{"id":89802,"date":"2015-09-15T14:51:52","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T18:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=89802"},"modified":"2015-09-15T15:48:58","modified_gmt":"2015-09-15T19:48:58","slug":"notes-from-a-dead-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/15\/notes-from-a-dead-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes from a Dead House"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first in a series by Max Nelson on prison literature.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

K\u00e4the Kollwitz, The Prisoners<\/i>, 1908.<\/p><\/div>\n

No writer intends to produce prison literature. Just as incarceration involves its own awful set of debasements, drudgeries, and abuses, so it marks any writing done under its restrictions as part of a genre, one of the oldest to which new work is still added daily. The loose canon of prison literature includes novels (Genet\u2019s Our Lady of the Flowers<\/em>,\u00a0Toer\u2019s Buru Quartet), autobiographies (Bunyan\u2019s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners<\/em>, Cleaver\u2019s Soul on Ice<\/em>, Madame Roland\u2019s memoirs), poems (Pound\u2019s Pisan Cantos<\/em>), erotic fictions (de Sade\u2019s Justine<\/em>, Cleland\u2019s Fanny Hill<\/em>), poetic dialogues (Boethius\u2019s The Consolation of Philosophy<\/em>), economic tracts (Gramsci\u2019s prison notebooks), histories (Nehru\u2019s Glimpses of World History<\/em>) and works of philosophy (portions of Wittgenstein\u2019s Tractatus<\/em>)\u2014but with the stipulation that whoever enters it must have suffered to an extent, and in a way, for which practically no one would volunteer. No prison writing is professional, but nor is any of it exactly recreational; it comes, by definition, from environments where \u201cany self-willed display of personality \u2026 is considered a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those words arrive early in Notes from a Dead House<\/a><\/em>, Fyodor Dostoyevsky\u2019s extraordinary, semi-fictionalized account of the internment he endured in a Siberian prison camp after being sentenced to four years of hard labor for his involvement in a revolutionary conspiracy\u2014and the latest installment in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky<\/a>\u2019s grand, ongoing effort to retranslate the Russian canon. Episodic, rambling, full of keen and deliberately stretched-out character sketches, the book is the drama of a person working out how to reproduce prison life in prose: its longueurs, its diversions, its pleasures, traumas, and inurements. <\/p>\n

Dostoyevsky didn\u2019t complete the book until six years after his release, and across its two main parts you can feel him at once organizing his memories, artfully revising them, and struggling to get them down before they fade. Few books give such a vivid picture of the sort of setting from which many great works of prison literature emerge; at the same time, few show such concern for the possibility <\/em>of prison literature in the first place. How, the novel asks, could any piece of writing come out of such restricted circumstances? How could any fail to? \u201cEven people sent up for life,\u201d the narrator remembers,<\/p>\n

\n

dreamed of something almost impossible. This eternal restlessness, manifesting itself silently but visibly; this strange fervor and impatience of sometimes involuntarily expressed hopes, at times so unfounded that they were more like raving, and, what was most striking of all, that often dwelt in the most practical-seeming minds\u2014all this gave the place an extraordinary appearance and character, so much so that these features may have constituted its most characteristic qualities.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The power of certain writing done from prison has to do with the way it alternatively staves off and gives rein to restlessness, fervor, and desperation. Sometimes it\u2019s a daily exercise, a consolation. In other cases, it gives the writer what Dostoyevsky\u2019s narrator insists even the most docile prisoners sometimes need: an \u201canguished, convulsive\u201d\u2014and, in some cases, recklessly hopeful\u2014\u201cdisplay of personality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dostoyevsky, left, in the Haymarket, March 1874<\/p><\/div>\n

The young men arrested in 1849 over the course of the Petrashevsky Affair, so named after the owner of the house where their meetings took place, seem to have resembled the disorganized anarchists that fill Dostoyevsky\u2019s later novel Demons<\/em>: a gaggle of clueless innocents and a smaller circle of more committed, driven dissidents. By nearly all accounts, Dostoyevsky belonged to the second group. Held during the deposition in Saint Petersburg\u2019s Peter and Paul Fortress, a sort of tsarist Bastille, he wrote a story called \u201cA Little Hero.\u201d After he was sentenced, subjected to a harrowing mock-execution, and shipped off to a grim labor camp in the southern Siberian city of Omsk, he wrote no fiction for four years.<\/p>\n

His living situation was not suited to literary work. \u201cImagine,\u201d Dostoyevsky wrote his brother in a long letter immediately after his release, \u201can old, dilapidated, wooden construction, which was supposed to have been pulled down years ago, and which was no longer fit for use. In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold.\u201d There follows, for pages, a squalid catalog of privations and miseries. To be caught writing anything in these quarters was to earn a flogging, which is not to say that Dostoyevsky didn\u2019t keep a notebook anyway: the scribbled pages he entrusted to a loyal orderly in the prison\u2019s hospital contained many of the sayings, songs, and anecdotes that would ripen into Notes from a Dead House<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Dostoyevsky\u2019s heroic biographer Joseph Frank argues convincingly that the writer underwent a major conversion during his time in Omsk: he came to consider working-class Russian people less as \u201cbarbarians awaiting the light\u201d\u2014his own characterization of the view he\u2019d had of the peasantry as a young revolutionary\u2014than as representatives of spiritual light itself. Forced into close quarters with murderers, thieves, and petty criminals, Dostoyevsky came to believe, as Frank puts it, \u201cin the moral beauty of the Russian peasantry, its infinite capacity to love and forgive those who had for so long sinned against it.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could also argue that he came to the less lofty conclusion that Alexander Petrovich, the author of the found text that comprises most of Notes from a Dead House<\/em>, arrives at in a late chapter: that the Russian working class is too unruly, too temperamentally varied, and too frustratingly human to bear any generalizations well. At a key stage in the novel, Alexander Petrovich chides himself for \u201ctrying to sort our whole prison into categories,\u201d when in fact \u201creality is infinitely diverse compared to all, even the most clever, conclusions of abstract thought, and does not suffer sharp and big distinctions. Reality tends towards fragmentation. We, too, had our own particular life, of whatever sort, but at least we had it, and not only an official, but an inner life of our own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across these three strange, dense sentences, the narrator drifts away from his initial epiphany and toward a second one. The discovery that human behavior is too cluttered and multifarious to conform to abstract generalizations bleeds into the discovery that a person\u2019s \u201cown\u201d life\u2014what Alexander Petrovich calls \u201cinner\u201d life\u2014is too stubbornly entrenched to bend to outer pressures and controls. It\u2019s easy to read Notes from a Dead House<\/em>, with its vivid, carefully composed (and, in the case of the cartoonish Isay Fomitch, distastefully anti-Semitic) character sketches, as Dostoyevsky\u2019s way of showing his newfound appreciation for the varieties of Russian working-class existence. But it makes just as much sense to read the book as a display of what writing can do to disclose\u2014and sustain\u2014the very kind of inwardness that labor camps are supposed to squash out.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"notesfromadeadhouse\"<\/a>At the start of the book\u2019s second chapter, it occurs to Alexander Petrovich that if a prisoner \u201cwere forced, for instance, to pour water from one tub into another and from the other into the first, to grind sand, [or] to carry a pile of dirt from one place to another and back again\u201d\u2014in other words, to spend his time on any work defined by \u201ccomplete, total uselessness\u201d\u2014he \u201cwould hang himself after a few days.\u201d The narrator thanks God that his daily work in prison at least has a purpose. At the same time, he\u2019s hinting at a theme on which Notes from a Dead House<\/em> constantly insists: the numbing, repetitive dullness of prison life. Like boot camp or factory work, the novel implies, imprisonment flattens individual thought by pounding away at it slowly, steadily, and with as little rhythmic variation as possible.<\/p>\n

Most of the book\u2019s action revolves around the convicts\u2019 attempts to make room for some color and change in their days: card games, knife fights, thefts, drinking sprees, escape attempts, holiday celebrations, a play. But the most dramatic such attempt in the novel is the shape of the narrative itself. Alexander Petrovich is a sloppy storyteller. He keeps filling in background information belatedly. \u201cI gave Petrov a few kopecks to provide soap and some bast,\u201d he remembers in a sketch of the camp\u2019s bathhouse, before remembering to clarify that \u201csoap was sold right there in the vestibule.\u201d It\u2019s only after a lengthy description of his earliest encounter with the same Petrov that it occurs to him to connect the character with an earlier story: \u201cI will note, however, that this Petrov was the same one who had wanted to kill the major when he was summoned to be punished.\u201d Many of the novel\u2019s chapters are really loose assemblages of anecdotes and essayistic fragments. One, the first of two set in the camp hospital, ends with the agonizing account of what one grizzled convict tells the sergeant of the watch over another prisoner\u2019s still-warm corpse. (\u201cHe had a mother, too!\u201d) After telling the story, it\u2019s as if Alexander Petrovich suddenly snaps back into focus. \u201cBut,\u201d he confesses, \u201cI\u2019ve strayed from my subject \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n

The form of Notes from a Dead House<\/em> is constantly at odds with its subject matter; wherever the narrative calls for a dreary roll call of routine tasks and daily humiliations, the book darts off, digresses or swerves to the side. (The effect is heightened in the hands of Pevear and Volokhonsky, who\u2014as in their earlier Dostoyevsky translations\u2014give the writer\u2019s prose a choppier, more elliptical and discursive rhythm than it could ever have reached under Constance Garnett\u2019s majestic, more grammatically fussy treatment.) It\u2019s one of the guiding assumptions behind Notes from a Dead House<\/em> that the novel as a form can accommodate the free, nimble movements even of a consciousness linked to an imprisoned body. If Dostoyevsky\u2019s captors had found the ribald, cacophonous commonplace book<\/a> he assembled out of overheard insults and tossed-off sayings during his time in prison, they would have recognized that they were dealing with a spirit not easily suppressed:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2014 So, my friends, this is the tenth year now I\u2019m wandering.
\u2014 Me and Big Uncle Vanya killed the death of the cow!
\u2014 Ha, so they brought in the tomfooling pig!
\u2014 You with your dirty mug dare stand in the breadline?
\u2014 Poor me, I don\u2019t even have an aunt, so screw her.
\u2014 And I, brother, with the Lord\u2019s help have become a major.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Small wonder that they ordered writers flogged. It might not have been one of Dostoyevsky\u2019s intentions to compose great prison literature\u2014but when he found himself forced to work in the genre, it was no use trying to keep his personality from emerging powerfully and digressively on the page.<\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em>n+1, <\/em>Film Comment, and <\/em>The Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the next installment of Max\u2019s prison literature series: <\/em>St. Paul, Eldridge Cleaver, and John Bunyan.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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