Notes from a Dead House

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “Well, now I’m alone … without any master!…”

  Everybody laughs at his being without a master; but now he adds in a half whisper, addressing the public confidentially and winking his little eye more and more merrily:

  “The devils took my master!…”

  The spectators’ ecstasy is boundless! Besides the fact that the devils took his master, it was told in such a way, with such slyness, with such mockingly triumphant grimaces, that it really was impossible not to applaud. But Kedril’s happiness does not last long. He has just taken possession of the bottle, filled his glass, and is about to drink, when the devils suddenly come back, sneak up behind him on tiptoe, and snitch-snatch him from both sides. Kedril shouts at the top of his lungs; he’s so cowardly he doesn’t dare turn around. He also cannot defend himself: his hands are taken up by the bottle and the glass, which he’s unable to part with. His mouth gaping with terror, he sits for half a minute staring pop-eyed at the public, with such a hilarious expression of cowardly fright that he decidedly could have posed for a picture. They finally pick him up and carry him off; he holds on to the bottle, wiggles his legs, and shouts and shouts. You can still hear him shouting from backstage. But the curtain falls, and everyone laughs, everyone is in ecstasy … The orchestra strikes up the Kamarinskaya.

  They begin softly, barely audibly, but the melody grows and grows, the tempo increases, dashing raps ring out on the soundboard of the balalaika … This is the Kamarinsky in full swing, and it truly would have been good if Glinka had happened to hear it in our prison.4 The pantomime begins to the sound of the music. The Kamarinsky doesn’t stop all through the pantomime. The scene is the interior of a cottage. A miller and his wife are onstage. The miller is mending a harness in one corner; in the other his wife is spinning hemp. The wife is played by Sirotkin, the miller by Netsvetaev.

  I will note that our stage set is very sparse. In both this and the preceding piece, you fill in more with your imagination than you see with your eyes. Instead of a backdrop, they have stretched some sort of rug or horse blanket; to the sides are some trashy screens. The left side is not obstructed at all, and you can see the bunks. But the spectators are not demanding, and they agree to fill in the reality with their imagination, the more so as prisoners are quite good at it: “They say a garden, so consider it a garden, a room so it’s a room, a cottage so it’s a cottage—never mind, we don’t stand on ceremony.” Sirotkin looks very sweet in the costume of a young peasant wench. A few hushed compliments are heard among the spectators. The miller finishes his work, takes his hat and knout, goes to his wife, and explains with gestures that he has to leave, but that if she receives anybody in his absence, then … and he points to the knout. The wife listens and nods. She is probably well acquainted with this knout: the wench plays fast and loose with her husband. The husband leaves. The moment he steps out, his wife shakes her fist at his back. Then comes a knock; the door opens and a neighbor appears, also a miller, a muzhik in a kaftan and with a beard. In his hands a present, a red kerchief. The wench laughs; but the neighbor just goes to embrace her, when there is another knock on the door. Where to put him? She quickly hides him under the table and goes back to her spinning. Another admirer appears: this one is a clerk in a military uniform. So far the pantomime has gone flawlessly, the gestures have been exactly right. You might even wonder, watching these improvised actors, and involuntarily think to yourself: how much power and talent sometimes perishes in our Russia almost for nothing, in prison and in hardship! But the prisoner who played the clerk probably used to be in a provincial or home theater, and imagined that our actors, one and all, did not understand what they were doing and did not move the way one ought to move onstage. And so he performs as they say the heroes of classical theater used to perform in the old days: he takes a long stride and, before moving the other leg, suddenly stops, throws back his head and his whole body, looks around proudly, and—takes another stride. If such a gait was ridiculous in classical heroes, it was all the more so in a military clerk, in a comic scene. But our public thought it probably had to be so and accepted the long strides of the lanky clerk as an accomplished fact, without any particular criticism. The clerk has barely had time to reach the middle of the stage when more knocking is heard: the hostess is again all aflutter. Where to put the clerk? Into the trunk, which is thankfully open. The clerk slips into the trunk, and the wench closes the lid on him. This time a special guest appears, also an amorous one, but of a special sort. He is a Brahmin, even in his costume. Irrepressible laughter breaks out among the spectators. The prisoner Koshkin plays the Brahmin, and plays him beautifully. He has a Brahminish look. Through gestures he expresses the full extent of his love. He raises his hands to heaven, then presses them to his breast, his heart; but he has just managed to wax tender when there comes a loud knock on the door. You can tell by the knock that it’s the master. The frightened wife is beside herself; the Brahmin rushes about frantically and begs to be hidden. She hastily puts him behind the cupboard and, forgetting to open the door, rushes to her spinning and spins, spins, not hearing her husband rapping on the door, in her fright twisting thread that isn’t there and turning the spindle that she has forgotten to pick up from the floor. Sirotkin succeeded in portraying her fear very well. But the master kicks the door open with his foot and approaches his wife knout in hand. He has noticed and spied out everything, and holds up his fingers to say she has three of them hidden. Then he goes looking for them. The first to be found is the neighbor, whom he ushers out of the room with his fists. The cowardly clerk wanted to flee, raised the lid with his head, and thus gave himself away. The master whips him along with the knout, and this time the amorous clerk hops about in a none-too-classical way. There remains the Brahmin; the master spends a long time searching for him, finally finds him in the corner behind the cupboard, bows politely to him, and pulls him out into the middle of the room by his beard. The Brahmin tries to defend himself, shouts: “Curse you! Curse you!” (the only words spoken in the pantomime), but the husband doesn’t listen and makes short work of him. The wife, seeing that it has now come around to her, drops the yarn and spindle and runs out of the room; the spinning-stool falls to the ground, the prisoners guffaw. Alei, without looking at me, tugs at my arm and shouts: “Look! The Brahmin! The Brahmin!” and laughs so he can hardly stand. The curtain falls. The next scene begins …

  But there is no need to describe all the scenes. There were two or three more. They were all funny and unfeignedly merry. If the prisoners didn’t write them themselves, they at least put a lot of their own into each of them. Almost every actor improvised, so that the next evening the same actor played the same scene slightly differently. The last pantomime, of a fantastic nature, concluded with a ballet. A dead man is being buried. The Brahmin and his numerous attendants perform various incantations over the coffin, but nothing helps. Finally, “The Sun Is Setting” rings out, the dead man rises, everybody joyfully begins to dance. The Brahmin dances with the dead man, and dances in a very special, Brahminish way. With that the theater ends, until the next evening. Our people all go their ways, cheerful, pleased, praising the actors, thanking the sergeant. No quarrels are heard. Everybody is somehow unusually pleased, even as if happy, and they fall asleep not as habitually, but almost with peace of mind—and why so, you wonder? And yet it’s not a figment of my imagination. It’s true, real. These poor men were allowed to live in their own way for a little while, to have fun like other people, to spend if only an hour of unprisonlike time—and they were morally changed, even if only for those few minutes … But now it’s already deep night. I give a start for some reason and wake up: the old man is still praying on the stove and will go on praying till dawn; Alei is sleeping quietly next to me. I remember that as he was falling asleep he was still laughing, talking about the theater with his brothers, and I involuntarily lose myself in contemplating his peaceful, childlike face. I gradually remember everything: the past day, the holidays, this who
le month … In fear I raise my head and look around at my sleeping comrades by the dim, flickering light of a two-penny prison candle. I look at their pale faces, their poor beds, at all this rank poverty and destitution—look at it intently—and it’s as if I want to make sure that all this is not the continuation of an ugly dream, but the real truth. But this is the truth: I now hear someone moan; someone moves his arm clumsily and his chains clank. Another shudders in his sleep and starts to talk, while grandpa on the stove is praying for all “Orthodox Christians,” and I can hear his measured, quiet, drawn-out “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us!…”

  “I’m not here forever, but only for a few years!” I think and lower my head to the pillow again.

  I

  The Hospital

  Soon after the holidays, I fell ill and was sent to our military hospital. It stood apart, about a quarter mile from the fortress. It was a long one-story building, painted yellow. In the summer, when repair work was done, an extraordinary amount of ochre was expended on it. In the vast courtyard of the hospital there were offices, houses for the medical authorities, and other utility buildings. In the main building there were only wards. There were many wards, but for the prisoners there were only two in all, always very crowded, especially in summer, so that the beds often had to be pushed together. Our wards were filled with all sorts of “unfortunates.” Our people went there, various sorts of military men on trial went there, held under various sorts of guard—already sentenced, awaiting sentence, and in transit; some were from the correctional company—a strange institution, to which delinquent or unreliable soldiers were sent from the battalions to have their behavior corrected, and from which, after two years or more, they usually came out such scoundrels as are rarely to be met with. Sick prisoners usually reported their sickness to the sergeant in the morning. They were entered into a book at once, and with that book the sick man was sent under convoy to the battalion infirmary. There a doctor made a preliminary examination of all the sick from all the military units billeted in the fortress, and those found to be actually sick were sent to the hospital. I was noted down in the book, and between one and two o’clock, when everybody had already gone from the prison to their afternoon work, I went to the hospital. A sick prisoner usually took with him as much money as he could, some bread, because he could not expect his ration in the hospital that day, a tiny pipe and a pouch of tobacco, a flint and steel. These last items were carefully hidden in a boot. I entered the grounds of the hospital not without a certain curiosity about this new variation, as yet unknown to me, on our prison life.

  The day was warm, overcast, and sad—one of those days when such institutions as a hospital acquire an especially business-like, dreary, and sour look. The convoy and I went into the anteroom, where two copper bathtubs stood and where two patients from those on trial were already waiting, also under convoy. A medical attendant came in, looked us over lazily and with authority, and went still more lazily to report to the doctor on duty. The latter soon appeared; he examined us, treated us very kindly, and issued each of us a “chart of ills” on which our name was inscribed. The further description of the illness, the medications prescribed, the dosages, and so on, were left to the intern who was in charge of the prisoners’ wards. I had already heard earlier that the prisoners could not praise their doctors too highly. “They’re better than fathers!” was their reply to my questions, as I was leaving for the hospital. Meanwhile we changed. The clothes and linen we had come in were taken from us, and we were dressed in hospital linen, along with which they issued us long stockings, slippers, caps, and thick flannel robes of a brown color, lined with canvas or something like sticking plaster. In short, the robe was filthy to the utmost degree; but I appreciated it fully only when I was installed. Then they took us to the prisoners’ wards, which were located at the end of a very long corridor, high-ceilinged and clean. The external cleanliness everywhere was very satisfactory; everything that first struck the eye was simply gleaming. However, it might well have seemed so to me after our prison. The other two men went to the ward on the left, I to the one on the right. At the door, fastened with an iron bolt, stood a sentry with a gun, a relief sentry beside him. A junior sergeant (from the hospital guard) ordered them to let me in, and I found myself in a long and narrow room, with beds lined up against both long walls, some twenty-two in number, of which three or four were as yet unoccupied. The beds were wooden, painted green, all too familiar to each of us in Russia—those same beds which, by a sort of predestination, simply cannot be without bedbugs. I placed myself in a corner on the window side.

  As I’ve already said, there were also some of our convicts from prison there. Some of them already knew me or at least had seen me before. They were far outnumbered by those on trial or from the correctional company. The gravely ill, that is, those who could not get out of bed, were not so many. The rest, slightly ill or convalescent, either sat on their cots or paced up and down the room between the two rows of beds, where there was space enough for strolling. There was an extremely suffocating hospital smell in the ward. The air was infected with various unpleasant exhalations and the smell of medications, even though a wood stove burned almost all day long in one corner. My cot had a striped cover on it. I took it off. Under the cover I found a flannel blanket lined with canvas and coarse sheets of a highly dubious cleanness. Next to the cot stood a little table with a mug and a tin bowl on it. All this, for decency’s sake, was covered by a small towel that had been issued to me. Under the little table was a shelf: there tea drinkers could keep a teapot, jugs of kvass, and so on; but among the patients there were very few tea drinkers. The pipes and tobacco pouches that almost everybody had, not excluding even the consumptives, were hidden under the cots. The doctors and other authorities almost never looked there, and if they did catch somebody with a pipe, they pretended not to notice. However, the patients were almost always cautious and went to smoke by the stove. Only during the night did they smoke right in bed; but nobody made the rounds of the ward at night, except sometimes the officer in charge of the hospital guard.

  Until then I had never been in any hospital; all the surroundings were therefore completely new to me. I noticed that I aroused a certain curiosity. They had already heard about me and looked me over quite unceremoniously, even with a shade of some superiority, the way a new pupil at school or a petitioner in an office is looked over. To the right of me lay a man on trial, a clerk, the illegitimate son of a retired captain. He was charged with counterfeiting money and had been in the hospital for a year already, apparently not sick at all, but assuring the doctors that he had an aneurysm. He achieved his goal: he avoided hard labor and corporal punishment and a year later was sent to Tobolsk, to be kept somewhere near a hospital. He was a sturdy, thickset fellow of about twenty-eight, a great crook and legalist, by no means stupid, extremely casual and self-assured, morbidly vain, who had quite seriously convinced himself that he was the most honest and truthful man in the world and even not guilty of anything at all, and remained forever convinced of it. He spoke to me first, started questioning me with curiosity, and told me in great detail about the external rules of the hospital. Before all, naturally, he informed me that he was a captain’s son. His greatest wish was to seem like a nobleman or at least “from the gentry.” After him a patient from the correctional company came up to me and began assuring me that he had known many earlier exiled noblemen, calling them by first name and patronymic. He was already a gray-haired soldier; it was written on his face that he was lying about it all. His name was Chekunov. He was obviously trying to suck up to me, probably suspecting I had money. Noticing my packet of tea and sugar, he immediately offered his services in finding a teapot and making tea for me. M—cki had promised to send me a teapot from the prison the next day, with one of the prisoners who went to work in the hospital. But Chekunov took care of it all. He found some sort of kettle, even a bowl, boiled the water, brewed the tea—in short, he served me with extraordina
ry zeal, which at once drew some venomous remarks at his expense from one of the patients. This patient, who lay across from me, was a consumptive by the name of Ustyantsev, a soldier on trial, the same one who, fearing punishment, drank a jug of vodka infused with a lot of snuff, which gave him consumption; I mentioned him earlier. Until then he had been lying there silently and breathing with difficulty, studying me intently and seriously, and following Chekunov with indignation. An extraordinary, bilious gravity gave an especially comic tinge to his indignation. Finally, he could not restrain himself: