The House of the Dead, Fyodor Dostoevsky

4 stars

First Sentence: Among the mountains and impenetrable forests of the Siberian desert one comes from time to time across little towns of a thousand or two inhabitants.

Thoughts: Recently Salman Rushdie went on the late night talk show circuit to promote his new memoir Knife about when he was almost killed at the Chautauqua lectures in 2022. One of the hosts, I think it was Stephen Colbert, asked why Rushdie wrote about the attack. “Because,” Rushdie said, “I couldn’t write about anything else.”

Makes sense. A traumatic experience like that, a storyteller has to write it down to process it completely and move past it to the next story.

And that’s why Dostoevsky wrote The House of the Dead. He had been imprisoned in Siberia for ten years, so when he came back to St. Petersburg he had to write about it before he could move on to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

He didn’t do it as a novel or a memoir, though. He used a frame story about a young man living in a charming Siberian town. One of the local tutors was a man who had spent some time in a prison camp. Not unusual in Siberia, but this man kept very much to himself, to the point where he was offended if anyone tried to visit him or hold a conversation. He was known to sit up late at night scribbling. After he died, the young man got hold of his writings and discovered that some of them were his memories of his life in prison. That’s the rest of the book.

Our Dostoevsky stand-in gave his readers a complete description of what life was like in a Siberian prison camp: their clothes, how their heads were shaved, how the chains were put on, how the barracks were arranged, what their beds were like, the other prisoners and how they acted, how they were classed by the authorities, what they did between dinner and going to bed, and the food.

The editor’s introduction in the version I read made a point of mentioning Dostoevsky made the food sound better than it was. This was because he knew the Russian authorities were going to be reading his book and his future life as an author depended on not making Siberian prison camps look better than the lowest level of Hell. Although he did mention that the worst part of prison was the fact that for ten years he was never alone, waking or sleeping. That, to me, is lower than the lowest level of Dante’s Inferno.

They weren’t doing forced labor all the time. They had some recreation, mainly smuggling vodka into the prison, watering it down, and selling it to the other inmates. Around Christmas they got some actual time off. This was when they made their annual trip to the local bathhouse. It wasn’t that great, though, because there were at least fifty men crammed into the sauna at the same time so it wasn’t very relaxing or cleansing.

Although there was that year some of the prisoners got together and put on a play. Everyone liked that, even the prison officials.

The authorial stand-in also spent some time in the prison hospital. He was actually sick, but there were some who pretended to be so they could get some time off. The doctors went along with it until the prisoner was fully rested and then they released him. Others, though, were really sick and did not go gentle into that good night. There were also a few madmen who went raging through the wards, so it wasn’t any more relaxing than the bathhouse.

I can understand the insanity part. Hell, as Camus, said, is other people, and not being able to get away from anyone to have one single solitary second to myself would make me nuttier than an outhouse rat in short order.