The House of the Dead, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky’s 1860 novel The House of the Dead is a loose memoir based on his prison experiences in Siberia between 1849 and 1854. It’s one of his minor works, but is fascinating nonetheless as a study of humanity’s extremes of character, presented in a humane and sympathetic manner. The novel can also be read as a precursor to Dostoyevsky's classics Crime and Punishment (1865-6) and The Devils (1871).

One of the most rivetting aspects of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ( 1821-1881) biography is his narrow, last minute escape in 1849 from the death penalty after his involvement in the ‘Petrashevsky Circle’. His involvement in this political conspiracy included printing incendiary matter and the call for the violent overthrow of the monarchy. Dostoyevsky escaped death, and was given a reprieve at the very last moment. What it was like to come so close to execution he described in his famous Crime and Punishment. Instead, the young Russian novelist was sent to Siberia for five years, until 1854.

The House of the Dead (1860) describes those years of drudgery and misery. It’s an odd piece of literature, as it describes itself as a novel, but is really a first person memoir. The ‘novel’ is introduced by a man who met one Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, a former convict who had spent ten years in prison for the murder of his wife. When Goryanchikov dies, the man goes to his landlady to find out some more information. The landlady has a basket of the ex-convict’s papers, which she sells for a twenty-copeck piece. The man takes the papers away and sorts out the trivial from the more substantial. As happens in these types of novels, the reader is then presented with the text of the original found diary. The rest of the novel is then merely all of Goryanchikov’s first hand experiences of life in a Serbian prison.

Of course, once you start reading you pretty much straight away take it for granted that you’re reading a first person memoir of Dostoyevsky’s personal experiences in prison. The flimsy device that supposedly turns it into a work of fiction immediately evaporates into thin air. If The House of the Dead resembles anything in the Dostoyevsky canon, it’s Notes From the Underground (1864), another novel written in the first person that mixes stream of consciousness and an existential philosophy. The House of the Dead the reader presumes to be Dostoyevsky’s accurate recollections of prison life, but we allow him the literary licence to immerse some of his memories in a bit of philosophical brooding. Perhaps we should take for granted that the sentiments and feelings in The House of the Dead are one hundred percent accurate, whereas the details described may not achieve that exactitude.

The whole notion of Serbian prisons immediately evoke feelings of dread and horror, but I was surprised to find that the novel is not particularly violent or ghoulish. Dostoyevsky avoids self pity and concentrates on presenting the psychological mood of men reduced to this level of bad food, foul smells, uncomfortably close living, appalling hygiene and a litany of other domestic evils. As a novelist, Dostoyevsky has a keen interest in character, and the novel is replete with a fascinating gallery of murderers, thieves and other criminals. Paradoxes come aplenty, as the reader learns about the gentle natures of certain murderers, and the nice manners of outlaws in general. You get to the end of the novel and its hard not to draw the conclusion that the extremes of personality Dostoyevsky met in prison deeply influenced his later writings. The kind of unfathomable eccentrics that turn up in The Devils can be found here in embryo.

The House of the Dead is not one of Dostoyevsky’s greater works. In fact, its safe to say its one of his minor novels. There are a few irritating repetitions in it, like the constant refrain ‘needless to say’, but its absolutely fascinating and highly readable nonetheless. It’s almost a bridging work to the great works that would soon come, as though Dostoyevsky were working out the extremes of humanity (of men, really) in his mind, sorting out how to present such paradoxical characters in fiction and make them real and coherent, with an essential human truth.

While The House of the Dead is not perfect, it should be mandatory reading for all students of Dostoyevsky. For the non-student of the great Russian master, it will provide a fascinating window onto the life of Siberian prisons in the late nineteenth century.

The House of the Dead, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0-14-044456-8