Surprisingly, however, in the fall the first two chapters were published in another magazine, The Russian World, an “obscure weekly,” as Joseph Frank describes it.*5 Frank suggests that Dostoevsky wanted to make “a preliminary trial of the censors’ response.” He was afraid that, despite the liberal atmosphere of the time, his portrayal of life at hard labor would not be approved for publication. The editor of The Russian World offered to take the matter into his own hands, submitted the early chapters to the censors, and the Central Censorship Authority passed them. The magazine published the next three chapters in its January numbers and promised more to come, but there would be no more. The Dostoevskys’ magazine Vremya (“Time”) had begun to appear that same January, and the whole of Notes from a Dead House, including the opening chapters, was published there in 1861–62.

The Notes made a very strong impression on the reading public, especially the radical youth. For Dostoevsky it indeed marked a triumphant return to literature. As Joseph Frank observed: “No writer was now more celebrated than Dostoevsky, whose name was surrounded with the halo of his former suffering, and whose sketches only served to enhance his prestige as a precursor on the path of political martyrdom.”*6 He was invited to give talks and readings to student groups and charitable organizations, opportunities he always accepted gladly, because they brought him into direct contact with his readers. His fellow writers also admired the Notes: Turgenev likened the book to Dante’s Inferno, and Tolstoy thought it not only Dostoevsky’s finest work, but one of the best books in all of Russian literature.

Notes from a Dead House was the first published account of life in the Siberian hard-labor camps. It initiated the genre of the prison memoir, which unfortunately went on to acquire major importance in Russian literature. But the book was innovative not only in its subject matter, but in its composition. Dostoevsky left the prison in Omsk with a collection of notes he had managed to take during those four years. In them he had recorded the unusual words and expressions of the peasant convicts, their arguments, their play-acting, their songs and stories, entrusting the pages to one of the medical assistants in the prison hospital, who duly returned them to him when he was released. These notes supplied the unique voicing of the book. While still in Tver, in the summer of 1858, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother that he now had “a complete and definite plan” in mind. “My personality will disappear from view. These are the notes of an unknown man; but I vouch for their interest … Here there will be the serious, the gloomy, and the humorous, and folk conversation with its particular hard-labor colorings.”*7

In the semi-fictional form he chose to give his narrative, Dostoevsky places himself at a third remove. The fictional author-narrator of the Notes, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, is a former nobleman serving a ten-year sentence for murdering his wife in a fit of jealousy. His Notes are presented to us, in the introduction and in one brief intrusion in part two, chapter VII, by another first-person narrator, the “editor” of Goryanchikov’s manuscript. He tells us, with a mixture of heavy irony and underlying sympathy, about Goryanchikov’s reclusive life in Siberia after prison and his sudden death—a closure that is in sharp contrast to the ending of the book itself. This fictionalizing was in part a mask for the censors: the notes of a man serving a sentence for a common-law crime were more likely to be passed for publication than the notes of a political criminal. But the mask is dropped rather quickly. By the second chapter, we hear a fellow nobleman say, in response to the narrator’s first impressions of the peasant prisoners: “Yes, sir, they don’t like noblemen … especially political criminals.” Though he keeps the persona of Alexander Petrovich throughout, the narrator’s thoughts, his preoccupations, and his conscience are not at all those of a man who has murdered his wife. Dostoevsky’s personality does not disappear from view; he is present as the observer of the life around him, but also as the protagonist of the inner transformation that the experience of prison brings about in him. It is Dostoevsky, not Goryanchikov, who says towards the end: “I outlined a program for the whole of my future and resolved to follow it firmly. A blind faith arose in me that I would and could fulfill it all … I waited, I called for freedom to come quickly; I wanted to test myself anew, in a new struggle.”

The fictional editor of Goryanchikov’s notes ends his introduction by describing his own fascination with them, but then says rather casually: “Of course, I may be mistaken. I will begin by selecting two or three chapters; let the public judge …” There is nothing loose or casual about the structure of the book itself, however. It is divided into two parts. Part One, as we can see from the chapter titles, is made up of first impressions. It is filled with vivid details that both repulse and intrigue the narrator as he tries to settle into his new circumstances. He moves about freely in time, but keeps coming back to his initial experiences. By the end of Part One we are still in his first month of captivity, rounded off with Christmas and the brief respite of the theater performance.