Notes From a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

ALSO TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

The Master and Margarita

ANTON CHEKHOV

The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov Selected Stories

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The Adolescent

The Brothers Karamazov

Crime and Punishment

Demons

The Double and The Gambler

The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

The Idiot

Notes from Underground

NIKOLAI GOGOL

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls

NIKOLAI LESKOV

The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

BORIS PASTERNAK

Doctor Zhivago

LEO TOLSTOY

Anna Karenina

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

War and Peace

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Translation copyright © 2015 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Richard Pevear

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881, author.
 [Zapiski iz mertvogo doma. English (Pevear and Volokhonsky)]
Notes from a dead house / by Fyodor Dostoevsky; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
pages; cm
ISBN 978-0-307-95959-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-307-95960-7 (eBook)
I. Pevear, Richard, [date] translator.
II. Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator. III. Title.
PG3326.Z3   2014
891.73′3—dc23             2014018194

Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

PART ONE

Introduction

    I. The Dead House

   II. First Impressions

  III. First Impressions

  IV. First Impressions

   V. The First Month

  VI. The First Month

 VII. New Acquaintances. Petrov

VIII. Resolute Men. Luchka

  IX. Isai Fomich. The Bathhouse. Baklushin’s Story

   X. Christmas

  XI. The Performance

PART TWO

    I. The Hospital

   II. Continuation

  III. Continuation

  IV. Akulka’s Husband

   V. Summertime

  VI. Prison Animals

 VII. The Grievance

VIII. Comrades

  IX. The Escape

   X. Leaving Prison

Appendix: The Peasant Marey

Notes

A Note About the Author

A Note About the Translators

Foreword

Late in the night of April 22–23, 1849, the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was awakened in his apartment in Petersburg and informed that he was under arrest for his participation in a secret utopian socialist society. The other members of the society, including its founder, Mikhail Petrashevsky, a follower of the French socialist thinker Charles Fourier, were arrested at the same time. The emperor Nicholas I had been alarmed by the series of revolutions that broke out in Europe in 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto, and had decided to move against the radical intellectuals. The “Petrashevists” were confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petersburg for eight months while the investigation was carried out. In the end, the judicial commission recommended death by firing squad, but the military court commuted the sentence to eight years at hard labor in Siberia.

Dostoevsky was specifically charged with circulating a letter by the liberal literary critic Vissarion Belinsky that was “filled with impertinent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the sovereign power” and with attempting to set up a clandestine printing press.*1 The emperor himself revised his sentence to four years at hard labor followed by four years of military service in Siberia. But he also decided to stage a little drama for the prisoners—a mock execution on the Semyonovsky parade ground, to be interrupted at the last moment by an imperial reprieve and the reading of the actual sentences. Konstantin Mochulsky notes that the emperor “entered personally into all the details: the scaffold’s dimensions, the uniforms to be worn by the condemned, the priest’s vestments, the escort of carriages, the tempo of the drum roll, the route from the fortress to the place of shooting, the breaking of the swords, the putting on of white shirts, the executioner’s functions, the shackling of the prisoners.”*2 On December 22, 1849, the performance took place. Petrashevsky was in the first group of three to be “executed”; Dostoevsky was in the second. He had just turned twenty-eight.

In a letter to his brother Mikhail written that same evening, Dostoevsky declared:

As I look back upon the past and think how much time has been spent to no avail, how much of it was lost in delusions, in mistakes, in idleness, in not knowing how to live; what little store I set upon it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit—for this my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every moment could have been an age of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!*3 Now, on changing my life, I am being born again in a new form. Brother! I swear to you I will not lose hope and will preserve my spirit and my heart in purity. I’ll be reborn to the better. This is all my hope, all my consolation!

That rebirth did take place, but more slowly than Dostoevsky may have thought and through experiences he could not have imagined before the years he spent at hard labor. His Notes from a Dead House give an account of it.

In February 1854, Dostoevsky was released from the prison in Omsk and sent to serve as a private in the fortress of Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan, some four hundred miles further east. There for the first time he was allowed to contact his family. In a letter to his brother written on February 22, 1854, a week after his release, Dostoevsky described the horrors of prison life and in particular the hatred of the peasant convicts for the nobility, to which he belonged by birth, though his sentence deprived him of his legal rights as a nobleman. The details in the letter are more shocking than anything we find in Notes from a Dead House. Yet he could say in the same letter, referring “even to robber-murderers”: “Believe me, there were deep, strong, beautiful natures among them, and it often gave me joy to find gold under a rough exterior.” The intensity of that contradiction was at the heart of Dostoevsky’s prison experience.