Dostoevsky (79 page)

The suppression of
Time
dealt a severe blow to Dostoevsky’s personal fortunes and deprived him of his sole regular source of income. Luckily, he was not left completely without resources for the future, because the various major works published in its pages had managed to reestablish his literary reputation. The
Insulted and Injured
had brought him back to public attention, and his
Notes from the House of the Dead
had raised him to a fame far surpassing the transient glory he had achieved with
Poor Folk
in 1845. We examined
House of the Dead
earlier for its documentary value; let us now take up the text as a work of art.

Prison memoirs have become so familiar to us (and Russian literature is now, alas, so rich in examples of them) that one tends to forget it was Dostoevsky who gave his country the first masterpiece of this kind. But so it was: his
House of the Dead
created the genre in Russia, thus responding to an immense curiosity concerning the conditions of life of those “unfortunates” who ran afoul of the state, especially those convicted of political crimes. The politicals usually came from the ranks of the educated, and any public allusion to
their
fate was certain to excite the liveliest interest. “My figure will disappear,” Dostoevsky had written to Mikhail in October 1859. “These are the notes of an unknown, but I guarantee their interest. There will be . . . the depiction of characters
unheard
of previously in literature, and . . . finally, the most important, my name. . . . I am convinced that the public will read this with avidity.”
⁶
Dostoevsky counted on his readers
to accept the work as an accurate report of his prison years, and so they did.
⁷
But his presence as a political convict would pervade the book as a whole rather than being placed in the foreground. This double perspective is carefully maintained, and must be kept in mind if we are to avoid the error of taking the work as either an unadorned memoir or a purely fictional construct; in fact, it is a unique combination of both.

House of the Dead
obviously owes its origins to the accidents of Dostoevsky’s existence, but it also fits quite neatly into a genre much cultivated in Russian literature at that moment. Many accounts of personal experience written in a loose, sketchlike form and tied together in a seemingly haphazard fashion were then being produced; and Dostoevsky was familiar with them all. On leaving prison camp, he had read Turgenev’s
A Sportsman’s Sketches
and the popular vignettes by S. T. Aksakov about hunting and fishing. Tolstoy’s
Sevastopol Stories
were also published shortly after Dostoevsky’s release, and he hastened to read these too, as well as everything else that came from Tolstoy’s pen. Herzen’s masterly memoirs,
My Past and Thoughts
, had begun to appear during the mid-1850s in
The Bell
, and new installments were published throughout the remainder of the decade.

The sudden emergence of this semi-journalistic literary mode may be attributed partly to a temporary relaxation of the censorship, which encouraged writers to speak more freely than they had done in the past without the protective disguise of “fiction” (Herzen, living in exile, did not have to worry about the censorship at all). Writers thus instinctively turned back to the form of the physiological sketch, much favored during the 1840s—another period of relative literary freedom—which had emphasized the accurate observation of social types embedded in their environment, and aimed at depicting people in the routine of their everyday existence. Most early sketches of this type had focused on urban characters and city life, but the renaissance of the form in the 1850s extended its thematic range to take in the life of the peasantry.

Since the aim of such sketches was to convey an impression of truthfulness, they were not linked together by any sort of novelistic intrigue that might arouse suspicion concerning the verisimilitude of the life being portrayed. Such relative plotlessness then became a distinctive feature of the Russian novel when writers like Turgenev and Tolstoy went on to more complex genres than the sketch and
the short story. Dostoevsky stands out as the great exception to this tendency of Russian nineteenth-century prose and had already begun to experiment with the elaborately plotted roman-feuilleton technique, which he would soon raise to new heights. But
House of the Dead
, among many other things, is also a tribute to his literary versatility and proves that he could adapt his technique to his material and to whatever artistic purpose he chose. It was important, above all, that the reader have no doubts about the veracity of his account, and so Dostoevsky, eschewing all “novelistic” effects, developed his own original variation of the larger sketch forms used by the Russian writers he admired.

Unlike those of either Turgenev or Tolstoy, Dostoevsky’s sketches reach the reader through the interposition of two frame narrators. The first is the presumed editor of the book, who appears in the introduction and gives the impression of being a well-educated, curious, and observant person; not a native of Siberia, he has spent a considerable time there—probably in some administrative capacity, like Dostoevsky’s friend Baron Wrangel. This first narrator supplies a tongue-in-cheek picture of life in that remote region (“the inhabitants are simple folk and not of liberal views; everything goes on according to the old-fashioned, solid, time-honored traditions”) that drips with polite sarcasm and indicates to the Russian reader that the region was really a sink of iniquity (4: 5). His words are also an invitation to look carefully beneath the surface of the prose for hidden meanings, and this signal was surely meant to alert the reader not to take completely at face value the information provided by the first narrator about the second. The nominal author of the sketches is a former landowner, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov (the name suggests someone who has suffered greatly:
gore
in Russian means “grief” or “misfortune”), who has served a ten-year sentence for murdering his wife in a fit of jealous rage during their first year of marriage. Goryanchikov lives in complete seclusion, earns his scant living by giving lessons to local children, and shuns all contact with the world, presumably unable to adjust to normal life after his years in penal servitude.

When Goryanchikov dies suddenly, the first narrator manages to rescue some of the dead man’s papers from being thrown away. One bundle contains a “disconnected description of the ten years spent by Alexander Petrovich in the prison camp.” These pages break off occasionally and are interspersed with passages from another story, “some strange and terrible reminiscences”—a probable reference to the murder, which haunts Goryanchikov. Hence this portion of the posthumous text is not reproduced, and the editor decides that only Goryanchikov’s account of his prison years is “not devoid of interest.” For since Goryanchikov reveals “an absolutely new, till then unknown world,” the editor decides to offer his sketches for public scrutiny (4: 8).

Just how seriously this second narrator should be taken has been a continual matter of dispute. Some critics are disposed to take him very seriously indeed,
and the ever-iconoclastic Victor Shklovsky has tried to make out a case for giving the fate of Goryanchikov a central place in the interpretation of the book.
⁸
But if we regard him as the genuine narrator of
House of the Dead
, rather than Dostoevsky himself, then it is impossible not to charge the author with unforgivable carelessness. In
Chapter 2
, for example, when Akim Akimich tells the convict narrator that the peasant inmates “are not fond of gentlemen . . . especially politicals,” he is clearly addressing someone included in this latter category; and there are other allusions to the same status of the narrator scattered throughout the book (4: 28). Moreover, if we are to accept Goryanchikov as more than a convention, then Dostoevsky can be accused of allowing a disturbing clash to occur between his theme as a whole and the frame narration in which it is contained. For none of the consoling truths that the narrator has learned in the house of the dead, none of the exuberance, the sense of hope, the possibility of beginning a new life that he felt on his release—none of these events are in accord with the character and fate of the Goryanchikov who is presumed to have written the manuscript we read.
⁹

The more convincing accepted view is that Dostoevsky introduced Goryanchikov primarily as a means of avoiding trouble with the censorship, and that he did not expect his readers to take him as more than a convenient device. Nor, in fact, did they do so: the book was universally accepted as a more or less faithful account of Dostoevsky’s own past as a political prisoner, even though, as he remarked much later with a touch of humor, he still came across people who believed he had been sent to
katorga
for having murdered his wife (22: 47). Such a device was practically obligatory for a book of this kind under Russian conditions, and was also employed by another survivor of the Petrashevsky Circle, F. N. Lvov, who published his souvenirs of Siberia almost simultaneously. A later exile, P. F. Yakubovich—whose memoirs, published at the end of the century, betray Dostoevsky’s influence—explained in a letter how important it still was to adopt a “disguise” while making it as transparent as possible (“the author does not try to make his disguise more successful: on the contrary, he wishes to use an obvious and well-worn stereotype”).
¹⁰
It is thus preferable to allow for the pressure of external circumstances, and not to impose more of an “artistic” pattern on the narrative structure of
House of the Dead
than the evidence supports; there is artistry enough, but of a different kind.

Even if we agree, however, that Goryanchikov is more of a device than a
narrator, and that it is Dostoevsky himself who unmistakably speaks in the body of the book, R. L. Jackson has perceptively suggested that the invention of this figure may have had a deeper significance all the same. The image we receive of Goryanchikov, who shuns almost all human contact and seems to be living in a state of shock—as if under the effect of a traumatic experience too severe to be overcome—certainly represents one aspect of Dostoevsky’s own reaction to his prison-camp encounters. Very little reflection of such an attitude can be seen in the book itself—or rather, we detect its gradual transmutation into feelings of comprehension and friendliness, although there is no portrayal of the inner process through which this change occurs. Jackson believes that, by placing the distraught Goryanchikov at the threshold of the work, Dostoevsky was in a sense eliminating him from the remainder, and in so doing “freed
Notes from the House of the Dead
from the tyranny of a deeply personal, misanthropic subjectivity, a tormented ego driven to the limits of malice and despair, to almost complete moral exhaustion by years of forced existence in the ‘human herd.’ ”
¹¹
Such a conjecture seems to me quite plausible, and Goryanchikov could well have served some such cathartic function during the course of creation.

While
House of the Dead
has no plot in the obvious sense, it is, all the same, carefully organized, and its overarching pattern reflects the narrator’s gradual penetration into the strange and disorienting world of the prison camp—his attainment, as he slowly overcomes his prejudices and preconceptions, of a new understanding of the intense humanity and particular moral quality of those he had at first regarded only with loathing and dismay. The plan of the work, shaped by this process of discovery, is thus “dynamic” in character, and reproduces the movement of moral-psychological assimilation and reevaluation that Dostoevsky himself underwent.

The first six chapters depict his first disorienting impressions of this strange new world to which he had been exposed. Only after this initiation, when he has overcome his bewilderment at the appalling spectacle he sees before him, do individuals begin to stand out with any clarity, and it is then that the names of persons appear in the chapter titles. This aspect of the form has been well defined by K. Mochulsky, who remarks that, in the beginning, Dostoevsky “is an external observer, grasping only the most glaring and striking features”; it is only later that “he penetrates into the mysterious depths of this world” and “perceives anew that which had been seen, re-evaluates his first impressions, deepens his
conclusions.”
¹²
Jacques Catteau has also sensitively remarked on the significant shift in the principles of the organization of chapters between Parts One and Two. At first, what is accentuated is the shock of initial contact (“First Impressions”), or the sudden perception of individual character (“Petrov”), while the second part spreads out into chapters held together by spatial contiguity (“The Hospital”) or by loose subject groupings (“Prison Animals,” “Comrades”).
¹³
In other words, the personality of the narrator, quite prominent in the earlier chapters, fades into the background as he merges into the everyday life of the community.