House of the Dead

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• Publisher: Alma Classics
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781847496669
• eBook ISBN: 9780714548890
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

The House of the Dead recounts the story of Alexander Goryanchikov, a gentleman who is sent to a prison colony in Siberia for killing his wife. Largely ignored at first by his fellow inmates due to his noble blood, he gradually settles in and becomes an avid observer of the new world around him - watching his fellow prisoners being brutally and cruelly punished by the guards, listening to their past stories of blood and murder, assimilating the institution's social codes and learning that even convicts are capable of acts of pure generosity.Based on Dostoevsky's own autobiographical experiences of penal servitude in Siberia, this genre-defying novel is not only an unflinching expose of the conditions faced by prisoners during the Tsarist period, but also a call to see the human side in criminals and rediscover the values of forgiveness and compassion.

Foreword

On 23rd January 1850, the twenty-eight-year-old Dostoevsky arrived at the prison fortress of Omsk in Western Siberia, where he had been sentenced for his involvement in the Petrashevsky conspiracy in 1849.* This marked the start of “a long, colourless, physically and morally burdensome existence”, as he was to write to Natalya Dmitryevna Fonvizina shortly after his release in February 1854. He felt he had been buried alive. But it wasn’t simply the physical privations and appalling conditions that were so hard to bear. As someone who lived an intensely rich inner life – as the first Russian translator of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and the author of a number of already published stories, including the widely acclaimed Poor Folk (1846) – he found the lack of literary culture and the almost total absence of books in prison particularly tortuous. At the same time, however, prison had given him a unique opportunity to meet and observe an extraordinary range of varied and interesting characters. “They became so familiar to me,” he wrote to his brother Mikhail, “that I think I got to know them pretty well… how many stories of vagrants and bandits, all leading such dark, hapless, ill-starred lives. Enough material for whole volumes. What extraordinary people!” (letter of 22nd February 1854).

Dostoevsky was certainly planning on “returning to literature” as soon as possible, but he was reluctant to embark on a book based on his prison experiences, largely because of his concern the censors might not pass it for publication. Yet the foundation for a new work had already been laid in the form of his Siberian Notebook, a compendium of anecdotes, songs and snatches of conversation he had overheard while a patient in the prison hospital. His confidence in the project grew, and in 1859, the year he was discharged from the army and allowed to return to European Russia, he wrote to Mikhail confirming that his Notes from the House of the Dead had taken definite shape. “It will be some two hundred pages long. My own person will disappear. They will be the notes of an unknown person, but I can vouch for their interest. Interest in it will be absolutely huge. It will include the serious, the dark, the humorous, and the dialogue will have a decidedly convict flavour… individuals will be depicted who have never been written about before in literature” (letter of 9th October 1859). True, the question of censorship still loomed large in his mind. “There could well be a disaster,” he continued, “and its publication could be banned. (I am quite confident that everything I’ve written will pass the censor.) But if it is banned, I will still be able to break it up into articles and publish it in chunks in the journals… Yet it would still be a disaster!” In the event, the work’s introduction and first chapter appeared in the weekly Russian World on 1st September 1860. Publication resumed throughout 1861, and was completed the following year.

Despite Dostoevsky’s assertion that his own person would “disappear” in his new work, the details he gives in his letter to Mikhail leave us in no doubt of the book’s autobiographical nature. The filthy, foul-smelling, overcrowded barrack rooms, the oppressive heat of the summers, the freezing cold of the winters, the coarseness of the convicts’ behaviour, the back-breaking labour, the drinking and gambling, the tribulations of being a nobleman (an “iron nose”) among peasants – all this so closely accords with the experiences of the narrator, Goryanchikov, that any differences between him and the implied author fade into unimportance. The majority of characters, moreover – including the almost surreal figure of the fearsome major – have real-life counterparts. This is confirmed by the official records from Omsk prison, together with other contemporary accounts – most significantly, the memoirs of the poet P.K. Martyanov (1827–99) and of the Pole Szymon Tokarzewski (1821–99), the prototype for T—ski, one of the small group of Polish prisoners towards whom Goryanchikov is so naturally drawn. The work is still further grounded in reality by the large number of borrowings from Dostoevsky’s own Siberian Notebook.

Hardly surprisingly, the publication of The House of the Dead, like that of Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island thirty years later, was little short of a sensation. There was some negative reaction, with Dostoevsky being unjustly accused, on the one hand, of lacking the courage to draw any firm socio-political conclusions and, on the other, of indulging in sugary sentimentality in his portrayal of the convicts. This was the exception, however. Dostoevsky’s unprecedented unmasking of Russia’s penitentiary system, taken in conjunction with his impassioned plea that everyone should be treated as a human being, undoubtedly influenced the preparations for the 1864 reform of the legal and prison systems. Ivan Turgenev wrote from Paris, praising Dostoevsky for portraying a character such as Petrov “with great psychological subtlety and accuracy”, while he likened the bathhouse scene to something “straight out of Dante”. Alexander Herzen was similarly enthusiastic, referring in particular to Lieutenant Zherebyatnikov’s sadistic mockery of the convicts in Part II, Chapter 2. “Let us not forget,” he wrote, “that this epoch [that of Nicholas I’s rule] has bequeathed us one appalling work… which will always stand as an inscription over the gateway marking the exit to Nikolai’s dismal reign, just as Dante’s inscription marked the entrance leading into hell.” In his What Is Art? (1898), Tolstoy was to point to The House of the Dead as one of the very few works of world literature that fulfilled the criteria of the highest form of religious art – art, that is, that flows “from love for God and for one’s neighbour”.

The importance of these four traumatic years for Dostoevsky’s own future development as a writer cannot be overstated. As the letter to Mikhail makes clear, they provided him with a seemingly infinitely rich source of characters on which he would later be able to draw. Characters such as the scrupulously honest and sweet-natured Alei, or Sushilov, with his pathological desire to serve others, or “the moral Quasimodo” A—v, the “lump of flesh, with teeth, a stomach and an insatiable desire for the coarsest and most bestial bodily pleasures”, were to reappear in various guises in one or another of his stories and novels. Equally importantly, Dostoevsky’s prison experiences led him to ponder on a whole range of questions relating to criminal behaviour. What was it, for example, that drove a man to commit a particular crime, especially when there seemed no rational basis for the action? Why should someone who was on the face of it the meekest and mildest of men suddenly go berserk and commit the most senseless murder? How could an apparently ordinary human being become transformed into a tyrant and allow the most sadistic and unnatural thoughts and feelings to dominate him to the extent they would eventually become pleasurable? Man’s irrational, seemingly perverse behaviour and his potentially bestial nature were just two of the themes Dostoevsky was to explore in his subsequent stories and novels, from Notes from Underground* (1864) to The Karamazov Brothers (1881).

There is much in The House of the Dead that reflects the dark side of human nature, and the opening pages paint a bleak picture, seemingly bereft of hope. The narrator, however, becomes sustained not just by his growing awareness of his fellow prisoners as individual human beings, but by his genuine belief in the positive qualities of the Russian people as a whole. “How heartening it was to be able to discover the gold hiding under the coarse exterior”, he wrote in the same letter to Mikhail. This is most apparent in the convicts’ reverence for the rituals of Christmas and Easter and, above all, during the stage show. Their instinctive dislike for the nobleman Goryanchikov is tempered by a genuine acknowledgement of his superiority with regard to theatrical matters. “Even the most hostilely disposed towards me,” Goryanchikov narrates, “were now anxious to obtain my approval of their show, and they therefore let me through to the best seat without the least sense of humiliation… It seemed to me at the time… that in their desire for an honest assessment of their performance there wasn’t a hint of servility… The highest and most clearly defined characteristic of our people is a sense of, and a yearning for, fairness. There is no hint of a desire to be cock of the roost, whatever the occasion… You only need to remove the outer, superficial shell and look more closely and carefully at the inner kernel, without prejudice, and some of you may see things in the common people you won’t ever have expected. There is not much our wise men can teach them. On the contrary: I would say it’s the wise men who could learn a lot from the common people” (Part I, Chapter 11).

When Dostoevsky walked out of prison that January morning in 1854 he knew that years of exile and army service lay ahead of him. Life in some respects was not necessarily going to become any easier, for he was as vulnerable to its vicissitudes as the eagle, whose chances of survival in the open steppe, with a broken wing, were slim. Yet he was finally free, free to leave the house of the dead and turn his back on the fortress prison and its detested fence. It was, however, far more than a question of physical freedom: he was now a transformed man, buoyed by his newly awakened faith in the resilience and instinctive common sense of the Russian people. It was with them, he was convinced, that Russia’s future lay, rather than with the pernicious socialist ideas he had only relatively recently espoused and for which he had had to pay such a heavy price.

– Roger Cockrell

The House of the Dead

Part I

Introduction

In the remote parts of Siberia,* in the midst of steppes, mountains or impassable forests, you can, from time to time, come across small towns of one, or even two thousand inhabitants, unprepossessing little wooden towns with two churches – one located in the town, the other at the cemetery. These towns are more like a fair-sized village on the outskirts of Moscow than a proper town. They generally possess far more than their fair share of police officers, superintendents and lesser officials of every sort. Despite the cold, a posting to Siberia generally means a warm and comfortable existence. The people there lead simple, conservative lives, according to fixed, unshakeable traditions that have become hallowed over the centuries. The officials, who may justly be said to fulfil the role of Siberian aristocracy, are either native, deep-dyed Siberians or men who have come from European Russia – for the most part from Moscow or Petersburg – lured by the prospect of the extra pay, the double travel allowances and the enticing future prospects. Those who are able to solve the riddle of life almost always stay on in Siberia and happily put down roots there. Later they yield sweet, abundant fruit. But others of a more empty-headed nature, unable to solve the riddle of life, soon find Siberia boring and rue the fact that they ever came. They impatiently sit out their allotted span of service – three years – and, as soon as it ends, instantly start angling for a transfer and return home, sneering at Siberia and cursing it. They are wrong: life in Siberia can be blissful, not merely from an official standpoint, but from many other points of view as well. The climate is wonderful; there are large numbers of remarkably wealthy and hospitable merchants, as well as of extraordinarily affluent natives. The young ladies bloom like roses and have exceptionally high moral standards. Wildfowl fly about the streets, positively offering themselves up to the sportsman. Champagne is drunk in unnatural quantities. The caviar is astonishing. In some parts, harvests have yields that are fifteen times higher than normal… In general, the land is blessed; you simply have to know how to make the best use of it. In Siberia people are able to do this.

It was in one of these contented, self-satisfied little towns, with its most charming inhabitants – whose memory will remain etched indelibly in my heart – that I came across Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a settler born in European Russia, a gentleman and landowner, who had later been exiled as a second-category convict for the murder of his wife, and who, on the expiration of his ten-year term of penal servitude, was meekly and quietly living out his life as a settler in the little town of K.* Although he was officially supposed to be living in one of the districts on the outskirts of town, he in fact lived in the town itself, where he was able to make ends meet by teaching children. In Siberian towns you can frequently come across teachers from among the exiled settlers; they are made welcome. For the most part they teach French, which is so necessary ...

Table of contents

• Foreword