Dostoevsky (80 page)

The repetitions of the book, the continual returns of character and motif, form part of the structure by which the negative first impressions are deepened and transformed. Such repetitions also act on the reader to reinforce the sense of living in an enclosed world of immutable routine, a world in which people, and time itself, constantly revolve in an endless cycle allowing for no real change. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s handling of time is particularly subtle and unobtrusive, and works to shape the perceptions of the reader underneath the seeming artlessness of the sketch form; he thus anticipates many of the experiments of our own day in correlating the shape of narrative time to accord with subjective experience. Time literally comes to a stop in the early chapters as the narrator concentrates gropingly on the unfamiliar perceptions that he is forced to cope with; but it speeds up gradually until, at the end, we find it hard to believe that ten years have actually elapsed. Much of the book is also structured around the cycle of the seasons (essentially the cycle of the first year of imprisonment, although Dostoevsky plays fast and loose with the literal sequence of events.)

It is probably this greater sense of unity achieved by Dostoevsky that has led to so much speculation regarding the genre to which
House of the Dead
should be assigned. Is it a series of sketches, a personal memoir, or, as Victor Shklovsky has insisted, “a novel of a special type,”
¹⁴
a documentary novel about a collectivity rather than about a single individual or family? The reasonable conclusion is that it is a mixed form combining aspects of all three types, and that it is less important to classify it properly than to understand the unique amalgam that Dostoevsky created. The basis is unquestionably that of the sketch form, as in Turgenev; there is also a strong element of the personal memoir, as in Tolstoy (the history of an encounter with and adaptation to a strange, bewildering, and frightening milieu), but Shklovsky is also right in calling attention to the importance accorded the collectivity. For what distinguishes
House of the Dead
from all
works of a similar kind is this unprecedented effort by an educated Russian to grasp and portray the moral-spiritual essence of a peasant world that he has been forced to
accept
provisionally as his own.

Dostoevsky conveys this apprehension of group life, the sense of living in a contained and unified world, by, among other means, reshaping the Russian sketch form to strengthen the atmosphere of self-enclosure. In his classic study of the young Tolstoy, B. M. Eikhenbaum has pointed out that, in the typical sketch, “a characteristic compositional device” was to use “a lyrical landscape as a frame.” This device, “especially canonized by Turgenev” in
A Sportsman’s Sketches
, is also used by Tolstoy in his
Sevastopol Stories
, and in both writers the lyrical evocation of nature provides a welcome release from the oppressive limits of the central situation.
¹⁵
Nature offers an escape into an innocent world of peace and serenity by contrast with the routine brutality of the treatment of peasant serfs or the unending slaughter at Sevastopol. An occasional poignant release of this kind can also be observed in Dostoevsky’s sketches as he turns his eyes to the sky overhead, feels the quickening effects of spring freshness, or gazes at the steppe fading into the distance through the slats of the prison stockade. But since such instances rarely if ever are used to frame and punctuate a sequence, they never function implicitly to offer some alternative to the world being portrayed.

Much more often the frame in Dostoevsky’s sketches is provided by the constraints of prison life—the life he shares with the collectivity. Time and again in
House of the Dead
, after the description of some holiday or other event (such as the prison theatricals) that has broken the stifling tedium of routine, this enclosing and constricting type of frame terminates the chapter. “But why describe this Bedlam! The oppressive day came to an end at last. The convicts fell asleep on the plank bed. . . . The holiday so long looked forward to was over. Tomorrow the daily round, tomorrow work again” (4: 116). Here we have the “nature” of the prison world, which does not allow man to dissolve his heartache in its limitless and consoling expanse; rather, it only sinks the individual, who may have felt a momentary upsurge of liberation, more despairingly back into the imprisonment of his mass fate.

Still another aspect of
House of the Dead
distinguishes it markedly from the similar works of Turgenev and Tolstoy. All three writers share the same overriding theme—the encounter of a member of the upper, educated class with the Russian people—and each treats it in his own distinctive way. Turgenev stresses the spiritual beauty and richness of Russian peasant life, the poetry of its superstitions and customs, and by doing so makes the serf status of the peasant and the casual cruelty of his treatment all the more unforgivable. Tolstoy discovers the Russian peasantry amid the besieged bastions of Sevastopol and is astonished
at the calm tranquility of its unassuming heroism—so much at variance with the vanity occupying the consciousness of upper-class officers dreaming of decorations and promotions, and this understanding inspires Tolstoy with “a joyous conviction of the strength of the Russian people.”
¹⁶
Such strength, however, is demonstrated exclusively by their imperturbable and almost cheerful acceptance of death out of instinctive loyalty to God, the tsar, and Mother Russia.

Only Dostoevsky depicts the Russian people
in revolt
against their enslaved condition, implacably hating the gentlemen who have oppressed them and ready to use their knives and axes to strike back when mistreatment becomes unbearable. Even more, it is precisely such peasants—whose crimes, for the most part, were a violent protest against the refusal to consider them as fully sentient human beings—whom Dostoevsky singles out as the finest specimens of the Russian people: “After all, one must tell the whole truth; these men were exceptional men. Perhaps they were the most gifted, the strongest of our people. But their mighty energies were vainly wasted, wasted abnormally, unjustly, hopelessly. And who was to blame, whose fault was it?” (4: 231). There can be no doubt of the answer: the abhorrent institution of serfdom, and the whole complex of social customs that had led to the treatment of serfs as members of an inferior species. No wonder that Dostoevsky’s portrait of the Russian peasantry—his image of them as indomitable and unyielding in their ceaseless struggle against the most brutal subjugation—became, above all others, a favorite of the Russian radicals in the midst of the revolutionary aspirations of the early 1860s.

From a purely artistic point of view,
House of the Dead
is probably the most unusual book that Dostoevsky ever produced. One would be hard put to recognize the prison memoirs and his purely creative work as coming from the same pen. The intense dramatism of the fiction is here replaced by a calm objectivity of presentation; there is little close analysis of interior states of mind, and there are marvelous descriptive passages that reveal Dostoevsky’s ability as an observer of the external world. These “non-Dostoevskian” qualities of
House of the Dead
, as it were, are one reason why a number of his great contemporaries preferred his prison memoirs to all those other works to which we now assign a much greater value. In a letter to Fet, Turgenev spoke of the “smelly self-laceration” of
Crime and Punishment
, but he called the bath scene in
House of the Dead
“simply Dantesque.”
¹⁷
Herzen made the same comparison with Dante, and added that Dostoevsky “had created out of the description of the customs of a Siberian prison a fresco in the spirit of Michelangelo.”
¹⁸
Tolstoy considered the book one of the
most original works of Russian prose; in
What Is Art?
he placed it among the few works in world literature that could be taken as models of a “lofty religious art, inspired by love of God and one’s neighbor.”
¹⁹

The bath scene singled out for praise by Turgenev is indeed an impressive example of Dostoevsky’s ability to present a mass tableau with broad strokes:

Even in what seems a purely descriptive passage, Dostoevsky selects the symbolic detail (“all those backs looked now as though freshly wounded”) that reinforces one of his main motifs—the terrible inhumanity of flogging, with its degradation of the human spirit and its devilish temptation to unleash the sadistic instincts. Dostoevsky skillfully weaves together all the seemingly casual events and accidents of prison life through this type of symbolic accentuation, and the book contains a number of such famous episodes greatly admired by his contemporaries.

Since there are several allusions in
House of the Dead
to recent changes for the better in prison-camp conditions, every reader would understand, even though no dates are given, that the work deals with events that took place during the reign of Nicholas I. The first narrator writes as someone who, in the early 1860s, is looking back at a recent but by now almost legendary past, and several passages, such as the dramatic episode involving “the parricide Ilyinsky,” introduce
the point of view of the present. Other indications of the time of writing evidently reflect Dostoevsky’s response to the social-cultural situation of the early 1860s. Indeed, it can be argued that the entire book was written as a response to this situation, and that Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the instinctive Christianity of the peasant convicts, as well as of their hostile alienation from the educated class, was intended to reveal the patent futility of revolutionary hopes inspired by a radical ideology that the peasants would reject with abhorrence if they understood it at all.

A few passages can hardly be read except as manifest thrusts against some of the notions, strenuously propagated by Chernyshevsky, that had now attained the status of irrefutable truth among the younger generation. There was a firm belief, for example, in the overwhelming power of environment to determine human behavior—a theory that Dostoevsky rejects. “It is high time,” he declares, “we gave up apathetic complaints of being corrupted by our environment. It is true no doubt that it does destroy a great deal in us, but not everything, and often a crafty and knowing rogue, especially if he is an eloquent speaker or writer, will cover up not simply weakness but often real baseness, justifying it by the influence of ‘environment’ ” (4: 142). Dostoevsky is thus perfectly willing to acknowledge the pressure of environment, but not to eliminate individual moral responsibility altogether.

In an even more overt sally against Chernyshevsky, a selfless widow is evoked who lives in the vicinity of the prison camp and devotes her life to helping the convicts. “There are in Siberia, and practically always have been,” he remarks, “some people who seem to make it the object of their lives to look after the ‘unfortunates,’ to show pure and disinterested sympathy and compassion for them, as though they were their own children.” Nastasya Ivanovna had nothing remarkable about her: “All that one could see in her was an infinite kindness, an irresistible desire to please one, to comfort one, to do something nice for one.” Dostoevsky recalls her modest present of a cigarette case of cardboard, covered with colored paper trimmed with gilt around the edges; she knew he smoked cigarettes and thought the case might give him pleasure. “Some people maintain (I have heard it and read it),” Dostoevsky continues, “that the purest love for one’s neighbor is at the same time the greatest egoism. What egoism there could be in this instance, I can’t understand” (4: 68).