Welcome back to books!
I love Dostoevsky. This has to do with my longstanding fascination with the fringes of life's experiences, the absolute outermost shell of our world's circumstances, and the denizens which inhabit it. Dostoevsky was apparently one such shell-dweller by force, and did not have the luxury of enjoying experiential radicality from the safety of a hardcover book I bought for $1.99 at the local bookstore. Dostoevsky in fact did not enjoy living in prison (imagine that). He not-enjoyed it so much that he ended up writing and extremely dense 300 pages about it and the prisoners he lived with. I am going to try to re-tell that tale to you without giving away the major plot points (hint: not much of a plot, this should be easy), so you can enjoy experiential radicality from an even further removed vantage point. You are so brave.
If anyone out there doesn't know, there are more than a few books out there about life in a Russian prison. It has become apparent to me that many Russian artists and writers have enjoyed at length what is apparently a literary brain-flexer in the form of hard labor in Siberia. I guess that just makes you write better, huh? Good ol' incarceration.
This book is a lot like going to prison. You start out in this small Russian town in Siberia, which serves as a sort of frame for this book. Then, the narrator describes finding the manuscript of these pages inside of a dead person's house. Then, you're in prison (as a different person). You stay there till the end of the book.
What actually is the case is that Dostoevsky actually lived through this nightmare and he re-told the story from the point of view of someone else, while he published the narrative in parts in a literary magazine. Dostoevsky had been arrested for being in a literary circle of Western thinkers who read banned books and loved Jesus Christ. I'm completely serious about this. After his famous fake mock execution, they sent him off to the pen, where he lived through the extremely drawn out and surprisingly not-that-bad life-circumstance elucidated in these pages.
All jokes aside, the scenes that Dostoevsky describes within are utterly heart-wrenching and amazing. This book is really in the vein of classic Russian mega-dramas, meaning there are tons of characters and the meat of the novel is simply describing their relationships and backstories. A prison is a great setting to do so, not just because this actually happened and is real, but form a literary standpoint because there is not much of a chance for narrative movement. After all, almost the entire novel takes place within the walls of a prison. This is by no means boring, although it can be a difficult trek for those who have little interest in psychology and are searching for an action novel. There is no action. There is only prison.
In Dostoevsky's extremely sensitive and surprisingly gentle heart, prison became a meditation on the types of men found in Russia, their relationship to the state, to ideas, to history, and ultimately to each other. The most beautiful moments in the story are these sort of "cracks in the wall", as I would call them, and here's what I mean. This novel has some bits which are slow. That's not a criticism, it's a reflection of what life in prison is like and it serves the purposes of the narrative perfectly. Imagine walking along a long prison wall, and coming to a crack and looking through into some unbelievable scene, which works your heart into such tremor that it affects you for the rest of your life. Walking along this wall of prison life, Dostoevsky describes several such cracks which are truly beautiful and emotionally impactful.
My favorite quote from The House of the Dead is the following: "man is the animal that can get used to anything". This is not an exact quote, but I'm too tired to go into the book and find it and go get it. You'll just have to read it. Imagine that.
In a sense, I don't think that the prison life that Dostoevsky describes is really so different from my own life. I work an often boring job and deal with a variety of interesting characters that in some ways seem condemned to their fates. Actually, I would say that all humans are condemned in some way, all that I have known. I know there are aspirational and successful people out there who have achieved a lot, like my friend at Harvard. I don't know what her life is really like. Maybe she is condemned to something as well. But among we lesser folk (who I have spent infinitely more time with) I have seen an unforgettable degree of sadness in duty to the world. Now what could that phrase mean?
Well- listen. The characters who inhabit this prison, not all are guilty, and many among them are clever, strong, brave, intelligent, caring, worthy human beings with an inner world rich in emotion and belief. How much more so the characters of our real world? I can't count the number of people with whole worlds of love inside them that are tied to merciless duty as if in prayer or in service, constantly progressing through the stations of the cross of their lives, uncertain if they will ever ascend to heaven. This is the way of our lives, it is the way of life for many that I have known and I know this is the way of life for myself. I don't mean to pronounce on religion or destiny, politics or economics, but I can tell you that in whatever way you slice our world, there is a great deal of it which I count as inhuman. There are too many innocent people unknowingly suffering through servitude and even identifying with it, either in their career, their family life, or under the thumb of others. Are they not prisoners in their own right? And what could help them, if anything?
I don't pretend that I have those answers. Dostoevsky felt that at the end of his sentence, he had a renewed feeling to succeed and an unshakable desire to overcome the issues of his life and confidence that he could. Perhaps those feelings are the key to "changing our lot", as it is described in House of the Dead.
Definitely worth a read.