Notes from the House of the Dead

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Boris Jakim

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781467437424
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Master translation of a neglected Russian classic into English Long before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago came Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead, a compelling account of the horrific conditions in Siberian labor camps. First published in 1861, this novel, based on Dostoevsky's own experience as a political prisoner, is a forerunner of his famous novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.The characters and situations that Dostoevsky encountered in prison were so violent and extraordinary that they changed his psyche profoundly. Through that experience, he later said, he was resurrected into a new spiritual condition -- one in which he would create some of the greatest novels ever written.Including an illuminating introduction by James Scanlan on Dostoevsky's prison years, this totally new translation by Boris Jakim captures Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical narrative -- at times coarse, at times intensely emotional, at times philosophical -- in rich American English.

PART I

Introduction

In the remote regions of Siberia, in the midst of the steppes, mountains, or impassable forests, one encounters a few little towns with a thousand or at most two thousand inhabitants, towns that are built of wood and that are nothing to look at, with two churches, one in the town center, the other in the cemetery; these are towns which bear more resemblance to a good-sized village in the suburbs of Moscow than to a town properly so called. They’re usually abundantly furnished with district police inspectors, superintendents, and all the other minor officials. In general, in spite of the cold, a government post in Siberia is a very snug berth. The people who live there are simple and untouched by liberal ideas; their ways are old and fixed, hallowed by the centuries. The officials, who may justly be said to play the role of the Siberian nobility, are either native, deeply rooted Siberians, or men who have come from Russia, for the most part from the capitals, enticed by the supplementary pay, the double traveling allowances, and alluring hopes for the future. Of these, those who know how to solve the riddle of life almost always remain in Siberia and gladly take root there. Later on, they bring forth abundant and sweet fruit. But the others, the frivolous men who are unable to solve the riddle of life, soon grow weary of Siberia, and ask themselves sorrowfully: “Why did I ever come here?” Impatiently they put in their statutory term of government service — three years — and as soon as it’s over, they immediately petition to be transferred, and return home cursing Siberia and ridiculing it. They’re wrong: one can lead a blissful existence in Siberia not only from the point of view of government service but from many other points of view as well. The climate is superb; there are many remarkably rich and hospitable merchants; there are many extremely prosperous non-indigenous inhabitants. The young ladies blossom like roses, and they’re moral to the highest degree. Wild game flies about the streets and practically bumps into the hunter. Champagne is drunk in unnatural quantities. The caviar is amazing. In some places the harvest yields fifteen-fold. . . . In general, it’s a blessed land. You just have to know how to use it. In Siberia they know how to use it.

It was in one of these cheerful and self-satisfied little towns, full of the most endearing inhabitants the memory of whom will never be erased from my heart, that I met Alexander Petrovich Gorianchikov, a settler¹ who had been born in Russia as a nobleman and landowner, was afterwards sent to Siberia as a convict of the second category for murdering his wife, and, after the expiration of the ten-year term of penal servitude to which he had been sentenced, lived out the rest of his life humbly and obscurely as a settler in the little town of K.² Strictly speaking, he had been assigned to a district that adjoined the town, but he lived in the town itself, where he had a chance to make some sort of living by giving lessons to children. In Siberian towns one often encounters settlers who work as teachers; they’re not looked down upon. They primarily teach French, which is so indispensable in life and which, if not for the settlers, would be a thing totally unknown in the remote regions of Siberia. I first met Alexander Petrovich at the house of a certain old-fashioned, venerable, and hospitable government official, Ivan Ivanych Gvozdikov, who had five daughters of various ages of whom the greatest hopes were entertained. Alexander Petrovich gave them lessons four times a week, at thirty silver kopecks a lesson. His outward appearance drew my attention. He was an extremely pale and thin man, not yet old, about thirty-five, small and frail-looking. He was always very neatly dressed in the European style. If you spoke to him, he’d look at you extremely intently and attentively, listen to every one of your words with strict politeness, as if reflecting deeply upon it, as if with your question you had posed a problem for him to solve or wished to extract some secret from him, and finally he’d answer clearly and concisely, but weighing every word of his answer so carefully that you’d suddenly begin to feel awkward for some reason and rejoice when the conversation finally came to an end. I asked Ivan Ivanych about him at the time and found out that Gorianchikov’s life was morally irreproachable, and that otherwise Ivan Ivanych wouldn’t have invited him to give lessons to his daughters, but that he was a terrible misanthrope, that he hid from everyone, was extremely learned, read a lot, but spoke very little, and that in general it was rather hard to engage him in conversation. Others asserted that he was totally crazy, although they told me that this was not really such a serious defect and that many of the town’s respected citizens were ready to be kind to Alexander Petrovich in all sorts of ways, and that he could even be useful by writing petitions, and so on. It was conjectured that he must have had a lot of relatives back in Russia who were perhaps not even of the lowest rank, but it was also known that from the time of his deportation he had broken off all relations with them — in short, he had done himself a lot of harm. What’s more, everyone in our town knew his history; everyone knew that he had killed his wife in the very first year of his marriage, that he had killed her out of jealousy and informed on himself (which greatly mitigated his punishment). Such crimes are always looked upon as misfortunes and as deserving of compassion. But in spite of all this, this strange man obstinately kept himself apart from everyone, and never appeared among people except to give lessons.

At first I didn’t pay any particular attention to him, but — I really don’t know why — little by little he began to interest me. There was something enigmatic about him. There wasn’t the slightest possibility of engaging him in conversation. Of course, he always answered my questions, and he answered them, in fact, as if he considered it his most important duty to do so, but after he had answered, I somehow found it awkward to question him any further; what’s more, after such conversations, his face always wore a look of suffering and weary exhaustion. I remember walking back with him from Ivan Ivanych’s house one fine summer evening. It suddenly occurred to me to ask him to come in for a minute, to smoke a cigarette. I can’t describe the look of horror that came into his face; he became totally disconcerted, started to mutter some incoherent words, and suddenly, after casting an angry glance at me, rushed off in the opposite direction. I was positively astonished. From that time on, whenever he met me, he’d look at me with a sort of alarm. But I wasn’t discouraged; something drew me to him, and a month later, for no particular reason, I dropped in to see Gorianchikov myself. There’s no question I acted stupidly and tactlessly. He lodged on the farthest outskirts of the town with an elderly woman of the petty bourgeoisie who had a sick daughter, a consumptive, and this daughter had a daughter of her own, illegitimate, about ten years old, a very pretty and merry little girl. Alexander Petrovich was seated by her side and teaching her to read at the moment I entered. When he saw me, he became as confused as if I had caught him committing some crime. He became completely disconcerted, jumped up from his chair, and stared at me wildly. Finally we sat down; his eyes intently followed every glance of mine, as if in every one of them he suspected some special mysterious significance. I realized that he was mistrustful to an insane degree. He looked at me with hatred, almost as if he were asking, “When are you going to go away?” I began to talk to him about our little town, about the news of the day; he was silent and smiled angrily; it turned out not only that he did not know the most ordinary news of the town, known to everybody else, but that he wasn’t even interested in knowing it. Then I began to talk about our region of Siberia and its needs; he listened to me silently and gazed into my eyes so strangely that at last I began to repent of having started the conversation. I almost succeeded in tempting him, however, with some new books and magazines, fresh from the post; they were in my hands, and I was offering them to him with the pages still uncut. He cast a greedy look at them, but he instantly changed his mind and declined the offer, making the excuse that he didn’t have the time to read them. Finally I said good-bye, and after I left him I felt as if some unbearable weight had been lifted from my heart. I felt ashamed, and it seemed extremely stupid to pester a man who had made it his chief aim in life to hide himself as far away as possible from the whole world. But the deed was done. I remember that I saw hardly any books in his room, and so people were in error when they said he read a lot. Nevertheless, when I drove by his windows on two occasions very late at night, I noticed a light in them. What was he doing sitting up until dawn? Was he writing? And if so, what exactly?

Circumstances took me away from our town for about three months. Returning home after winter had already begun, I learned that Alexander Petrovich had died in the fall, that he had died in solitude and had not even sent for a doctor once. In the little town he was already nearly forgotten. His apartment was empty. I immediately made the acquaintance of the deceased’s landlady, intending to find out from her what in particular her lodger had been occupying himself with and whether he had been writing anything. For a twenty-kopeck piece she brought me a whole bushel of papers left by the deceased. The old woman confessed that she had already used up two little notebooks. She was a morose and taciturn old hag from whom it was hard to elicit much sense. She couldn’t tell me anything particularly new about her lodger. According to her, he had hardly ever done a thing, and for months on end he didn’t open a book or pick up a pen; but he’d pace up and down his room all night and keep thinking about something, and sometimes he’d talk to himself; and he loved her little granddaughter, Katya, very much and was very tender toward her, especially after he learned her name was Katya; and on St. Catherine’s Day he always went to church and had a memorial service served for someone. He couldn’t bear visitors; he never went out except to give lessons to children; even at her, the old woman, he’d look with an unfriendly eye when, once a week, she’d come to tidy up his room at least a little, and he had hardly said a single word to her in all the three years he had lived there. I asked Katya if she remembered her teacher. She looked at me in silence, turned to the wall, and started crying. So even this man had been able to make someone love him.

I carried away his papers and spent the whole day going through them. Three quarters of these papers were trivial, meaningless scraps or pupils’ exercises. But there was one notebook, fairly bulky, with tiny handwriting, and unfinished, which perhaps had been cast aside and forgotten by the author himself. It was a description, though a disjointed one, of the ten years of prison life endured by Alexander Petrovich. In places this description was interrupted by some other narrative, by some strange, horrible recollections written down in uneven, convulsive handwriting, as if under some sort of compulsion. I re-read some of these fragments several times and almost became convinced that they had been written in a state of madness. But the prison notes — “Scenes from the House of the Dead,” as he himself calls them somewhere in his manuscript — seemed to me not without interest. This completely new world, hitherto unknown, the strangeness of some of the facts, certain particular observations about these lost men, fascinated me, and I read some of it with curiosity. Of course, I could be wrong. As an experiment, I’ve chosen two or three chapters to begin with; let the public judge for itself. . . .

1. Men sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia were obliged to remain in Siberian exile for the rest of their lives after the expiration of their sentences. They were designated as “settlers” and were permitted to return to European Russia only in exceptional cases, as was Dostoevsky himself in 1859. Trans.

2. K. stands for Kuznetsk, a western Siberian town about 600 miles east of Omsk. Trans.

CHAPTER I

The House of the Dead

Our prison stood at the edge of the fortress, right next to the fortress ramparts. Sometimes you’d look through the chinks in the fence at God’s world: surely there must be something to see? — but the only thing you’d see would be a little corner of the sky and the high earthen ramparts, overgrown with coarse weeds, and on the ramparts the sentries would walk back and forth, day and night, and then you’d think that whole years would go by and you’d go up to the fence in exactly the same way to look through the chinks and you’d see the same ramparts, the same sentries, and the same little corner of the sky, not the sky that’s above the prison but another sky, distant and free. Imagine a large courtyard, two hundred paces long and a hundred and fifty paces wide, completely enclosed by a high stockade in the form of an irregular hexagon, that is, by a fence of tall posts vertically thrust deep into the ground, wedged firmly together, reinforced by transverse planks, and sharpened at the top: this was the outer enclosure of the prison. In one side of the enclosure was set a sturdy gate, which was always locked, and always guarded, day and night, by sentries; it was opened as required, to let the convicts out to work. Beyond this gate was the radiant free world where people lived like everybody else. But on this side of the enclosure one imagined that world to be some unattainable fairyland. On this side there was a peculiar world, a world set apart that was unlike anything else, a world with its own peculiar laws, its own dress, its own mores and customs — this was a house of the living dead, where life was like nowhere else and the people were special. It’s this special little corner that I will undertake to describe.

As you enter the enclosure, you see several buildings inside it. On both sides of a wide inner courtyard stretch two long single-story log buildings. These are the barracks. This is where the convicts live, quartered according to the categories they belong to. Then, in the interior of the enclosure, there’s another log building of the same sort: this is the kitchen, and it’s divided so as to accommodate two companies of convicts; further on there’s another structure where cellars and storage sheds of various kinds are housed under one roof. The middle of the courtyard is empty and consists of a fairly large level stretch of ground. Here the convicts assemble; there are head counts and roll calls morning, noon, and evening, and sometimes several more times in the course of the day, depending on how suspicious the guards are and how fast they can count. All around, between the buildings and the fence, there remains a fairly large space. Here, behind the buildings, some of the convicts, the most misanthropic and gloomy ones, like to walk during their leisure time; they’re hidden from all eyes and can think their own thoughts. Encountering them during those walks of theirs, I liked to look into their morose, branded faces¹ and try to guess what they were thinking about. There was one convict whose favorite occupation in his spare time was to count the fence posts. There were about fifteen hundred of them, and he had counted all of them and knew them all individually. Each post signified a day for him; every day he counted off one post and thus, from the number of uncounted posts, he could see as if in a picture how many days were left before he’d be released from his penal servitude. He was genuinely happy whenever he finished a side of the hexagon. He still had many years to wait, but in prison there was time to learn patience. I once saw a convict saying farewell to his comrades when, after twenty years in prison, he was at last being released into freedom. There were people who remembered seeing his arrival at the prison when he was young and carefree, thinking neither of his crime nor of his punishment. He was leaving it now as a gray-haired old man, with a sad and somber face. Silently he made the rounds of all six of our barracks. As he entered each barrack, he prayed before the icons, and then he bowed to his comrades deeply, down to his waist, asking them not to remember ill of him. I also remember how a convict who had formerly been a well-to-do Siberian peasant was summoned to the gate one evening. Half a year earlier he had received the news that his former wife had remarried, and this caused him great sorrow. Now she herself had come to the prison; s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Dostoevsky’s Prison Years
• Translator’s Note
• Part I
• Part II