I saw this book appear in the Standard Ebooks newsletter since they had just added it to their catalogue. I was intrigued, I remember liking Crime and Punishment very much, and I had never heard of this novel. I ended up not reading that version, although I think they make excellent ebooks, it is the Constance Garnett translation that is in the public domain and it seems there are far better ones now.
I bought the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation, which reportedly is the most faithful to the spirit of the original. I found the prose to be very much like natural thought or conversations. He would routinely get sidetracked, fixated on things, and come back to points made much earlier.
The book apparently is autobiographical, it is a record of Dostoevsky’s own experiences when he was incarcerated for four years in a Siberian prison for being a member of a Socialist group. The book’s narrator is a wife murderer, but he made this change as he would not have been able to publish it otherwise.
The book doesn’t really have much of a plot, the chapters are either observations on characters in the prison or individual events that took place. The events don’t naturally flow one into the other, they’re more like stand-alone stories. It gives a sense that time isn’t moving, or is irrelevant, which I think is what the “Dead House” in the title is referring to.
The inmates are often branded on their forehead or cheeks, and have half of the hair on their heads shaved off. This, I assume is both for humiliation and control, as well as to make them easy to spot if they make an escape attempt. They are also routinely punished with beatings using birch or rods. They discuss the amount of strokes they receive and compare them, or help each other out after the beatings. The rods in particular seem brutal, tearing flesh and sometimes causing death.
It seems like Dostoevsky was surprised by the people he encountered in the prison. They are complex characters, who have real depth to them. In the appendix there is an extra chapter, written after the book itself. In it, he details a time when he was lying in his bunk trying to be on his own, to get away from the brutes he thought he was imprisoned with. At that time a memory came back to him of when he was small, and frightened himself imagining that a wolf was about to attack. He was comforted by a serf, who showed deep compassion for him. This person he never spoke to again, and the memory had disappeared as he grew up, only to flash back in his mind at this moment. This is the turning point where he was able to see his fellow inmates as real people, not necessarily good or bad but as human beings who have desires and problems they face.
There are several characters that trade, or start businesses inside the prison. They then save all the money they have from this, and spend it all at once on binge drinking vodka that has been smuggled in. On the one hand this is explained as avoiding having your money confiscated, but on the other it’s described as one of the only ways the prisoners are able to have any control over their day to day lives. I found this whole section really quite moving, and it’s clear that this does not just apply to 19th century Russian prisoners.
The inmates occasionally encounter the local citizens when they have been assigned work duty. These people call the prisoners unfortunates, and often give them alms that then get shared out in the prison. This includes a bounty of food for Christmas day. It was reading these sections that made me compare this book to Sympathy Tower Tokyo, they share some of the same themes, but this one is significantly more effective by actually showing the people involved as real people.
In one particularly memorable scene the prisoners are taken to a bath house. They are crammed into a small bathing room, with literally no floor space left. People are on top of each other, with the heat becoming nearly unbearable. It feels like he’s describing one of the circles of hell.
In the final section, when he is leaving the prison after serving his term, it’s a particularly interesting emotion being expressed. He’s almost wistful, nostalgic about the experiences he’s had.