Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Notes from Underground & The House of the Dead

A month later I called on Petrovitch without pretext, and it is evident that, in doing so, I behaved foolishly and without the least delicacy. He lived in one of the farthest points of the town with an old woman whose daughter suffered from tuberculosis and had a little girl about ten years old, very pretty and very lively.

When I entered Alexander Petrovitch was seated beside the child, teaching her to read. When he saw me he became confused, as if I had detected him in a crime. Losing all self-control, he jumped up and looked at me with awe and astonishment. Then we both of us sat down. He followed attentively all my looks, as if I suspected him of some mysterious intention. I realized that he was horribly mistrustful. He looked at me as if I were some kind of spy, and seemed to be on the point of saying: ‘ Are you not going soon?’

I spoke to him of our little town, of the news of the day; but he was silent, or smiled with an air of displeasure. I could see that he was absolutely ignorant of all that went on in the town, and that he was in no way curious to know. I spoke to him next of the country generally, and of its men. He listened to me in silence, fixing his eyes upon me in such a strange way that I felt ashamed of what I was doing. I apparently offended him by offering him some books and newspapers which I had just received by post. He cast a greedy look upon them, but seemed to alter his mind, and declined my offer, giving his want of leisure as a pretext.

At last I wished him goodbye, and felt a weight fall from my shoulders as I left the house. I regretted having harassed a man whose tastes kept him apart from the rest of the world, but the mistake had been made. I noticed that he possessed very few books: it was not true, then, that he read so much. Nevertheless, on two occasions when I drove past I saw a light in his lodging. What could make him sit up so late? Was he writing; and if that were so, what was he writing?

I was absent from town for about three months, and on my return in the winter I learned that Petrovitch was dead. He had not even sent for a doctor. He was already forgotten, and his lodging was unoccupied. I at once made the acquaintance of his landlady, in the hope of learning from her what her lodger had been writing. For twenty kopecks she brought me a basket full of papers left by the deceased, and confessed that she had already used four sheets to light her fire. She was a morose and taciturn old woman and I could elicit nothing of interest. She could tell me nothing about her lodger. She gave me to understand all the same that he scarcely ever worked, and that he remained for months together without opening a book or touching a pen. On the other hand, he walked all night up and down his room, given up to his reflections. Sometimes, indeed, he spoke aloud. He was very fond of her little grandchild, Katia, above all when he knew her name; on her nameday-the feast of St Catherine -he always had a requiem mass said in the parish church for somebody’s soul. He detested receiving visits, and never went out except to give lessons. Even his landlady he looked upon with an unfriendly eye when, once a week, she came into his room to put it in order.

During the three years he had lived under her roof, he had scarcely ever spoken to her. I asked Katia if she remembered him. She looked at me in silence, and turned weeping to the wall. This man, then, was loved by someone! I took away the papers and spent the day examining them. They were for the most part of no importance, merely children’s exercises. At last I came to a rather thick packet: the sheets were covered with delicate handwriting which ended abruptly. It had perhaps been forgotten by the writer. It was the narrative-incoherent and fragmentary-of the ten years Alexander Petrovitch had passed in hard labour. The story was interrupted here and there by anecdotes or strange, terrible recollections thrown in convulsively as if torn from the writer. I read some of these fragments again and again and began to suspect that they had been written in moments of madness. But his memories of the convict prison-Recollections of the House of the Dead, as he himself called them somewhere in his manuscript-seemed to me not without interest. They revealed quite a new world unknown till then; and in the strangeness of his facts, together with his singular remarks on this fallen people, there was enough to tempt me to go on. I may perhaps be wrong, but I shall publish some chapters from this narrative, and the public may judge for itself.

Table of Contents

Our prison was at the far end of the citadel behind the ramparts. Peering through the crevices in the palisade in the hope of glimpsing something, one sees nothing but a little corner of the sky, and a high earthwork covered with the long grass of the steppe. Night and day sentries walk to and fro upon it. Then one suddenly realizes that whole years will pass during which one will see, through those same crevices in the palisade, the same sentinels pacing the same earthwork, and the same little corner of the sky, not just above the prison, but far and far away. Imagine a courtyard two hundred feet long and one hundred and fifty feet broad, enclosed by an irregular hexagonal palisade formed of stakes thrust deep into the ground. So much for the external surroundings of the prison. On one side of the palisade is a great gate, solid and nearly always shut; watched perpetually by the sentries, and never opened except when the convicts go out to work. Beyond this there are light and liberty, the life of free people! Beyond the palisade one thought of the marvellous world, fantastic as a fairytale. It was not the same on our side. Here there was no resemblance to anything. Habits, customs, laws were all precisely fixed. It was the house of living death. It is this corner that I have undertaken to describe. Entering the enclosure, one sees a few buildings. On two sides of a vast courtyard are long wooden buildings made of logs, and only one storey high. These are convict barracks. Here the prisoners are confined, divided into several classes. At the end of the enclosure may be seen a house, which serves as a kitchen, divided into two compartments. Behind it is another building, which does duty at once as cellar, loft, and barn. The centre of the enclosure, completely barren, is a large open space. Here the prisoners are drawn up in ranks three times a day. They are identified and must answer to their names morning, noon, and evening, besides several times in the course of the day if the soldiers on guard are suspicious and clever at counting. All around, between the palisade and the buildings, there remains a fairly wide space, where some of the prisoners who are misanthropes, or of a sombre turn of mind, like to walk about when they are not at work. There they go turning over their favourite thoughts, shielded from all observation.

Meeting them on those walks, I took pleasure in observing their sad, deeply marked countenances, and in guessing their thoughts. The favourite occupation of one convict, during the moments allowed him from hard labour, was to count the palisades. There were fifteen hundred of them. He had counted them all, and knew them nearly by heart. Every one of them represented to him a day of confinement; and, numbering them daily in this manner, he knew exactly the number of days that he had still to pass in prison. He was sincerely happy when he had finished one side of the hexagon, although he had to wait many long years for his liberation. But one learns patience in a prison.

One day I saw a prisoner who had undergone his punishment take leave of his comrades. He had done twenty years’ hard labour. More than one convict remembered seeing him arrive, quite young, careless, thinking neither of his crime nor of his punishment. He was now an old man with grey hair, his countenance sad and morose. He walked in silence through our six barracks. As he entered each of them he prayed before the icon, made a deep bow to his former companions, and begged them to remember him kindly.