Notes from a Dead House

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  ALSO TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

  MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

  The Master and Margarita

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov Selected Stories

  FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

  The Adolescent

  The Brothers Karamazov

  Crime and Punishment

  Demons

  The Double and The Gambler

  The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

  The Idiot

  Notes from Underground

  NIKOLAI GOGOL

  The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

  Dead Souls

  NIKOLAI LESKOV

  The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

  BORIS PASTERNAK

  Doctor Zhivago

  LEO TOLSTOY

  Anna Karenina

  The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

  War and Peace

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Translation copyright © 2015 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

  Foreword copyright © 2015 by Richard Pevear

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881, author.

  [Zapiski iz mertvogo doma. English (Pevear and Volokhonsky)]

  Notes from a dead house / by Fyodor Dostoevsky; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-95959-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-307-95960-7 (eBook)

  I. Pevear, Richard, [date] translator.

  II. Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator. III. Title.

  PG3326.Z3 2014

  891.73′3—dc23 2014018194

  Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  PART ONE

  Introduction

  I. The Dead House

  II. First Impressions

  III. First Impressions

  IV. First Impressions

  V. The First Month

  VI. The First Month

  VII. New Acquaintances. Petrov

  VIII. Resolute Men. Luchka

  IX. Isai Fomich. The Bathhouse. Baklushin’s Story

  X. Christmas

  XI. The Performance

  PART TWO

  I. The Hospital

  II. Continuation

  III. Continuation

  IV. Akulka’s Husband

  V. Summertime

  VI. Prison Animals

  VII. The Grievance

  VIII. Comrades

  IX. The Escape

  X. Leaving Prison

  Appendix: The Peasant Marey

  Notes

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translators

  Foreword

  Late in the night of April 22–23, 1849, the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was awakened in his apartment in Petersburg and informed that he was under arrest for his participation in a secret utopian socialist society. The other members of the society, including its founder, Mikhail Petrashevsky, a follower of the French socialist thinker Charles Fourier, were arrested at the same time. The emperor Nicholas I had been alarmed by the series of revolutions that broke out in Europe in 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto, and had decided to move against the radical intellectuals. The “Petrashevists” were confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petersburg for eight months while the investigation was carried out. In the end, the judicial commission recommended death by firing squad, but the military court commuted the sentence to eight years at hard labor in Siberia.

  Dostoevsky was specifically charged with circulating a letter by the liberal literary critic Vissarion Belinsky that was “filled with impertinent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the sovereign power” and with attempting to set up a clandestine printing press.*1 The emperor himself revised his sentence to four years at hard labor followed by four years of military service in Siberia. But he also decided to stage a little drama for the prisoners—a mock execution on the Semyonovsky parade ground, to be interrupted at the last moment by an imperial reprieve and the reading of the actual sentences. Konstantin Mochulsky notes that the emperor “entered personally into all the details: the scaffold’s dimensions, the uniforms to be worn by the condemned, the priest’s vestments, the escort of carriages, the tempo of the drum roll, the route from the fortress to the place of shooting, the breaking of the swords, the putting on of white shirts, the executioner’s functions, the shackling of the prisoners.”*2 On December 22, 1849, the performance took place. Petrashevsky was in the first group of three to be “executed”; Dostoevsky was in the second. He had just turned twenty-eight.

  In a letter to his brother Mikhail written that same evening, Dostoevsky declared:

  As I look back upon the past and think how much time has been spent to no avail, how much of it was lost in delusions, in mistakes, in idleness, in not knowing how to live; what little store I set upon it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit—for this my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every moment could have been an age of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!*3 Now, on changing my life, I am being born again in a new form. Brother! I swear to you I will not lose hope and will preserve my spirit and my heart in purity. I’ll be reborn to the better. This is all my hope, all my consolation!

  That rebirth did take place, but more slowly than Dostoevsky may have thought and through experiences he could not have imagined before the years he spent at hard labor. His Notes from a Dead House give an account of it.

  In February 1854, Dostoevsky was released from the prison in Omsk and sent to serve as a private in the fortress of Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan, some four hundred miles further east. There for the first time he was allowed to contact his family. In a letter to his brother written on February 22, 1854, a week after his release, Dostoevsky described the horrors of prison life and in particular the hatred of the peasant convicts for the nobility, to which he belonged by birth, though his sentence deprived him of his legal rights as a nobleman. The details in the letter are more shocking than anything we find in Notes from a Dead House. Yet he could say in the same letter, referring “even to robber-murderers”: “Believe me, there were deep, strong, beautiful natures among them, and it often gave me joy to find gold under a rough exterior.” The intensity of that contradiction was at the heart of Dostoevsky’s prison experience. The struggle to understand its implications would inform all his future works.

  Dostoevsky arrived in Semipalatinsk filled with plans for writing. He felt that he had enough material in him for many volumes, and though as an exile he was forbidden to publish, he hoped that situation would change in some six years, if not sooner. While still in Omsk, a week after his release, he had asked his brother to send him books. The list is interesting: “I need (very necessary) ancient historians (in French translations); modern historians: Guizot, Thierry, Thiers, Ranke, and so forth; national studies, and the Fathers of the Church … and church histories … Send me the Koran, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason … and Hegel, especially his History of Philosophy. My whole future depends on this …” He was clearly intent on rethinking his former utopian
socialism both historically and philosophically. “I won’t even try to tell you what transformations went on in my soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart in those four years,” he wrote in the same letter. “That perpetual escape into myself from bitter reality has borne its fruit. I now have many new needs and hopes of which I never thought in the old days.”

  In Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky made the acquaintance of the young Baron Alexander Egorovich Vrangel (1833–1915), who was sent there in 1854 as the district procurator. By an odd coincidence, Vrangel happened to have witnessed the mock execution of the Petrashevists in 1849; he had also read Dostoevsky’s early works and admired them. The two became friends and eventually shared a house, and Vrangel also interceded with the authorities several times on the author’s behalf. The baron’s memoirs of those years, published in 1912, give a detailed and moving portrait of Dostoevsky. He describes their first meeting: “He had on a soldier’s greatcoat with red stand-up collar and red epaulettes. Morose, with a sickly pale face covered with freckles, he wore his light-blond hair cut short; in height he was taller than average. Staring intently at me with his intelligent grey-blue eyes, it seemed he was trying to peer into my soul.”*4 Through Vrangel, Dostoevsky was introduced to the commanding officers of the fortress and was received in society, where he met his future wife, Marya Dmitrievna Isaeva.

  Vrangel recalled Dostoevsky working on his prison memoirs while they lived together. “I was happy to see him during the moments of his creative work,” he wrote, “and I was the first person who listened to the notes of this outstanding work of art.” Vrangel also recorded a curious incident that occurred one day while they were sitting on the terrace having tea. His servant announced that a young woman was asking to see Dostoevsky. She was invited to the garden, and Dostoevsky recognized her at once as the daughter of a Gypsy woman who had been sent to prison for murdering her husband. The girl herself had been involved in the escape of two convicts from the prison in Omsk. Their plan—“completely illogical and fantastic,” according to Vrangel—was to make their way eastward, join the khan’s army, and come back to free their fellow prisoners. He says that the girl’s sudden reappearance inspired Dostoevsky to write a new chapter, “The Escape,” the next to last in Notes from a Dead House and the book’s thematic culmination.

  The emperor Nicholas I died in the spring of 1855 and in September his son, Alexander II, who came to be known as the Tsar-Liberator, ascended the throne. The liberal spirit of the new government made itself felt rather quickly and, perhaps owing to it, Dostoevsky was promoted from private to noncommissioned officer in the autumn of that same year. A year later, in October 1856, he was made a commissioned officer and his rights as a nobleman were restored. This improvement in his position made it possible for him to marry Marya Dmitrievna the following February. His official work and the turmoil of his courtship and eventual marriage had interfered with his writing, but after his marriage he went back to it more steadily. He worked on some of his prison sketches, then set them aside in order to write two long stories, Uncle’s Dream and The Village of Stepanchikovo, which he thought would be better suited to his reappearance as a writer. In fact, they are more or less the same as his pre-prison works. The deep change that was going on in him had not yet found its form and voice.

  In 1858 Dostoevsky asked for permission to retire from the service and return to Russia. The permission was granted, but the order took more than a year to reach him, and it did not allow him to live in Moscow or Petersburg. In the summer of 1859, he left Semipalatinsk for the city of Tver, a hundred miles north of Moscow, where his literary plans and the idea of collaborating with his brother Mikhail on a weekly magazine took clearer shape. The two stories were published in reputable journals that same year, and in mid-December, after more petitions, Dostoevsky was finally allowed to return to Petersburg.

  During the spring and summer of 1860, while he and Mikhail were going through the complicated process of starting their magazine, Dostoevsky set to work on the final version of Notes from a Dead House. Surprisingly, however, in the fall the first two chapters were published in another magazine, The Russian World, an “obscure weekly,” as Joseph Frank describes it.*5 Frank suggests that Dostoevsky wanted to make “a preliminary trial of the censors’ response.” He was afraid that, despite the liberal atmosphere of the time, his portrayal of life at hard labor would not be approved for publication. The editor of The Russian World offered to take the matter into his own hands, submitted the early chapters to the censors, and the Central Censorship Authority passed them. The magazine published the next three chapters in its January numbers and promised more to come, but there would be no more. The Dostoevskys’ magazine Vremya (“Time”) had begun to appear that same January, and the whole of Notes from a Dead House, including the opening chapters, was published there in 1861–62.

  The Notes made a very strong impression on the reading public, especially the radical youth. For Dostoevsky it indeed marked a triumphant return to literature. As Joseph Frank observed: “No writer was now more celebrated than Dostoevsky, whose name was surrounded with the halo of his former suffering, and whose sketches only served to enhance his prestige as a precursor on the path of political martyrdom.”*6 He was invited to give talks and readings to student groups and charitable organizations, opportunities he always accepted gladly, because they brought him into direct contact with his readers. His fellow writers also admired the Notes: Turgenev likened the book to Dante’s Inferno, and Tolstoy thought it not only Dostoevsky’s finest work, but one of the best books in all of Russian literature.

  Notes from a Dead House was the first published account of life in the Siberian hard-labor camps. It initiated the genre of the prison memoir, which unfortunately went on to acquire major importance in Russian literature. But the book was innovative not only in its subject matter, but in its composition. Dostoevsky left the prison in Omsk with a collection of notes he had managed to take during those four years. In them he had recorded the unusual words and expressions of the peasant convicts, their arguments, their play-acting, their songs and stories, entrusting the pages to one of the medical assistants in the prison hospital, who duly returned them to him when he was released. These notes supplied the unique voicing of the book. While still in Tver, in the summer of 1858, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother that he now had “a complete and definite plan” in mind. “My personality will disappear from view. These are the notes of an unknown man; but I vouch for their interest … Here there will be the serious, the gloomy, and the humorous, and folk conversation with its particular hard-labor colorings.”*7

  In the semi-fictional form he chose to give his narrative, Dostoevsky places himself at a third remove. The fictional author-narrator of the Notes, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, is a former nobleman serving a ten-year sentence for murdering his wife in a fit of jealousy. His Notes are presented to us, in the introduction and in one brief intrusion in part two, chapter VII, by another first-person narrator, the “editor” of Goryanchikov’s manuscript. He tells us, with a mixture of heavy irony and underlying sympathy, about Goryanchikov’s reclusive life in Siberia after prison and his sudden death—a closure that is in sharp contrast to the ending of the book itself. This fictionalizing was in part a mask for the censors: the notes of a man serving a sentence for a common-law crime were more likely to be passed for publication than the notes of a political criminal. But the mask is dropped rather quickly. By the second chapter, we hear a fellow nobleman say, in response to the narrator’s first impressions of the peasant prisoners: “Yes, sir, they don’t like noblemen … especially political criminals.” Though he keeps the persona of Alexander Petrovich throughout, the narrator’s thoughts, his preoccupations, and his conscience are not at all those of a man who has murdered his wife. Dostoevsky’s personality does not disappear from view; he is present as the observer of the life around him, but also as the protagonist of the inner transformation that the experience of prison brings about in him
. It is Dostoevsky, not Goryanchikov, who says towards the end: “I outlined a program for the whole of my future and resolved to follow it firmly. A blind faith arose in me that I would and could fulfill it all … I waited, I called for freedom to come quickly; I wanted to test myself anew, in a new struggle.”

  The fictional editor of Goryanchikov’s notes ends his introduction by describing his own fascination with them, but then says rather casually: “Of course, I may be mistaken. I will begin by selecting two or three chapters; let the public judge …” There is nothing loose or casual about the structure of the book itself, however. It is divided into two parts. Part One, as we can see from the chapter titles, is made up of first impressions. It is filled with vivid details that both repulse and intrigue the narrator as he tries to settle into his new circumstances. He moves about freely in time, but keeps coming back to his initial experiences. By the end of Part One we are still in his first month of captivity, rounded off with Christmas and the brief respite of the theater performance. Part Two is constructed differently. Here the narrator speaks more generally of prison life—the hospital, various kinds and degrees of corporal punishment, the officers, certain of his prison “comrades,” the prison animals—and even includes an inset story told by another prisoner. But again there is an underlying unity to this seemingly random sampling, an inner unity, in the author’s deepening perception of the people he has been thrown together with. He begins to fathom their difference not only from himself but from his former assumptions about the “Russian peasant”—an abstract figure idealized by the radical intelligentsia. As a result of this synchronic structure, there is no sense in the book of time passing. “The prison is immobile,” as Mochulsky observes, “it is a ‘dead house’ frozen in perpetuity, but the author moves.”*8 It is the movement of his own increasing penetration and comprehension, which passes through his first Easter, through the release of the hurt eagle at the end of the chapter on prison animals, through the drama of the escape, to culminate on his last day of captivity in a sudden assertion: “I must say it all: these people are extraordinary people. They are perhaps the most gifted, the strongest of all our people. But their mighty strength perished for nothing, perished abnormally, unlawfully, irretrievably. And who is to blame?”