Part Two is constructed differently. Here the narrator speaks more generally of prison life—the hospital, various kinds and degrees of corporal punishment, the officers, certain of his prison “comrades,” the prison animals—and even includes an inset story told by another prisoner. But again there is an underlying unity to this seemingly random sampling, an inner unity, in the author’s deepening perception of the people he has been thrown together with. He begins to fathom their difference not only from himself but from his former assumptions about the “Russian peasant”—an abstract figure idealized by the radical intelligentsia. As a result of this synchronic structure, there is no sense in the book of time passing. “The prison is immobile,” as Mochulsky observes, “it is a ‘dead house’ frozen in perpetuity, but the author moves.”*8 It is the movement of his own increasing penetration and comprehension, which passes through his first Easter, through the release of the hurt eagle at the end of the chapter on prison animals, through the drama of the escape, to culminate on his last day of captivity in a sudden assertion: “I must say it all: these people are extraordinary people. They are perhaps the most gifted, the strongest of all our people. But their mighty strength perished for nothing, perished abnormally, unlawfully, irretrievably. And who is to blame?”

This inner change in Dostoevsky’s perception of the people began during his first Easter in prison with the surprise recollection of a forgotten moment from his childhood, which came to him while he was lying on his bunk with his eyes closed, trying to forget the vileness of his surroundings. Interestingly enough, he did not include this “awakening” in Notes from a Dead House, though its effects are central to the book; he wrote about it only fifteen years later, in the issue of his Writer’s Diary for February 1876, in an entry entitled “The Peasant Marey,” which we include here as an appendix. It tells of how the frightened nine-year-old Dostoevsky was comforted by one of his father’s serfs.

Now suddenly, twenty years later, in Siberia, I remembered this whole encounter with such clarity, to the very last detail. Which means that it had embedded itself in my soul imperceptibly, on its own and without my will, and I suddenly remembered it when it was needed … And so, when I got off my bunk and glanced about, I suddenly felt that I could look at these unfortunate men with totally different eyes, and that suddenly, by some miracle, all the hatred and anger in my heart had vanished completely.

What he saw in these “simple people” was a complexity of character, a capacity for extremes of both evil and good, that destroyed the basic assumptions of the utopian socialism he had embraced as a young man. “What had been a pitying sentimentalism towards weak and basically unassertive characters,” Joseph Frank writes, “now took on a tragic complexity as Dostoevsky’s sympathies with the unsubjugated peasant convicts stretched the boundaries of official morality to the breaking point.”*9 Early in Notes from a Dead House, the author meditates on a complex riddle that pursued him all the while he was in prison: the sameness of the crime and the sameness of the sentence, faced with the enormous variety of human characters and motives and of the effects on different characters of the same punishment. “True, there are variations in the length of the sentences. But these variations are relatively few; while the variations in one and the same crime are a numberless multitude. For each character there is a variation.” This riddle comes up again five years later in Crime and Punishment, where the remarkable investigator, Porfiry Petrovich, says to Raskolnikov:

It must be observed that the general case, the one to which all legal forms and rules are suited, and on the basis of which they are all worked out and written down in books, simply does not exist, for the very reason that every case, let’s say, for instance, every crime, as soon as it actually occurs, turns at once into a completely particular case, sir; and sometimes, just think, really completely unlike all the previous ones, sir.

Still later, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov confesses to his brother Alyosha:

Too many riddles oppress man on earth. Solve them if you can without getting your feet wet … Besides, I can’t bear it that some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the ideal of the Madonna and end with the ideal of Sodom. It’s even more fearful when someone who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna either, and his heart burns with it, verily, verily burns, as in his young, blameless years. No, man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down. Devil knows what to make of him, that’s the thing!

The epilogue of Crime and Punishment is set in a Siberian hard-labor prison closely resembling the prison in Omsk, where Raskolnikov, like the narrator of Notes from a Dead House, confronts “a new, hitherto completely unknown reality” and undergoes a “gradual regeneration.” In the early drafts of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky gave Dmitri Karamazov the name of Ilyinsky. Dmitri Ilyinsky was one of his fellow prisoners in Omsk; in the Notes he is not named; the narrator refers to him only as “the parricide.” He had been sentenced to twenty years at hard labor for murdering his father, but after serving ten years of his sentence, he was found to be innocent. Dostoevsky, who never believed in his crime, says in the Notes that he was haunted by his memory, and his last novel bears him out. In his early drafts of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky called the depraved immoralist Svidrigailov by the name of Aristov. Aristov was the A—v of Notes from a Dead House, “an example of what the carnal side of man can come to, unrestrained by any inner norm, any lawfulness … Add to that the fact that he was cunning and intelligent, good-looking, even somewhat educated, and not without abilities. No,” says the narrator, “better fire, better plague and famine, than such a man in society!”

All of Dostoevsky’s later work grew out of his meditation on the extremes he met with in the “hitherto completely unknown reality” of the dead house. It is, finally, a meditation on human freedom. The radical social thought of his time had trouble finding a place for freedom; given the right social organization, freedom was really no longer necessary. It also excluded the irrational; it reduced good and evil to the useful and the harmful; it removed the metaphysical dimensions of human life. But Dostoevsky had seen that the extremes of good and evil, the breadth that Mitya Karamazov talks about, were innate even in the crudest men, and that they would never renounce the need to assert their freedom, bizarre and deformed as the results might be. “The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner, an outcast …,” he writes, “but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being.”

—Richard Pevear

*1 See Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, by Konstantin Mochulsky, translated by Michael A.