Feodor Dostoevsky. The House of the Dead. 1862; 1911. Edited by Ernest Rhys et al., translated by H. S. Edwards, Project Gutenberg, 25 Sept. 2011.

The House of the Dead, subtitled Prison Life in Siberia, is an earlier work of Dostoevsky. It is a fictionalized account of a noble who is sentenced to ten years of hard labor in Siberia for murdering his unfaithful wife. While it is at most semi-autobiographical, it is no doubt based on Dostoevsky’s own observations and experiences in such a prison camp.

We should note that crimes of passion such as his “are always looked upon as misfortunes, which must be treated with pity.” Later he notes that “the common people throughout Russia call crime “a misfortune” and the criminal “an unfortunate.”

In this case our author or editor has discovered the posthumous papers of one Alexander Petrovitch Goriantchikoff, “formerly a landed proprietor.” The vast bulk of the novel, then, is Alexander Petrovitch’s memoirs of his ten years in the prison camp.

While The House of the Dead does not have the same piercing insights into human nature and aspirations that Dostoevsky’s later work has, it is nevertheless pointed and fascinating to read. For obvious reasons, this reader could not help thinking of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Of course, The Gulag Archipelago was nonfiction, but it was also a collection of stories about prisoners and prison camps in Russia.

Similarly, The House of the Dead tells stories of a variety of prisoners whom Alexander Petrovitch encounters. Some things are especially striking. For example, there was no forty-lash limit for corporal punishment such as we read about in the Bible and in other places. Punishment was generally with rods and most beatings were in increments of five hundred blows up to two thousand.

The authorities showed some mercy in that if the convict were beaten with more than five hundred blows, he could take five hundred at a time, spend some time in the infirmary to recover, and then continue with the punishment. Even before the first round of blows, prisoners would be examined by a doctor to insure that they could endure the punishment.

The novel suggests that, among Russians of all classes in the nineteenth century, it was considered acceptable and even normal to beat one’s wife. Animals that ended up in prison precincts were eventually used for food or leather even if some men treated them as pets. Although there were seldom physical altercations among the prisoners, there is a violent undercurrent throughout The House of the Dead.

Early in the story, we are told that even former prisoners were “recognized at a glance.” Solzhenitsyn would write the same thing about former zeks, prisoners under Communism. Alexander Petrovitch also notes that “there was not one man among them who admitted his iniquity.” That is often the case in prisons today.

One curious detail reminded this reader of a famous American film about prison labor. The Major, the officer in charge of the day to day operations and discipline in the prison camp, was called the man with eight eyes. This would be echoed in Cool Hand Luke‘s man with no eyes. Both epithets suggest an unnatural hardness.

The Russian Empire was larger than the Russia of today, even larger than the Soviet Union. Besides Russians and Ukrainians, there were Poles, Kirghiz, Circassians, Cossacks, Gypsies, and a variety of other nationalities and languages in the prison. In that sense there is a kind of “everyman” quality to the story. A majority of the prisoners identify with Orthodoxy, but the Poles are Catholic, and many from the Caucasus and Central Asia are Muslim.

While there may be nothing like the dreams of Crime and Punishment or The Possessed, there are still some pointed observations about humanity.

It is acknowledged that neither convict prisons, nor the hulks, nor any system of hard labor ever cured a criminal. These forms of chastisement only punish him and reassure society against the offenses he might commit. Confinement, regulation, and excessive work have no effect but to develop with these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitrations

Again:

Man cannot exist without work, without legal, natural property. Depart from these conditions, and he becomes perverted and changed into a wild beast.

At one point fairly early in his story, Alexander Petrovitch tells of a man who was convicted of murdering his father in a cruel manner. Towards the end of the story, we are reminded of the crime and discover that many years later, after a decade in prison, he was exonerated. By that time, though, he was no different from many of the other prisoners:

The prisoner who has revolted against society, hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes.

These camps depend on a kind of slave labor. The novel relates how the convicts looked forward to the Christmas holiday where they did not have to work for a few days and when many of them would have saved up enough money to get drunk. I could not help thinking of how Frederick Douglass wrote that slave owners were often able to keep slaves subservient by promoting a drunken celebration each year at New Year’s.

The more pious prisoners saw this time as a serious religious celebration. All prisoners took Christmas and Easter celebrations seriously, even if they got drunk, because “they are in communion with the rest of the world; that they are not altogether reprobates lost and cast off by society.”

A family gang of Circassians were found guilty of robbing the caravan of a rich Armenian merchant. It seems that throughout the region, the Armenians were seen as being rich merchants. This was apparently just as true in the Byzantine era of Digenes Akrites and in the Communist Soviet Union. It had become, and perhaps still is, a Russian stereotype.

We learn that rascal is prison slang for knife. This connects with the Raskolniki, schismatics or splitters, and the source of the name for Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment.

A Jewish prisoner explains that at certain times he is supposed to mourn and weep for the loss of Jerusalem and then rejoice.

He explained to me directly that the sobs and tears were provoked by the loss of Jerusalem, and that the law ordered pious Jew to groan and strike his breast; but at the moment of his most acute grief he was suddenly to remember that a prophecy had foretold the return of the Jews to Jerusalem, and he was then to manifest overflowing joy, to sing, to laugh, and to recite his prayers with an expression of happiness in his voice and in his countenance.

If Dostoevsky were alive since 1967!

Alexander Petrovitch later reflects on the beatings that beyond five hundred blows “death is almost certain” and that such tortures are like “the Marquis de Sade and the Marchioness Brinvilliers.” As a result, “Tyranny is a habit capable of being developed, and at last become a disease.” Political science, perhaps, but it tells us something of human nature.

Here Dostoevsky echoes Astolphe de Custine’s observations on Russia. Just as Dickens saw the abuses of the French aristocracy leading to the excesses of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities, so The House of the Dead may suggest how even idealists in Russia from the nineteenth century to the present become tyrants. Perhaps this is the norm for Communism wherever it appears.

Alexander Petrovitch notes that there is an insuperable gap between landowners and peasants even in prison. The educated and upper classes who claim to understand the working classes and farm workers are only deceiving themselves. He wanted to join a prison protest but was told in no uncertain terms that he was not one of them.

You may be your whole life in daily relations with the peasant, forty years you may do business with him regularly as the day comes…you may be his benefactor, all but a father to him—well, you’ll never know what is at the bottom of this man’s mind or heart. You may think you know something about him, but it is all optical illusion, nothing more.

I cannot help thinking of the student radicals in the sixties or their heirs today. They might speak of a “worker-student alliance,” but the only men who really know the workers are other workers, not the elite who think they can manipulate the masses, and are shocked when the “basket of deplorables” do not respect them.

Alexander Petrovitch goes on:

My readers may charge me with exaggeration, but I am convinced I am quite right. I don’t go on theory or book reading in this…Perhaps everybody will some day learn how well-founded I am in what I say about this.

Similarly, he writes, political prison camps do not work. Even if people subscribe to ideas that make no sense,

…when they have undergone great and constant suffering for their ideas and made great sacrifices for them, you can’t drive their notions out of their heads, and it is cruel to try it.

Alas, in so many places cruelty reigns. May such intolerance never come to my country.

I am left with one last thought. Many year ago I lived in the Detroit ghetto for a while. I recall having a conversation with an ex-convict. Like so many people, he said he would some day write his memoirs. He had seen things no one else had seen, and people needed to know about them. I doubt if he ever did write them—others have noted that everyone thinks they can write, but few are good at it. Well, Dostoevsky has seen things and written about them. Maybe for us that is enough.

N.B. Just as there are different ways to spell Dostoevsky’s name in our alphabet, so this book has gone by different titles in various translations including Buried Alive, Notes from a Dead House, and Ten Years in Siberian Prison Camp.