The struggle to understand its implications would inform all his future works.

Dostoevsky arrived in Semipalatinsk filled with plans for writing. He felt that he had enough material in him for many volumes, and though as an exile he was forbidden to publish, he hoped that situation would change in some six years, if not sooner. While still in Omsk, a week after his release, he had asked his brother to send him books. The list is interesting: “I need (very necessary) ancient historians (in French translations); modern historians: Guizot, Thierry, Thiers, Ranke, and so forth; national studies, and the Fathers of the Church … and church histories … Send me the Koran, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason … and Hegel, especially his History of Philosophy. My whole future depends on this …” He was clearly intent on rethinking his former utopian socialism both historically and philosophically. “I won’t even try to tell you what transformations went on in my soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart in those four years,” he wrote in the same letter. “That perpetual escape into myself from bitter reality has borne its fruit. I now have many new needs and hopes of which I never thought in the old days.”

In Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky made the acquaintance of the young Baron Alexander Egorovich Vrangel (1833–1915), who was sent there in 1854 as the district procurator. By an odd coincidence, Vrangel happened to have witnessed the mock execution of the Petrashevists in 1849; he had also read Dostoevsky’s early works and admired them. The two became friends and eventually shared a house, and Vrangel also interceded with the authorities several times on the author’s behalf. The baron’s memoirs of those years, published in 1912, give a detailed and moving portrait of Dostoevsky. He describes their first meeting: “He had on a soldier’s greatcoat with red stand-up collar and red epaulettes. Morose, with a sickly pale face covered with freckles, he wore his light-blond hair cut short; in height he was taller than average. Staring intently at me with his intelligent grey-blue eyes, it seemed he was trying to peer into my soul.”*4 Through Vrangel, Dostoevsky was introduced to the commanding officers of the fortress and was received in society, where he met his future wife, Marya Dmitrievna Isaeva.

Vrangel recalled Dostoevsky working on his prison memoirs while they lived together. “I was happy to see him during the moments of his creative work,” he wrote, “and I was the first person who listened to the notes of this outstanding work of art.” Vrangel also recorded a curious incident that occurred one day while they were sitting on the terrace having tea. His servant announced that a young woman was asking to see Dostoevsky. She was invited to the garden, and Dostoevsky recognized her at once as the daughter of a Gypsy woman who had been sent to prison for murdering her husband. The girl herself had been involved in the escape of two convicts from the prison in Omsk. Their plan—“completely illogical and fantastic,” according to Vrangel—was to make their way eastward, join the khan’s army, and come back to free their fellow prisoners. He says that the girl’s sudden reappearance inspired Dostoevsky to write a new chapter, “The Escape,” the next to last in Notes from a Dead House and the book’s thematic culmination.

The emperor Nicholas I died in the spring of 1855 and in September his son, Alexander II, who came to be known as the Tsar-Liberator, ascended the throne. The liberal spirit of the new government made itself felt rather quickly and, perhaps owing to it, Dostoevsky was promoted from private to noncommissioned officer in the autumn of that same year. A year later, in October 1856, he was made a commissioned officer and his rights as a nobleman were restored. This improvement in his position made it possible for him to marry Marya Dmitrievna the following February. His official work and the turmoil of his courtship and eventual marriage had interfered with his writing, but after his marriage he went back to it more steadily. He worked on some of his prison sketches, then set them aside in order to write two long stories, Uncle’s Dream and The Village of Stepanchikovo, which he thought would be better suited to his reappearance as a writer. In fact, they are more or less the same as his pre-prison works. The deep change that was going on in him had not yet found its form and voice.

In 1858 Dostoevsky asked for permission to retire from the service and return to Russia. The permission was granted, but the order took more than a year to reach him, and it did not allow him to live in Moscow or Petersburg. In the summer of 1859, he left Semipalatinsk for the city of Tver, a hundred miles north of Moscow, where his literary plans and the idea of collaborating with his brother Mikhail on a weekly magazine took clearer shape. The two stories were published in reputable journals that same year, and in mid-December, after more petitions, Dostoevsky was finally allowed to return to Petersburg.

During the spring and summer of 1860, while he and Mikhail were going through the complicated process of starting their magazine, Dostoevsky set to work on the final version of Notes from a Dead House.