House of the Dead , livre ebook

The House of the Dead
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Roger Cockrell


ALMA CLASSICS


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The House of the Dead first published in Russian in 1860–62 This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2018
Translation, Translator’s Introduction and Notes © Roger Cockrell, 2018
Cover design: Will Dady
Extra Material © Alma Books Ltd
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR 0 4 YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-666-9
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Contents
Foreword
The House of the Dead
Part I
Part II
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material
Fyodor Dostoevsky ’ s Life
Fyodor Dost oevsky ’ s Works
Sel ect Bibliography


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 des