Notes from a Dead House

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  6. a large group of exiled noblemen: The reference is to the Decembrists (see the first note to part one, chapter VI).

  7. that recent long-past time: The peculiar wording and emphasis are a left-handed appeasement of the censors, who would not have approved the book for publication if they thought it referred to present evils.

  IX. THE ESCAPE

  1. Salt-eared Siberians: The epithet “salt-eared” was originally applied to inhabitants of the region of Perm, in eastern Russia near the Urals. Legend held that the men who worked in the salt mines there had their ears pickled from carrying sacks of salt, which turned them big and red.

  APPENDIX: THE PEASANT MAREY

  1. The Peasant Marey: Dostoevsky included this reminiscence in the February 1876 number of his Writer’s Diary, which he published periodically from 1873 to 1876 and again from 1877 to 1881.

  2. Konstantin Aksakov: Konstantin Aksakov (1817–1860) was one of the major figures of the Slavophile movement, which sought continuity with the traditions and values of early Russian history and opposed the influence of western European ideas. He wrote a thesis on the question of the historical and religious mission of the Russian peasant.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881) is best known for the series of novels he wrote in the last twenty years of his life—Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov—which made him one of the major figures of Western literature. These works were all nourished by and partly foreshadowed in Notes from a Dead House (1862), the author’s semifictional account of his own experiences as a political prisoner in Siberia from 1850 to 1854.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

  Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov, and Pasternak. They were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina), and their translation of Dostoevsky’s Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.