip of sky and a high earthen rampart overgrown with weeds, and on the wall sentries pacing up and down day and night, and right then you would think that years would go by, and you would come in the same way to look through the chinks in the fence and see the same rampart, the same sentries, and the same little strip of sky, not the sky over the prison, but a different, far-off, free sky. Picture to yourself a large yard, some two hundred paces long and a hundred and fifty wide, surrounded on all sides, in the form of an irregular hexagon, by a high stockade, that is, a fence of high posts (palings) dug deeply into the ground, their ribs pressed firmly against each other, fastened together by crosswise planks, and sharpened at the tips: this was the outer wall of the prison. On one side of the wall sturdy gates had been set in, always locked, always guarded day and night by sentries; they were opened on demand to let people out to work. Beyond those gates was the bright, free world; people lived like everybody else. But on this side of the wall, you pictured that world as some sort of impossible fairy tale. Here you were in a special world, unlike anything else; it had its own special laws, its own clothing, its own morals and customs, an alive dead house, a life like nowhere else, and special people. It is this special corner that I am setting out to describe.