The House of the Dead

The test is harder here than in a novel, because the book is built by accumulation: portraits, institutions, feasts, a hospital, animals, an escape. Much is required. The first chapters must establish the place before anything in it can mean. The Christmas feast and the theatricals are the two days on which the convicts are, for a while, free men, and the book’s argument about freedom needs them; the hospital is where the floggings are seen from the far side, on backs brought in from the line. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what could go without loss: some of the cataloguing of types in the seventh and eighth chapters of the first part, which repeats a point already made; the goat Vaska, closer to anecdote than the eagle beside him; and stretches of generalisation on punishment and on the Russian people that restate what the scenes have shown. The book is necessary in its spine and loose in its middle.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Unfreedom, not hardship, is the punishment: the men are fed, some trade and drink, and what crushes them is that nothing they do is their own; a man made to pour water from one tub into another and back again, the narrator says, would hang himself within days. Money is “чеканенная свобода”
(coined freedom), which is why the convicts who save it spend it at once. Man is a being who gets used to anything, and that is both his salvation and his ruin. The power to flog corrupts the flogger into a habit and then a need. Between the gentleman and the peasant stands a gulf no shared sentence closes. It holds without Dostoevsky’s later faith. Held off the top because the claims about the people are sometimes asserted where the scenes have shown only a few men.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Height is reached several times, mostly in the dreadful register and in a plain voice. The bath (I.9), where a hundred men in fetters crowd a steaming room and the narrator thinks of hell. The theatricals (I.11), where the convicts become actors and an audience and the narrator sees in them, for an evening, what they might have been. Christmas (I.10), its solemnity and its drunken collapse. Shishkov’s telling of Akulka’s Husband (II.4), the murder of a wronged wife narrated as gossip by a man who does not know what he is telling. The wounded eagle let go at the palisade (II.6). The fetters struck off at the smithy (II.10). Held below the top because the reportorial register keeps most of the book on the level, and the elevations are spaced by long stretches of description.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The myth is built, and the title states it: a house of the dead, from which the narrator is at last raised, and whose last words are of “воскресенье из мертвых”
(resurrection from the dead). The book’s year turns on Christmas and on the Lenten fast and communion the convicts keep; the descent is to a bath he thinks of as hell, the return through the smithy’s door. The prison becomes a figure of Russia, every province and nation and faith shut in one stockade, and the convict a figure of the strongest of the people, wasted. These carry weight: the death and resurrection frame is what the book means. Held below the top because the realist and documentary surface keeps the archetype mostly implicit, and the counter-figures, Aley taught to read from the Sermon on the Mount and the eagle, are images more than a built structure.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The inheritance is the physiological sketch of the Russian natural school, Gogol, the prison memoir of Pellico’s Le mie prigioni, Hugo’s Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, and the Decembrists’ Siberia as legend. The turn: a novelistic frame wrapped round testimony, so that a former political convict could write of penal labour at all; the convicts given as individuals, with their own humour, honour and economy, not as a moral lesson or a mass; and a form between memoir, ethnography, essay and fiction that has no settled name. The stake was real. Dostoevsky was newly returned from exile and still under surveillance, the subject was closed, and the frame was a shield the book had to wear without being bound by it. Held below the top because the sketch form it extended was already established, and the swerve is in matter and stance more than in a new form fully made.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and some knowledge goes. The arrangement by the shape of memory rather than of time, the first year given whole and the rest compressed, is itself a disclosure: in prison time is eaten, and the one year remembered is the year before habit closed over the narrator. The circling among types, feasts and institutions, with no plot to carry it, is the condition of men for whom nothing will happen; the escape (II.9) is the only plot the book allows, and it fails within days. The frame does real work: a dead man’s notes from a dead house, published by a stranger. Held lower because the frame is not sustained, the wife-murderer vanishing and the narrator Dostoevsky in all but name, and because in the essayistic passages the form becomes a container for argument that would read the same in an article.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The evidence is a century and a half of reading by novelists, penologists and historians. Tolstoy praised it in a letter to Strakhov of 1880. Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols (1889), took from it his admiration for the Siberian convicts as men of the hardest and most valuable wood. It keeps yielding on freedom and habit, on the gentleman and the people, and on whether the closing hope is earned; and it is read as the seedbed of the great novels, Raskolnikov’s Siberia and the Karamazov parricide among them. Held below the top because much of its return is as source and document for Dostoevsky’s later work, and because its open questions lie nearer the surface than the novels’ do.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is Russian prose of the mid nineteenth century, and beyond it the literature of imprisonment. The force: it made the prison a subject for serious literature as a whole society seen from inside, and showed that testimony could carry the weight of a novel; and in Dostoevsky’s own work it marks the turn from the young writer of Poor Folk to the author of the great novels, where the criminal, the people and resurrection become his matter. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands at the head of a line that runs through Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island (1893 to 1895) and Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899) to Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago, and Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales; Russian writers of the camps have named it as their precedent. Held below 9.0 because the line it founded is a line of subject and witness, not a reorganisation of the novel’s form.

Score: 8.8 / 10

About one hundred and sixty-five years. The text survives whole, as published, without textual question. Presence is continuous: in print in Russian since 1862, in English since the 1880s and in at least four English translations of standing, read in schools and universities, cited in histories of punishment and of the Gulag. It has outlived its conditions: the penal labour of Nicholas I’s reign, the shaved half-heads and the gauntlet are history, and the book is read for what they show. Charged a little below the widest presence: its reading is narrower than that of Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, and much of it is as a document of Dostoevsky’s life or of Russian penal history, which is presence of a narrower kind.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on the Russian as far as it can be judged without hearing it; what this reading cannot hear in the sentence is not charged. The command is in the portrait and the scene: Akim Akimych’s punctilio; Gazin drunk and murderous and stopped; Petrov, who might kill the narrator over nothing and is fond of him; Isai Fomich at his Sabbath; Baklushin’s love story; the hospital ward at night with its chains; and above all Akulka’s Husband, a tale in a teller’s voice whose horror the teller cannot see, as finished as any story Dostoevsky wrote. Charged: the prose is calmer than in the novels and slack in places, with repetitions and generalising passages that run on; the frame is handled carelessly, the wife-murder vanishing and the nobleman held for parricide in the first chapter corrected in a later note as innocent; and the later chapters are hurried beside the first.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the theatricals (I.11), comic and festive, and the flogged men in the hospital (II.2 to II.3); or the goat Vaska paraded by the convicts and the murder of Akulka. One law governs them: what men do with whatever scrap of freedom is left them, and what is done to them when even that is taken. The play, the money, the vodka, the animals, the escape, the grievance and the killing all obey it, and the range is wide: comedy, horror, ethnography, essay, confession. Charged: the frame breaks its own law, since the introduction’s narrator is not the narrator of the notes; and the essays on the people at times speak in a register the scenes do not support, the later novelist’s thesis entering the witness’s book.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Held, and many orders. The state, as the penal system from the major’s whim to the gauntlet. Labour, as forced labour: the brickworks, the breaking up of old barges on the Irtysh, the workshops, and what labour means to the men. Class, in the gulf between the gentleman and the peasant. Nations and faiths under one roof: Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Dagestanis, Poles, a Jew, Old Believers. The sacred: Christmas, the Lenten fast and communion, Aley’s Gospel. The body, in the bath, the hospital and the wounds. Economy, in the convicts’ trade and smuggling. The natural order, in the animals, the steppe beyond the palisade, the river seen from the work site. Consciousness, in the narrator’s slow change. History is a ground and not an agent, and the family stands only at the edge, in Akulka’s village; that holds it a step below the novels.

Score: 8.6 / 10