I finally took leave of him and, on going out, felt that some intolerable burden had been lifted from my heart. I was ashamed, and it seemed extraordinarily stupid of me to pester a man who has made it his chief task to hide as far away as possible from the whole world. But the deed was done. I remember noticing almost no books in his room, which meant they were wrong when they said that he read a lot. However, driving past his windows once or twice very late at night, I noticed light in them. What was he doing, sitting there till dawn? Could he be writing? And, if so, what precisely?

Circumstances took me away from our little town for about three months. Returning home when it was already winter, I learned that Alexander Petrovich had died that autumn, had died in solitude and had not even once sent for a doctor. They had already nearly forgotten him in town. His lodgings stood vacant. I immediately made the acquaintance of the deceased man’s landlady, with the aim of finding out from her what in particular her tenant had been occupied with, and whether he had been writing anything. For twenty kopecks she brought me a basket full of papers that the deceased had left behind. The old woman confessed that she had already used up two notebooks. She was a sullen and taciturn woman, from whom it was hard to draw anything sensible. Of her lodger she could tell me nothing particularly new. It seemed from what she said that he hardly ever did anything and for months did not open a book or pick up a pen; instead he paced up and down his room all night, thinking about something and sometimes talking to himself; that he loved her granddaughter Katya very much and was very affectionate with her, especially after he learned that her name was Katya; and that on St. Catherine’s day he always went to have a memorial service offered for somebody. He could not stand visitors; he left the house only to teach children; he even looked askance at her, the old woman, when she came once a week to tidy his room a least a little, and hardly ever said so much as a word to her in all those three years. I asked Katya if she remembered her teacher. She looked at me silently, turned to the wall, and began to cry. So the man had been able to make at least somebody love him.

I took his papers and spent a whole day sorting them. Three-quarters of these papers were empty, insignificant scraps, or his pupils’ exercises in penmanship. But there was one notebook, a rather voluminous one, filled with small handwriting and unfinished, perhaps abandoned and forgotten by the author himself. It was a description, though a disjointed one, of the ten years of life at hard labor that Alexander Petrovich had endured. At times this description was interrupted by another sort of narrative, some strange, horrible memories, jotted down roughly, convulsively, as if under some sort of constraint. I reread those passages several times and was almost convinced that they had been written in madness. But the notes on hard labor—“Scenes from a Dead House,” as he himself calls them somewhere in his manuscript—seemed to me not without interest. The totally new world, unknown till then, the strangeness of some facts, certain particular observations about those lost people, fascinated me, and I read some of it with curiosity. Of course, I may be mistaken. As a test, I will begin by selecting two or three chapters; let the public judge …

I

The Dead House

Our prison stood at the edge of the fortress, right by the fortress rampart. You could look at God’s world through the chinks in the fence: wouldn’t you see at least something? But all you could see was a strip of sky and a high earthen rampart overgrown with weeds, and on the wall sentries pacing up and down day and night, and right then you would think that years would go by, and you would come in the same way to look through the chinks in the fence and see the same rampart, the same sentries, and the same little strip of sky, not the sky over the prison, but a different, far-off, free sky.