Notes from a Dead House

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “There was a shout … Somebody just shouted: ‘A wolf’s coming!…,’ ” I babbled.

  “Now, now, what wolf? You imagined it. See? There can’t be any wolf!” he murmured, encouraging me. But I clutched his coat still more tightly, trembling all over, and was probably very pale. He looked at me with an uneasy smile, obviously worried and anxious about me.

  “You’re really frightened—ay, ay!” He shook his head. “Enough now, my dear. There’s a good lad!”

  He reached out and suddenly stroked my cheek.

  “Well, enough now, Christ be with you, cross yourself.” But I wouldn’t cross myself; the corners of my lips twitched, and I think he was especially struck by that. He gently reached out his thick, dirt-covered finger with its black nail and gently touched my quivering lips.

  “Really now,” he smiled at me with a long and somehow motherly smile. “Lord, what’s all this, really now, ay, ay!”

  I finally understood that there was no wolf and that I had imagined the cry “A wolf’s coming!” The cry had been very clear and distinct, but I had imagined such cries once or twice before (not only about wolves), and I was aware of it. (Later, along with my childhood, these hallucinations went away.)

  “Well, I’ll go now,” I said, looking at him questioningly and timidly.

  “Well, off with you, then, and I’ll keep an eye on you. I won’t let the wolf get you!” he added with the same motherly smile. “Well, off you go, and Christ be with you”—and he made the sign of the cross over me and over himself. I went, turning to look back almost every ten steps. While I went, Marey stood by his little mare watching me and nodding to me each time I looked back. I must confess I was a little ashamed before him for being so afraid, but I kept going, still very frightened of the wolf, until I reached the top of the other slope of the ravine and the first barn; there my fear fell away completely, and suddenly, out of nowhere, our yard dog Volchok came rushing to me. With Volchok there, I felt totally reassured and turned to Marey for the last time. Though I couldn’t see his face clearly, I felt that he was still smiling tenderly at me and nodding his head. I waved to him, he waved back to me and touched up his little mare.

  “Hup, hup!” his distant cry came again, and again the little mare pulled her plow.

  I recalled all this at once, I don’t know why, but with an astonishing precision of detail. I suddenly came to and sat up on the bunk, and, I remember, I still had the quiet smile of remembrance on my face. For another minute I went on remembering.

  On coming home from Marey then, I didn’t tell anyone about my “adventure.” And what sort of adventure was it? And about Marey I also very soon forgot. Meeting him occasionally afterwards, I never even spoke to him, not only about the wolf, but about anything at all, and now suddenly, twenty years later, in Siberia, I remembered this whole encounter with such clarity, to the very last detail. Which means that it had embedded itself in my soul imperceptibly, on its own and without my will, and I suddenly remembered it when it was needed; I remembered that tender, motherly smile of the poor serf, his signs of the cross, the way he shook his head: “You’re really frightened, lad!” And especially that thick, dirt-covered finger of his, with which he had touched my quivering lips gently and with timid tenderness. Of course, anyone would reassure a child, but here, in this solitary encounter, something quite different happened, as it were, and if I had been his own son, he could not have given me a look shining with more radiant love—and who made him do it? He was our own serf, and I was his little master; no one would learn how tender he had been with me and reward him for it. Was it that he loved little children so much? There are such people. This had been a solitary encounter, in an empty field, and maybe only God above had seen what deep and enlightened human feeling, what refined, almost feminine tenderness could fill the heart of a coarse, brutishly ignorant Russian serf, who back then was not yet expecting or even dreaming of his freedom. Tell me, is that not what Konstantin Aksakov meant when he spoke of the lofty education of our people?2

  And so, when I got off my bunk and glanced about, I remember suddenly feeling that I could look at these unfortunate men with totally different eyes, and that suddenly, by some miracle, all the hatred and anger in my heart had vanished completely. I went about peering into the faces I met. This shaved and disgraced muzhik, drunk and with a branded face, bellowing out his hoarse, drunken song, why, he also could be that same Marey: I could not look into his heart. That same evening I met M—cki again. Poor man! He certainly could not have had memories of any Mareys or any other view of these people than “Je haïs ces brigands!” No, those Poles endured more than we did then!

  Notes

  PART ONE

  INTRODUCTION

  1. the capitals: It was customary to refer to two capitals of Russia—the old capital, Moscow, and the newer capital, St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703.

  2. a settler in the town of K.: On finishing their term at hard labor, prisoners were required to settle in Siberia rather than return to European Russia, and were thus known as “settlers.” The town of K. is the Siberian town of Kuznetsk (later Novokuznetsk), over six hundred miles east of Omsk, where the prison was located. Dostoevsky married his first wife there in 1857, three years after his release.

  I. THE DEAD HOUSE

  1. not to remember evil against him: It was a Russian custom on bidding farewell to bow in four directions and ask forgiveness of all those present by repeating the formula “Do not remember evil against me.”

  2. “stroll down the green street”: Prison jargon for running the gauntlet.

  3. kalachi: A kalach (pl. kalachi) is a purse-shaped loaf of fine white bread.

  II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  1. the Irtysh: A major river in western Siberia, which rises in the Altai Mountains and flows through Omsk on its way to join the Ob.

  2. shchi: Cabbage soup prepared with or without meat and other ingredients; one of the staples of the Russian diet.

  3. the bird Kagan: A legendary bird of Russian folklore, said to bring happiness.

  4. “a pantry whore”: Dostoevsky recorded these phrases in notes taken while he was in prison; they mean “a petty thief, who tried to escape and was caught.”

  5. kvass: A slightly fermented, mildly alcoholic drink popular in Russia and other Slavic countries, made from rye bread.

  6. in the Caucasus: The Russian conquest of the Caucasus took place between 1817 and 1864. In the Russian army, junker (borrowed from the German) was a low rank of noncommissioned officer.

  7. “One’s a cantonist”: Cantonists were sons of Russian conscripts and other military personnel, who were trained for military service in special schools known as “cantonist schools” and were obliged to serve afterwards. The Circassians are a Caucasian ethnic group; they strongly opposed the Russian conquest and were the last to sign a treaty with the imperial forces in 1864. The schismatics (raskolniki in Russian) were and are members of the religious group known as the Old Believers, who broke with the Russian Orthodox Church in protest against reforms carried out by the patriarch Nikon between 1652 and 1666.

  8. a holy fool: A “holy fool” (“fool in God” or “fool for Christ”) could be a harmless village idiot, but there are also saintly persons or ascetics whose saintliness is expressed as “folly.”

  9. the stove: Russian wood-burning stoves were large and rather elaborate structures, which included special shelves designed for sleeping or reclining.

  III. FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  1. M—cki: Alexander Mirecki (b. 1820) was a Polish revolutionary, who was sentenced to ten years at hard labor for participating in the “Greater Poland Uprising” of 1846, one of the many uprisings that took place following the partition of Poland among Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1772.

  2. Starodubsky settlements: During the eighteenth century, a large number of Old Believers moved from Vietka on the river Sozh in Belarus to Starodub, in the Ukrainian district of Chernigov.

&nb
sp; 3. taverners: The Russian word here is tselovalnik (“kisser”), from tselovat’, “to kiss.” Permission to sell vodka involved the ritual of kissing the cross and vowing not to dilute the drink.

  4. from sirota, “orphan.”: After the conquest of the Tatar capital Kazan by Ivan the Terrible in 1552, many Tatar princes embraced Christianity and were received at court in Moscow. Seeking favors and rewards, they pretended to be poor, and thus earned the nickname “orphans from Kazan.”

  5. “four thousand”: According to the regulations of 1839 and 1855, the maximum number of strokes a man could be sentenced to was six thousand, but in practice it was unofficially lowered to three thousand, and in 1856 it was reduced to one thousand.

  6. Nerchinsk: The town of Nerchinsk is in Eastern Siberia, about 140 miles from the Chinese border. The Russians built a fortress there in 1654, and by the late eighteenth century it was receiving large numbers of convicts sentenced to hard labor.

  IV. FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  1. maidan: “Maidan,” in many eastern languages, means an open space, a market or meeting place; it also came to mean a gambling house and, in prison jargon, simply a game of cards. The word derives ultimately from Arabic.

  2. two Lezgins, one Chechen, and three Daghestan Tatars: The Lezgins and Chechens are peoples that have been living since the Bronze Age in the area of the Caucasus—the Lezgins on what is now the border between southern Daghestan and northeastern Azerbaijan, and the Chechens in the northern Caucasus. The Tatars were originally a nomadic Turkic people from the area between China and Mongolia; they joined with the forces of Genghis Khan and in 1239 invaded Daghestan, where they settled.

  3. “how well he speaks”: “Isa” is how Jesus is known in Islam; the words Alei repeats are from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), the longest single discourse in the Gospels, containing the essentials of Christ’s teaching.

  4. Gogol’s little Jew Yankel: Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) published his novella about Ukrainian Cossack life, Taras Bulba, in 1835. Yankel the Jew is a character in the novella, who is saved by Taras Bulba and later helps him against the Poles. Gogol describes him as looking like a plucked chicken.

  V. THE FIRST MONTH

  1. a moral Quasimodo: Quasimodo, the hero of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, was only physically deformed. A—v’s full name, as we know from Dostoevsky’s notes, was Pavel Aristov.

  2. Briullov: Karl Briullov (1799–1852) was a major Russian portraitist and historical painter. His masterpiece, The Last Day of Pompeii (1830–33), brought him great fame in Russia and Europe.

  VI. THE FIRST MONTH

  1. those who also suffered in exile: When Dostoevsky’s party stopped in Tobolsk on the way to Omsk, it was met by the wives of some of the Decembrists, who had been exiled twenty-five years earlier. One of them, Natalya Dmitrievna Fonvizina (1805–69), gave Dostoevsky a Gospel, the only book allowed in prison, which he kept for the rest of his life. The Decembrists were members of a group of reformist aristocrats in Petersburg who staged an uprising on December 14, 1825, after the sudden death of the emperor Alexander I, demanding that Russia become a constitutional monarchy. The revolt was brutally suppressed, five leaders were executed, and more than a hundred others were exiled to Siberia. Their wives chose to accompany them. Dostoevsky wrote some important letters to Natalya Dmitrievna after his release.

  2. Nastasya Ivanovna: The woman’s real name was Natalya Stepanovna Kryzhanovskaya, as Dostoevsky records in his notes; she lived in Omsk and exchanged letters with him.

  3. the greatest egoism: This notion, known as “rational egoism,” was propounded by the materialist philosopher and utopian socialist Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89) in The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (1855) and particularly in The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy, published in 1860, just as Dostoevsky was working on his Notes from a Dead House.

  4. the pioneers: Soldiers who went ahead of an advancing army, preparing roads, bridges, and so on; also known as sappers.

  VII. NEW ACQUAINTANCES. PETROV

  1. a president: Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1808–73), the nephew of Napoléon I, was elected president of the Second Republic in 1848; in 1851 he staged a coup d’état and in 1852 took the throne as Napoléon III, establishing the Second Empire.

  2. the countess La Vallière: Louise de la Baume le Blanc (1644–1710) became one of the mistresses of Louis XIV, who made her Duchess of La Vallière. She gives her name to the middle volume of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847–50), the last of the three d’Artagnan novels by Alexandre Dumas (1802–70).

  VIII. RESOLUTE MEN. LUCHKA

  1. “to Ch—ov”: That is, the city of Chernigov, capital of Chernigov province in the northern Ukraine. K—v, mentioned a moment later, is Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.

  2. the image of God: See Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” This is the most fundamental notion of Judeo-Christian anthropology.

  IX. ISAI FOMICH. THE BATHHOUSE. BAKLUSHIN’S STORY

  1. as they crossed the Red Sea: See Exodus 12–14, the story of the flight of the Jews from Egypt.

  2. a garrison battalion in R.: That is, in Riga, now the capital of Latvia, but annexed to the Russian Empire by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century.

  3. the zertsalo: A three-sided pyramid of mirrored glass topped by a two-headed eagle, which stood on the desk of every Russian official. It was introduced by Peter the Great as a symbol of law and order, each face of the zertsalo being engraved with words from one of his decrees.

  X. CHRISTMAS

  1. the breaking of the fast: In the Orthodox Church, Christmas (the Feast of the Nativity) is preceded by the forty-day Advent fast.

  2. they always spread hay: There was a custom of spreading hay on the floor for Christmas, to suggest the manger in which Christ was born (see Luke 2:11–16).

  XI: THE PERFORMANCE

  1. the first performance: In his memoirs, At Hard Labor 1846–57, Szymon Tokarzewski, one of the Poles imprisoned at Omsk, mentions that “the improvised actors asked the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky to give directions when necessary on how to speak theatrically.”

  2. Filatka and Miroshka, or The Rivals: A popular vaudeville by P. G. Grigoryev (1807–54), first produced in Petersburg in 1831.

  3. Leporello: Don Giovanni’s manservant in Mozart’s opera.

  4. the Kamarinskaya: The Kamarinskaya is a fast Russian folk dance. The composer Mikhail Glinka (1804–57) wrote a famous Kamarinskaya for orchestra, first performed in 1848.

  PART TWO

  II. CONTINUATION

  1. the German rules: For the simple Russian folk, “German” meant anything foreign or simply unfamiliar.

  2. a baptized Kalmyk: The Kalmyks are a western Mongol people who settled north of the Caucasus on the west coast of the Caspian Sea. Their national religion is Buddhism.

  3. Nozdryovian laugh: Nozdryov is a loud, boastful character from Gogol’s Dead Souls.

  4. “the memory is fresh”: A quotation from the play Woe from Wit, by the poet and diplomat Alexander Griboedov (1795–1829). Many lines from the play became proverbial.

  5. Manilovism: Manilov is a softhearted, sentimental, and futile landowner in Gogol’s Dead Souls.

  III. CONTINUATION

  1. the Marquis de Sade and Brinvilliers: Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), is most famous as a writer of novels combining philosophy, eroticism, and violence—hence the word sadism. Marie Madeleine Dreux d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers (1630–76), was a notorious poisoner: having tested her potions first on poor hospital patients and her own chambermaid, she proceeded to poison her father, two brothers, and sister. She was arrested, tried, and beheaded.

  2. the onetime army of 1830: That is, the army of the Polish uprising of 1830, known as the November Uprising, and of the resulting Polish-Russian war of 1830–31.

  IV. AKULKA’S HUSBAND

  1. torban: A Ukrainian musical instrumen
t, a combination of the European bass lute (theorbo) and the zither.

  2. smear tar on Akulka’s gate: A traditional way of publicly shaming a girl who has “lost her virtue.”

  V. SUMMERTIME

  1. Holy Week: The week from Palm Sunday to Easter, following the Great Lent.

  2. prepare for communion: A time of fasting, prayer, and confession before taking the sacrament of the Eucharist.

  3. “but like the thief accept me”: A fused quotation of two phrases from the prayer before communion: “accept me today as a communicant” and “like the thief will I confess Thee.”

  4. “the Dormition fast”: The two-week fast preceding the feast of the Dormition (Assumption) of the Mother of God, celebrated on August 15.

  VI. PRISON ANIMALS

  1. St. Peter’s Day: That is, June 29, the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul.

  2. a goat in the prison stables: Goats have traditionally been kept in stables because of their calming influence on skittish horses.

  VII. THE GRIEVANCE

  1. T—ski: That is, Szymon Tokarzewski (1821–1900), whose memoirs of his years in the Omsk prison and his relations with Dostoevsky were written in 1857.

  VIII. COMRADES

  1. Saint Anne on the sword: The Order of St. Anne was founded in 1735 by Karl Friedrich, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, in honor of his wife, Anna Petrovna, daughter of the Russian emperor Peter the Great. The fourth (lowest) class of the order was a medal attached to the hilt of the sword.

  2. B—ski: B—ski, elsewhere referred to as B., is the Polish revolutionary Joszef Boguslawski.

  3. Zh—ski: Zh—ski is Joszef Zhochowski (1800–51), also a revolutionary, whose death sentence had been commuted to ten years at hard labor in Omsk.

  4. U—gorsk: That is, Ust-Kamenogorsk, a fortress and trading post established by Peter the Great in what is now eastern Kazakhstan.

  5. a nobleman was being punished: One of the privileges of the Russian nobility was freedom from corporal punishment, but there could be exceptions, as in this case. Hence the convicts’ interest.