Dostoevsky “Notes from the House of the Dead” - analysis. “Notes from a Dead Man” - Kazan rock inspired by karate Notes from a Dead House read online

Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Notes from a Dead House

Part one

Introduction

In the remote regions of Siberia, among the steppes, mountains or impenetrable forests, you occasionally come across small towns, with one, many with two thousand inhabitants, wooden, nondescript, with two churches - one in the city, the other in the cemetery - towns that look more like good village near Moscow than the city. They are usually quite sufficiently equipped with police officers, assessors and all other subaltern ranks. In general, in Siberia, despite the cold, it is extremely warm. People live simple, illiberal lives; the order is old, strong, sanctified for centuries. The officials who rightly play the role of the Siberian nobility are either natives, inveterate Siberians, or visitors from Russia, mostly from the capitals, seduced by the non-credited salaries, double runs and tempting hopes for the future. Among them, those who know how to solve the riddle of life almost always remain in Siberia and take root in it with pleasure. They subsequently bear rich and sweet fruits. But others, frivolous people who do not know how to solve the riddle of life, will soon become bored with Siberia and ask themselves with longing: why did they come to it? They eagerly serve out their legal term of service, three years, and at the end of it they immediately bother about their transfer and return home, scolding Siberia and laughing at it. They are wrong: not only from an official point of view, but even from many points of view, one can be blissful in Siberia. The climate is excellent; there are many remarkably rich and hospitable merchants; there are many extremely wealthy foreigners. The young ladies bloom with roses and are moral to the last extreme. The game flies through the streets and stumbles upon the hunter. An unnatural amount of champagne is drunk. The caviar is amazing. The harvest happens in other places as early as fifteen... In general, the land is blessed. You just need to know how to use it. In Siberia they know how to use it.

In one of these cheerful and self-satisfied towns, with the sweetest people, the memory of which will remain indelible in my heart, I met Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a settler who was born in Russia as a nobleman and landowner, then became a second-class exile and convict for the murder of his wife. and, after the expiration of the ten-year term of hard labor prescribed for him by law, he humbly and quietly lived out his life in the town of K. as a settler. He, in fact, was assigned to one suburban volost, but lived in the city, having the opportunity to earn at least some food in it by teaching children. In Siberian cities one often encounters teachers from exiled settlers; they are not disdained. They teach mainly the French language, which is so necessary in the field of life and which, without them, in the remote regions of Siberia they would have no idea. The first time I met Alexander Petrovich was in the house of an old, honored and hospitable official, Ivan Ivanovich Gvozdikov, who had five daughters, of different years, who showed wonderful hopes. Alexander Petrovich gave them lessons four times a week, thirty silver kopecks per lesson. His appearance interested me. He was an extremely pale and thin man, not yet old, about thirty-five, small and frail. He was always dressed very cleanly, in a European style. If you spoke to him, he looked at you extremely intently and attentively, listening to every word of yours with strict politeness, as if he were pondering it, as if you asked him a task with your question or wanted to extract some secret from him, and, finally, he answered clearly and briefly, but weighing every word of his answer so much that you suddenly felt awkward for some reason and you yourself finally rejoiced at the end of the conversation. I then asked Ivan Ivanovich about him and found out that Goryanchikov lives impeccably and morally and that otherwise Ivan Ivanovich would not have invited him for his daughters; but that he is a terrible unsociable person, hides from everyone, is extremely learned, reads a lot, but speaks very little, and that in general it is quite difficult to talk to him. Others argued that he was positively crazy, although they found that, in essence, this was not such an important flaw, that many of the honorary members of the city were ready to favor Alexander Petrovich in every possible way, that he could even be useful, write requests, etc. They believed that he must have decent relatives in Russia, maybe not even the last people, but they knew that from the very exile he stubbornly cut off all relations with them - in a word, he was harming himself. In addition, we all knew his story, we knew that he killed his wife in the first year of his marriage, killed out of jealousy and denounced himself (which greatly facilitated his punishment). Such crimes are always looked upon as misfortunes and regretted. But, despite all this, the eccentric stubbornly avoided everyone and appeared in people only to give lessons.

At first I didn’t pay much attention to him, but, I don’t know why, little by little he began to interest me. There was something mysterious about him. There was not the slightest opportunity to talk to him. Of course, he always answered my questions, and even with such an air as if he considered this his primary duty; but after his answers I somehow felt burdened to question him longer; and on his face, after such conversations, some kind of suffering and fatigue was always visible. I remember walking with him one fine summer evening from Ivan Ivanovich. Suddenly I took it into my head to invite him to my place for a minute to smoke a cigarette. I cannot describe the horror that was expressed on his face; he was completely lost, began to mutter some incoherent words and suddenly, looking angrily at me, he started running in the opposite direction. I was even surprised. Since then, whenever he met me, he looked at me as if with some kind of fear. But I didn’t calm down; I was drawn to him by something, and a month later, out of the blue, I went to see Goryanchikov. Of course, I acted stupidly and indelicately. He lived on the very edge of the city, with an old bourgeois woman who had a daughter who was sick with consumption, and that daughter had an illegitimate daughter, a child of about ten years old, a pretty and cheerful girl. Alexander Petrovich was sitting with her and teaching her to read the minute I came into his room. When he saw me, he became so confused, as if I had caught him committing some crime. He was completely confused, jumped up from his chair and looked at me with all his eyes. We finally sat down; he closely watched my every glance, as if he suspected some special mysterious meaning in each of them. I guessed that he was suspicious to the point of madness. He looked at me with hatred, almost asking: “Are you going to leave here soon?” I talked to him about our town, about current news; he remained silent and smiled evilly; It turned out that he not only did not know the most ordinary, well-known city news, but was not even interested in knowing them. Then I started talking about our region, about its needs; he listened to me in silence and looked into my eyes so strangely that I finally felt ashamed of our conversation. However, I almost teased him with new books and magazines; I had them in my hands, fresh from the post office, and I offered them to him, still uncut. He cast a greedy glance at them, but immediately changed his mind and declined the offer, citing lack of time. Finally, I said goodbye to him and, leaving him, I felt that some unbearable weight had been lifted from my heart. I was ashamed and it seemed extremely stupid to pester a person whose main goal was to hide as far away from the whole world as possible. But the job was done. I remember that I noticed almost no books on him, and, therefore, it was unfair to say about him that he reads a lot. However, driving past his windows twice, very late at night, I noticed a light in them. What did he do while he sat until dawn? Didn't he write? And if so, what exactly?

Circumstances removed me from our town for three months. Returning home in the winter, I learned that Alexander Petrovich died in the fall, died in solitude and never even called a doctor to him. The town has almost forgotten about him. His apartment was empty. I immediately met the owner of the deceased, intending to find out from her; What exactly was her tenant doing and did he write anything? For two kopecks she brought me a whole basket of papers left behind by the deceased. The old woman admitted that she had already used up two notebooks. She was a gloomy and silent woman, from whom it was difficult to get anything worthwhile. She couldn’t tell me anything special new about her tenant. According to her, he almost never did anything and for months at a time did not open a book or pick up a pen; but whole nights he walked back and forth across the room and kept thinking about something, and sometimes talking to himself; that he loved and caressed her granddaughter, Katya, very much, especially since he found out that her name was Katya, and that on Katerina’s day every time he went to serve a memorial service for someone. He could not tolerate guests; he only came out of the yard to teach the children; he even glanced sideways at her, the old woman, when she came, once a week, to tidy up his room at least a little, and almost never said a single word to her for three whole years. I asked Katya: does she remember her teacher? She looked at me silently, turned to the wall and began to cry. Therefore, this man could at least force someone to love him.

“Notes from the House of the Dead” can rightfully be called the book of the century. If Dostoevsky had left behind only “Notes from the House of the Dead,” he would have gone down in the history of Russian and world literature as its original celebrity. It is no coincidence that critics assigned him, during his lifetime, a metonymic “middle name” - “the author of Notes from the House of the Dead” and used it instead of the writer’s surname. This book of Dostoevsky's books caused, as he accurately anticipated back in 1859, i.e. at the beginning of work on it, interest was “most capital” and it became a sensational literary and social event of the era.

The reader was shocked by pictures from the hitherto unknown world of Siberian “military hard labor” (military was harder than civilian), honestly and courageously painted by the hand of its prisoner - a master of psychological prose. “Notes from the House of the Dead” made a strong (though not equal) impression on A.I. Herzen, L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgeneva, N.G. Chernyshevsky, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and others. To the triumphant, but over the years, as if already half-forgotten glory of the author of “Poor People”, a powerful refreshing addition was added by the newly-minted glory of the great martyr and Dante’s House of the Dead at the same time. The book not only restored, but raised Dostoevsky’s literary and civic popularity to new heights.

However, the existence of “Notes from the House of the Dead” in Russian literature cannot be called idyllic. The censorship found fault with them stupidly and absurdly. Their “mixed” newspaper and magazine initial publication (the weekly Russkiy Mir and the magazine Vremya) lasted more than two years. The enthusiastic readership did not mean the understanding that Dostoevsky expected. He regarded the results of literary critical assessments of his book as disappointing: “In criticism”3<аписки>from Meurthe<вого>"At home" means that Dostoevsky exposed the prisons, but now it is outdated. That's what they said in the book<ых>shops<нах>, offering another, closer denunciation of the prisons" (Notebooks 1876-1877). Critics belittled the significance and lost the meaning of Notes from the House of the Dead. Such one-sided and opportunistic approaches to “Notes from the House of the Dead” only as an “exposure” of the penitentiary-convict system and, figuratively and symbolically, in general the “house of the Romanovs” (V.I. Lenin’s assessment), an institution of state power, have not been completely overcome and have not yet been completely overcome. so far. The writer, meanwhile, did not focus on “accusatory” goals, and they did not go beyond the bounds of immanent literary and artistic necessity. That is why politically biased interpretations of the book are essentially fruitless. As always, Dostoevsky here, as a heart expert, is immersed in the elements of the personality of modern man, developing his concept of the characterological motives of people’s behavior in conditions of extreme social evil and violence.

The disaster that occurred in 1849 had dire consequences for Petrashevsky Dostoevsky. A prominent expert and historian of the royal prison M.N. Gernet, eeriely, but without exaggerating, comments on Dostoevsky’s stay in the Omsk prison: “One must be amazed that the writer did not die here” ( Gernet M.N. History of the royal prison. M., 1961. T. 2. P. 232). However, Dostoevsky took full advantage of the unique opportunity to comprehend up close and from the inside, in all the details inaccessible in the wild, the life of the common people, constrained by hellish circumstances, and to lay the foundations of his own literary knowledge of the people. “You are unworthy to talk about the people; you understand nothing about them. You did not live with him, but I lived with him,” he wrote to his opponents a quarter of a century later (Notebooks 1875-1876). “Notes from the House of the Dead” is a book worthy of the people (peoples) of Russia, based entirely on the difficult personal experience of the writer.

The creative story of “Notes from the House of the Dead” begins with secret entries in “my convict notebook.”<ую>", which Dostoevsky, violating the provisions of the law, led in the Omsk prison; from Semipalatinsk sketches “from memories<...>stay in hard labor" (letter to A.N. Maikov dated January 18, 1856) and letters of 1854-1859. (M.M. and A.M. Dostoevsky, A.N. Maikov, N.D. Fonvizina, etc.), as well as from oral stories among people close to him. The book was conceived and created for many years and surpassed in the duration of the creative time devoted to it. Hence, in particular, its genre-stylistic finishing, unusual for Dostoevsky in its thoroughness (not a shadow of the style of “Poor People” or), the elegant simplicity of the narrative is entirely the peak and perfection of form.

The problem of defining the genre of Notes from the House of the Dead has puzzled researchers. In the set of definitions proposed for the “Notes...” there are almost all types of literary prose: memoirs, book, novel, essay, research... And yet not a single one agrees in the totality of characteristics with the original. The aesthetic phenomenon of this original work consists of inter-genre borderliness and hybridity. Only the author of “Notes from the House of the Dead” was able to control the combination of document and address with the poetry of complex artistic and psychological writing that determined the unique originality of the book.

The elementary position of the recollector was rejected by Dostoevsky initially (see the instruction: “My personality will disappear” - in a letter to his brother Mikhail dated October 9, 1859) as unacceptable for a number of reasons. The fact of his condemnation to hard labor, well known in itself, did not represent a forbidden subject in the censorship-political sense (with the accession of Alexander II, censorship relaxations were outlined). The fictitious figure who ended up in prison for murdering his wife could not mislead anyone either. In essence, it was the mask of Dostoevsky the convict, which everyone understood. In other words, the autobiographical (and therefore valuable and captivating) story about the Omsk penal servitude and its inhabitants of 1850-1854, although overshadowed by a certain eye on censorship, was written according to the laws of an artistic text, free from the self-sufficient and restrained memory of the everyday personality memoir empiricism.

So far, no satisfactory explanation has been offered of how the writer managed to achieve a harmonious combination in a single creative process of chronicling (factography) with personal confession, knowledge of the people with self-knowledge, analyticity of thought, philosophical meditation with the epic nature of the image, meticulous microscopic analysis of psychological reality with fiction entertaining and concisely artless, Pushkin's type of storytelling. Moreover, “Notes from the House of the Dead” was an encyclopedia of Siberian hard labor in the mid-nineteenth century. The external and internal life of its population is covered - with the laconicism of the story - to the maximum, with unsurpassed completeness. Dostoevsky did not ignore a single idea of ​​the convict consciousness. The scenes from the life of the prison, chosen by the author for scrupulous consideration and leisurely comprehension, are recognized as stunning: “Bathhouse”, “Performance”, “Hospital”, “Claim”, “Exit from hard labor”. Their large, panoramic plan does not obscure the mass of all-encompassing particulars and details, no less piercing and necessary in their ideological and artistic significance in the overall humanistic composition of the work (the penny alms given by the girl to Goryanchikov; the undressing of the shackled men in the bathhouse; the flowers of the prisoner’s argotic eloquence and etc.)

The visual philosophy of “Notes from the House of the Dead” proves: “a realist in the highest sense” - as Dostoevsky would later call himself - did not allow his most humane (by no means “cruel”!) talent to deviate one iota from the truth of life, no matter how unpleasant and tragic it was neither was. With his book about the House of the Dead, he courageously challenged the literature of half-truths about man. Goryanchikov the narrator (behind whom Dostoevsky himself visibly and tangibly stands), observing a sense of proportion and tact, looks into all corners of the human soul, without avoiding the most distant and dark ones. Thus, not only the savage and sadistic antics of prison prisoners (Gazin, Akulkin’s husband) and executioners-executors by position (lieutenants Zherebyatnikov, Smekalov) came into his field of vision. The anatomy of the ugly and the vicious knows no bounds. “Brothers in misfortune” steal and drink the Bible, talk “about the most unnatural actions, with the most childishly cheerful laughter,” get drunk and fight on holy days, rave in their sleep with knives and “Raskolnikov’s” axes, go crazy, engage in sodomy (obscene “companionship” to which Sirotkin and Sushilov belong) get used to all sorts of abominations. One after another, from private observations of the current life of convict people, generalizing aphoristic judgments and maxims follow: “Man is a creature that gets used to everything, and, I think, this is the best definition of him”; “There are people like tigers, eager to lick blood”; “It’s hard to imagine how human nature can be distorted,” etc. - then they will join the artistic philosophical and anthropological fund of the “Great Pentateuch” and “The Diary of a Writer.” Scientists are right when they consider it not “Notes from Underground”, but “Notes from the House of the Dead” to be the beginning of many beginnings in the poetics and ideology of Dostoevsky, a novelist and publicist. It is in this work that the origins of the main literary ideological, thematic and compositional complexes and solutions of Dostoevsky the artist: crime and punishment; voluptuous tyrants and their victims; freedom and money; suffering and love; the shackled “our extraordinary people” and the nobles - “iron noses” and “fly-drags”; the chronicler narrator and the people and events he describes in the spirit of diary confession. In “Notes from the House of the Dead,” the writer received a blessing for his further creative path.

With all the transparency of the artistic-autobiographical relationship between Dostoevsky (author; prototype; imaginary publisher) and Goryanchikov (narrator; character; imaginary memoirist), there is no reason to simplify them. A complex poetic and psychological mechanism is hidden and operates latently here. It has been correctly noted: “Dostoevsky typified his cautious fate” (Zakharov). This allowed him to remain in “Notes...” himself, the unconditional Dostoevsky, and at the same time, in principle, following the example of Pushkin’s Belkin, not to be him. The advantage of such a creative “double world” is the freedom of artistic thought, which, however, comes from actually documented, historically confirmed sources.

The ideological and artistic significance of “Notes from the House of the Dead” seems immeasurable, and the questions raised in them are innumerable. This is - without exaggeration - a kind of poetic universe of Dostoevsky, a short version of his complete confession about man. Here is an indirect summary of the colossal spiritual experience of a genius who lived for four years “in a heap” with people from the people, robbers, murderers, vagabonds, when, without receiving the proper creative outlet, “inner work was in full swing,” and rare, from time to time, fragmentary entries in the “Siberian Notebook” only fueled the passion for full-blooded literary pursuits.

Dostoevsky-Goryanchikov thinks on the scale of the entire geographically and nationally great Russia. A paradox arises in the image of space. Behind the prison fence (“palami”) of the House of the Dead, the outlines of an immense power appear in dotted lines: the Danube, Taganrog, Starodubye, Chernigov, Poltava, Riga, St. Petersburg, Moscow, “a village near Moscow,” Kursk, Dagestan, the Caucasus, Perm, Siberia, Tyumen, Tobolsk , Irtysh, Omsk, Kyrgyz “free Steppe” (in Dostoevsky’s dictionary this word is written with a capital letter), Ust-Kamenogorsk, Eastern Siberia, Nerchinsk, Petropavlovsk port. Accordingly, for sovereign thinking, America, the Black (Red) Sea, Mount Vesuvius, the island of Sumatra and, indirectly, France and Germany are mentioned. The narrator's living contact with the East is emphasized (oriental motifs of the “Steppe”, Muslim countries). This is consonant with the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional character of “Notes...”. The prison artel consists of Great Russians (including Siberians), Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Kalmyks, Tatars, “Circassians” - Lezgins, Chechens. Baklushin's story depicts the Russian-Baltic Germans. Named and, to one degree or another, active in “Notes from the House of the Dead” are the Kyrgyz (Kazakhs), “Muslims,” Chukhonka, Armenian, Turks, Gypsies, Frenchman, Frenchwoman. The poetically determined scattering and cohesion of topoi and ethnic groups has its own, already “novelistic” expressive logic. Not only is the House of the Dead part of Russia, but Russia is also part of the House of the Dead.

The main spiritual conflict of Dostoevsky-Goryanchikov is connected with the theme of Russia: bewilderment and pain in the face of the fact of the class alienation of the people from the noble intelligentsia, its best part. The chapter “Claim” contains the key to understanding what happened to the narrator-character and the author of the tragedy. Their attempt to stand in solidarity on the side of the rebels was rejected with deadly categoricality: they are - under no circumstances and never - “comrades” for their people. Exit from hard labor resolved the most painful problem for all prisoners: de jure and de facto, it was an end to prison bondage. The ending of “Notes from the House of the Dead” is bright and uplifting: “Freedom, new life, resurrection from the dead... What a glorious moment!” But the problem of separation from the people, not provided for by any legal codes in Russia, but which pierced Dostoevsky’s heart forever (“the robber taught me a lot” - Notebook 1875-1876), remained. It gradually - in the writer’s desire to solve it at least for himself - democratized the direction of Dostoevsky’s creative development and ultimately led him to a kind of pochvennik populism.

A modern researcher successfully calls “Notes from the House of the Dead” “a book about the people” (Tunimanov). Russian literature before Dostoevsky did not know anything like this. The central position of the folk theme in the conceptual basis of the book forces us to take it into account in the first place. “Notes...” testified to Dostoevsky’s enormous success in understanding the personality of the people. The content of “Notes from the House of the Dead” is not at all limited to what Dostoevsky-Goryanchikov personally saw and personally experienced. The other, no less significant half is what came to “Notes...” from the environment that closely surrounded the author-narrator, orally, “voiced” (and what the corpus of notes from the “Siberian Notebook” reminds of).

Folk storytellers, jokers, wits, “Conversations Petrovichi” and other Chrysostoms played an invaluable “co-author” role in the artistic concept and implementation of “Notes from the House of the Dead”. Without what I heard and directly adopted from them, the book - in the form it is - would not have taken place. Prison stories, or “chatter” (Dostoevsky-Goryanchikov’s censorship-neutralizing expression) recreate the living – as if according to the dictionary of a certain cautious Vladimir Dahl – charm of popular colloquial speech of the mid-nineteenth century. The masterpiece inside “Notes from the House of the Dead,” the story “Shark’s Husband,” no matter how stylized we recognize it, is based on everyday folk prose of the highest artistic and psychological merit. In fact, this brilliant interpretation of an oral folk tale is akin to Pushkin’s “Fairy Tales” and Gogol’s “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.” The same can be said regarding Baklushin’s fabulous romantic confession story. Of exceptional importance for the book are the constant narrative references to rumors, rumors, rumors, visits - grains of everyday folklore. With appropriate reservations, “Notes from the House of the Dead” should be considered a book, to a certain extent, told by the people, “brothers in misfortune,” so great is the proportion of colloquial tradition, legends, stories, and momentary living words in it.

Dostoevsky was one of the first in our literature to outline the types and varieties of folk storytellers, and cited stylized (and improved by him) examples of their oral creativity. The House of the Dead, which, among other things, was also a “house of folklore,” taught the writer to distinguish between storytellers: “realists” (Baklushin, Shishkov, Sirotkin), “comedians” and “buffoons” (Skuratov), ​​“psychologists” and “anecdotes” ( Shapkin), whipping “veils” (Luchka). Dostoevsky the novelist could not have found the analytical study of the convict “Conversations of the Petrovichs” more useful than the lexical and characterological experience that was concentrated and poetically processed in “Notes from the House of the Dead” and which later fed his narrative skills (Chronicler, biographer of the Karamazovs, writer) in the Diary, etc.).

Dostoevsky-Goryanchikov equally listens to his convicts - “good” and “bad”, “near” and “distant”, “famous” and “ordinary”, “living” and “dead”. In his “class” soul there are no hostile, “lordly” or disgusting feelings towards his fellow commoner. On the contrary, he reveals a Christian-sympathetic, truly “comradely” and “brotherly” attention to the mass of people under arrest. Attention, extraordinary in its ideological and psychological purpose and ultimate goals - through the prism of the people, to explain oneself, and a person in general, and the principles of his life. This was caught by Ap. A. Grigoriev immediately after the publication of “Notes from the House of the Dead”: their author, the critic noted, “through a painful psychological process reached the point that in the “House of the Dead” he completely merged with the people...” ( Grigoriev Ap. A. Lit. criticism. M., 1967. P. 483).

Dostoevsky did not write a dispassionately objectified chronicle of hard labor, but a confessional-epic and, moreover, “Christian” and “edifying” story about “the most gifted, the most powerful people of all our people,” about its “mighty forces,” which in the House of the Dead “died in vain.” " In the poetic folk history of “Notes from the House of the Dead,” samples of most of the main characters of the late Dostoevsky artist were expressed: “soft-hearted,” “kind,” “persistent,” “nice” and “sincere” (Aley); indigenous Great Russian, “precious” and “full of fire and life” (Baklushin); “Kazan orphan”, “quiet and meek”, but capable of rebellion in extremes (Sirotkin); “the most decisive, the most fearless of all convicts,” heroic in potential (Petrov); in Avvakum’s style, stoically suffering “for the faith,” “meek and meek like a child,” a schismatic rebel (“grandfather”); “spidery” (Gazin); artistic (Potseykin); “superman” of hard labor (Orlov) - the entire socio-psychological collection of human types revealed in “Notes from the House of the Dead” cannot be listed. In the end, one thing remains important: the characterological studies of the Russian prison revealed to the writer the horizonless spiritual world of a person from the people. On these empirical grounds, Dostoevsky’s novelistic and journalistic thought was updated and affirmed. The internal creative rapprochement with the folk element, which began in the era of the House of the Dead, brought it to the formulated by the writer in 1871 “ law turn to nationality."

The historical merits of the author of “Notes from the House of the Dead” to Russian ethnological culture will be infringed if we do not pay special attention to some aspects of folk life that found their discoverer and first interpreter in Dostoevsky.

The chapters “Performance” and “Convict Animals” are given a special ideological and aesthetic status in “Notes...”. They depict the life and customs of prisoners in an environment close to natural, primordial, i.e. careless folk activities. The essay on the “people's theater” (the term was invented by Dostoevsky and entered the circulation of folklore and theater studies), which formed the core of the famous eleventh chapter of “Notes from the House of the Dead”, is priceless. This is the only such complete (“reporting”) and competent description of the phenomenon of folk theater of the 19th century in Russian literature and ethnography. - an indispensable and classic source on Russian theatrical history.

The drawing of the composition “Notes from the House of the Dead” is like a convict chain. The shackles are the heavy, melancholic emblem of the House of the Dead. But the chain arrangement of chapter links in the book is asymmetrical. The chain, consisting of 21 links, is divided in half by the middle (unpaired) eleventh chapter. In the main weak-plot architecture of Notes from the House of the Dead, chapter eleven is out of the ordinary, compositionally, highlighted. Dostoevsky poetically endowed her with enormous life-affirming power. This is the pre-programmed climax of the story. The writer pays tribute here to the spiritual power and beauty of the people with all the measure of his talent. In a joyful impulse towards the bright and eternal, the soul of Dostoevsky-Goryanchikov, jubilantly, merges with the soul of the people (actors and spectators). The principle of human freedom and the inalienable right to it triumphs. Folk art is set as a model, as the highest authorities in Russia can verify: “This is Kamarinskaya in all its scope, and it would really be good if Glinka even accidentally heard it in our prison.”

Behind the prison palisade, its own, so to speak, “prison-convict” civilization has developed - a direct reflection, first of all, of the traditional culture of the Russian peasant. Usually the chapter on animals is viewed from a stereotypical angle: our smaller brothers share the fate of slaves with the prisoners, figuratively and symbolically complement, duplicate and shade it. This is undeniably true. The animalistic pages really correlate with the bestial principles in people from the House of the Dead and beyond. But the idea of ​​external similarity between human and bestial is alien to Dostoevsky. Both in the bestiary plots of “Notes from the House of the Dead” are connected by ties of natural-historical kinship. The narrator does not follow Christian traditions, which prescribe to see chimerical similarities of the divine or the devil behind the real properties of creatures. He is entirely at the mercy of healthy, this-worldly folk-peasant ideas about animals that are everyday close to people and about unity with them. The poetry of the chapter “Convict Animals” lies in the chaste simplicity of the story about a man of the people, taken in his eternal relationship with animals (horse, dog, goat and eagle); relationships, respectively: loving-economic, utilitarian-self-dealing, amusing-carnival and mercifully respectful. The bestiary chapter is involved in a single “passive psychological process" and completes the picture of the tragedy of life in the space of the House of the Dead.

Many books have been written about Russian prison. From “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum” to the grandiose paintings of A.I. Solzhenitsyn and camp stories by V.T. Shalamov. But “Notes from the House of the Dead” remained and will remain fundamental in this literary series. They are like an immortal parable or a providential mythologem, a certain omniscient archetype from Russian literature and history. What could be more unfair than to look for them in the days of the so-called “the lie of Dostoevschina” (Kirpotin)!

A book about Dostoevsky’s great, albeit “unintentional” closeness to the people, about his kind, intercessory and infinitely sympathetic attitude towards them - “Notes from the House of the Dead” is pristinely imbued with a “Christian human-folk” view ( Grigoriev Ap. A. Lit. criticism. P. 503) to an unsettled world. This is the secret of their perfection and charm.

Vladimirtsev V.P. Notes from the House of the Dead // Dostoevsky: Works, letters, documents: Dictionary-reference book. St. Petersburg, 2008. pp. 70-74.

“Notes from the House of the Dead” is the pinnacle work of Dostoevsky’s mature non-novel creativity. The sketch story “Notes from the House of the Dead,” whose life material is based on the impressions of the writer’s four-year hard labor imprisonment in Omsk, occupies a special place both in the work of Dostoevsky and in Russian literature of the mid-19th century.

Being dramatic and sorrowful in its themes and life material, “Notes from the House of the Dead” is one of the most harmonious, perfect, “Pushkin” works of Dostoevsky. The innovative nature of “Notes from the House of the Dead” was realized in the synthetic and multi-genre form of an essay story, approaching the organization of the whole to the Book (Bible). The way of telling the story, the nature of the narration from the inside overcomes the tragedy of the event outline of the “notes” and leads the reader to the light of the “true Christian”, according to L.N. Tolstoy, a view of the world, the fate of Russia and the biography of the main narrator, indirectly related to the biography of Dostoevsky himself. “Notes from the House of the Dead” is a book about the fate of Russia in the unity of specific historical and metahistorical aspects, about the spiritual journey of Goryanchikov, like Dante’s wanderer in the “Divine Comedy,” who, through the power of creativity and love, overcomes the “dead” principles of Russian life and finds a spiritual fatherland ( House). Unfortunately, the acute historical and social relevance of the problems of “Notes from the House of the Dead” overshadowed its artistic perfection, innovation of this type of prose and moral and philosophical uniqueness from both contemporaries and researchers of the 20th century. Modern literary criticism, despite the huge number of private empirical works on the problems and understanding of the socio-historical material of the book, is taking only the first steps towards studying the unique nature of the artistic integrity of Notes from the House of the Dead, poetics, innovation of the author’s position and the nature of intertextuality.

This article gives a modern interpretation of “Notes from the House of the Dead” through an analysis of the narrative, understood as a process of implementing the author’s holistic activity. The author of “Notes from the House of the Dead”, as a kind of dynamic integrating principle, realizes his position in constant oscillations between two opposite (and never fully realized) possibilities - to enter inside the world he created, striving to interact with the heroes as with living people (this technique is called “getting used to it”), and at the same time, distance himself as much as possible from the work he created, emphasizing the fictionality, “composition” of the characters and situations (a technique called “alienation” by M. M. Bakhtin).

Historical and literary situation in the early 1860s. with its active diffusion of genres, giving rise to the need for hybrid, mixed forms, made it possible to realize in “Notes from the House of the Dead” an epic of folk life, which with some degree of convention can be called a “sketch story”. As in any story, the movement of artistic meaning in “Notes from the House of the Dead” is realized not in the plot, but in the interaction of different narrative plans (speech of the main narrator, oral convict narrators, publisher, rumor).

The very name “Notes from the House of the Dead” belongs not to the person who wrote them (Goryanchikov calls his work “Scenes from the House of the Dead”), but to the publisher. The title seems to have met two voices, two points of view (Goryanchikov’s and the publisher’s), even two semantic principles (the concrete chronicle: “Notes from the House of the Dead” - as an indication of the genre nature - and the symbolic-conceptual formula-oxymoron “The House of the Dead” ).

The figurative formula “The House of the Dead” appears as a unique moment of concentration of the semantic energy of the narrative and at the same time, in the most general form, outlines the intertextual channel in which the author’s value activity will unfold (from the symbolic name of the Russian Empire Necropolis by P.Ya. Chaadaev to allusions to V. F. Odoevsky's stories "The Mockery of a Dead Man", "Ball", "The Living Dead" and more broadly - the theme of dead, spiritless reality in the prose of Russian romanticism and, finally, to the internal controversy with the title of Gogol's poem "Dead Souls"), the oxymoronic nature of such a name as if repeated by Dostoevsky on a different semantic level.

The bitter paradox of Gogol’s name (the immortal soul is declared dead) is contrasted with the internal tension of opposing principles in the definition of “House of the Dead”: “Dead” due to stagnation, lack of freedom, isolation from the big world, and most of all from the unconscious spontaneity of life, but still a “house” “- not only as housing, warmth of the hearth, refuge, sphere of existence, but also as a family, clan, community of people (“strange family”), belonging to one national integrity.

The depth and semantic capacity of the artistic prose of “Notes from the House of the Dead” reveal themselves especially clearly in the introduction about Siberia that opens the introduction. Here is the result of spiritual communication between the provincial publisher and the author of the notes: at the plot-event level, understanding, it would seem, did not take place, however, the structure of the narrative reveals the interaction and gradual penetration of Goryanchikov’s worldview into the publisher’s style.

The publisher, who is also the first reader of “Notes from the House of the Dead,” comprehends the life of the House of the Dead, at the same time looking for the answer to Goryanchikov, moving towards an increasing understanding of him not through the facts and circumstances of life in hard labor, but rather through the process of familiarization with the narrator’s worldview. And the extent of this familiarization and understanding is recorded in Chapter VII of Part Two, in the publisher’s message about the further fate of the prisoner - an imaginary parricide.

But Goryanchikov himself is looking for the key to the people’s soul through the painfully difficult introduction to the unity of people’s life. The reality of the House of the Dead is refracted through different types of consciousness: publisher, A.P. Goryanchikov, Shishkov, telling the story of a ruined girl (chapter “Akulkin’s Husband”); All these ways of perceiving the world look at each other, interact, correct one another, and at their border a new universal vision of the world is born.

The introduction takes a look at Notes from the House of the Dead from the outside; it ends with a description of the publisher's first impression of their reading. It is important that in the publisher’s mind there are both principles that determine the internal tension of the story: this is interest in both the object and the subject of the story.

“Notes from the House of the Dead” is a life story not in the biographical, but rather in the existential sense; it is a story not of survival, but of life in the conditions of the House of the Dead. Two interconnected processes determine the nature of the narrative of “Notes from the House of the Dead”: this is the story of the formation and growth of Goryanchikov’s living soul, which takes place as he comprehends the living, fruitful foundations of national life, revealed in the life of the House of the Dead. The narrator’s spiritual self-knowledge and his comprehension of the folk element occur simultaneously. The compositional structure of “Notes from the House of the Dead” is mainly determined by a change in the narrator’s view - both by the patterns of psychological reflection of reality in his mind, and by the direction of his attention to the phenomena of life.

“Notes from the House of the Dead,” according to the external and internal type of compositional organization, reproduces the annual circle, the circle of life in hard labor, conceptualized as the circle of existence. Of the twenty-two chapters of the book, the first and last open outside the prison; the introduction gives a brief history of Goryanchikov’s life after hard labor. The remaining twenty chapters of the book are structured not as a simple description of convict life, but as a skillful translation of the reader’s vision and perception from external to internal, from everyday to invisible, essential. The first chapter implements the final symbolic formula of “The House of the Dead”, the three chapters following it are called “First Impressions”, which emphasizes the personality of the narrator’s holistic experience. Then two chapters are titled “The First Month,” which continues the chronicle-dynamic inertia of the reader’s perception. Next, three chapters contain a multi-part reference to “new acquaintances,” unusual situations, and colorful characters of the prison. The culmination are two chapters - X and XI (“The Feast of the Nativity of Christ” and “Performance”), and in Chapter X the deceived expectations of the convicts about the failed internal holiday are given, and in the chapter “Performance” the law of the need for personal spiritual and creative participation is revealed in order for the real the holiday took place. The second part contains four of the most tragic chapters with impressions of the hospital, human suffering, executioners, and victims. This part of the book ends with the overheard story “Shark’s Husband,” where the narrator, yesterday’s executioner, turned out to be today’s victim, but never saw the meaning of what happened to him. The next five final chapters give a picture of spontaneous impulses, delusions, external actions without understanding the inner meaning of the characters from the people. The final tenth chapter, “Exit from hard labor,” marks not just the physical acquisition of freedom, but also gives the internal transformation of Goryanchikov with the light of sympathy and understanding of the tragedy of people’s life from the inside.

Based on all that has been said above, the following conclusions can be drawn: the narration in “Notes from the House of the Dead” develops a new type of relationship with the reader; in the essay story, the author’s activity is aimed at shaping the reader’s worldview and is realized through the interaction of the consciousnesses of the publisher, the narrator and oral storytellers from the people, the inhabitants Dead house. The publisher acts as a reader of “Notes from the House of the Dead” and is both the subject and the object of a change in worldview.

The narrator’s word, on the one hand, lives in constant correlation with the opinion of everyone, in other words, with the truth of national life; on the other hand, it is actively addressed to the reader, organizing the integrity of his perception.

The dialogic nature of Goryanchikov’s interaction with the horizons of other narrators is not aimed at their self-determination, as in the novel, but at identifying their position in relation to common life, therefore, in many cases, the narrator’s word interacts with non-personalized voices that help shape his way of seeing.

Gaining a truly epic perspective becomes a form of spiritual overcoming of the disunity in the House of the Dead that the narrator shares with the readers; this epic event determines both the dynamics of the narrative and the genre nature of “Notes from the House of the Dead” as a sketch story.

The dynamics of the narrator’s narrative are entirely determined by the genre nature of the work, subordinated to the implementation of the aesthetic task of the genre: from a generalized view from afar, from a “bird’s eye view” to the development of a specific phenomenon, which is carried out by comparing different points of view and identifying their commonality on the basis of popular perception; further, these developed measures of national consciousness become the property of the reader’s internal spiritual experience. Thus, the point of view acquired in the process of familiarization with the elements of folk life appears in the event of the work as both a means and a goal.

Thus, the introduction from the publisher gives an orientation to the genre, defamiliarizes the figure of the main narrator, Goryanchikov, and makes it possible to show him both from the inside and from the outside, as the subject and object of the story at the same time. The movement of the narrative within “Notes from the House of the Dead” is determined by two interrelated processes: the spiritual formation of Goryanchikov and the self-development of people’s life, to the extent that this is revealed as the hero-narrator comprehends it.

The internal tension of the interaction of individual and collective worldviews is realized in the alternation of the concrete momentary point of view of the narrator-eyewitness and his final point of view, distanced into the future as the time of the creation of “Notes from the House of the Dead,” as well as the point of view of general life, appearing in its specific -everyday version of mass psychology, then in the essential existence of a universal folk whole.

Akelkina E.A. Notes from the House of the Dead // Dostoevsky: Works, letters, documents: Dictionary-reference book. St. Petersburg, 2008. pp. 74-77.

Lifetime publications (editions):

1860—1861 — Russian world. The newspaper is political, social and literary. Edited by A.S. Hieroglyphic. SPb.: Type. F. Stellovsky. Year two. 1860. September 1. No. 67. pp. 1-8. Year three. 1861. January 4. No. 1. P. 1-14 (I. House of the Dead. II. First impressions). January 11. No. 3. P. 49-54 (III. First impressions). The 25th of January. No. 7. P. 129-135 (IV. First impressions).

1861—1862 — . SPb.: Type. E Praca.

1862: January. pp. 321-336. February. pp. 565-597. March. pp. 313-351. May. pp. 291-326. December. pp. 235-249.

1862 —

Second edition: Part one [and only]. SPb.: Type. E. Praca, 1862. 167 p.

1862 — Second edition. SPb.: Publishing house. A.F. Bazunov. Type. I. Ogrizko, 1862. Part one. 269 ​​p. Part two. 198 p.

1863 - SPb.: Type. O.I. Baksta, 1863. - P. 108-124.

1864 — For upper classes of secondary educational institutions. Compiled by Andrey Filonov. Second edition, corrected and expanded. Volume one. Epic poetry. SPb.: Type. I. Ogrizko, 1864. - P. 686-700.

1864 — : nach dem Tagebuche eines nach Sibirien Verbannten: nach dem Russischen bearbeitet / herausgegeben von Th. M. Dostojewski. Leipzig: Wolfgang Gerhard, 1864. B. I. 251 s. B. II. 191 s.

1865 — The edition has been reviewed and expanded by the author himself. Publication and property of F. Stellovsky. SPb.: Type. F. Stellovsky, 1865. T. I. P. 70-194.

1865 — In two parts. Third edition, revised and updated with a new chapter. Publication and property of F. Stellovsky. SPb.: Type. F. Stellovsky, 1865. 415 p.

1868 — First [and only] issue. [B.m.], 1868. — Notes from the House of the Dead. Akulkin's husband pp. 80-92.

1869 — For upper classes of secondary educational institutions. Compiled by Andrey Filonov. Third edition, significantly revised. Part one. Epic poetry. SPb.: Type. F.S. Sushchinsky, 1869. — Notes from the House of the Dead. Performance. pp. 665-679.

1871 — For upper classes of secondary educational institutions. Compiled by Andrey Filonov. Fourth edition, significantly revised. Part one. Epic poetry. SPb.: Type. I.I. Glazunov, 1871. — Notes from the House of the Dead. Performance. pp. 655-670.

1875 — For upper classes of secondary educational institutions. Compiled by Andrey Filonov. Fifth edition, significantly revised. Part one. Epic poetry. SPb.: Type. I.I. Glazunov, 1875. — Notes from the House of the Dead. Performance. pp. 611-624.

1875 — Fourth edition. SPb.: Type. br. Panteleev, 1875. Part one. 244 p. Part two. 180 pp.

SPb.: Type. br. Panteleev, 1875. Part one. 244 p. Part two. 180 pp.

1880 — For upper classes of secondary educational institutions. Compiled by Andrey Filonov. Sixth edition (printed from the third edition). Part one. Epic poetry. SPb.: Type. I.I. Glazunov, 1879 (in the region - 1880). — Notes from the House of the Dead. Performance. pp. 609-623.

Posthumous edition prepared for publication by A.G. Dostoevsky:

1881 — Fifth edition. St. Petersburg: [Ed. A.G. Dostoevskaya]. Type. Brother. Panteleev, 1881. Part 1. 217 p. Part 2. 160 p.

Introduction

I met Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov in a small Siberian town. Born in Russia as a nobleman, he became a second-class convict exile for the murder of his wife. After serving 10 years of hard labor, he lived out his life in the town of K. He was a pale and thin man of about thirty-five, small and frail, unsociable and suspicious. Driving past his windows one night, I noticed a light in them and decided that he was writing something.

Returning to the town about three months later, I learned that Alexander Petrovich had died. His owner gave me his papers. Among them was a notebook describing the hard labor life of the deceased. These notes - “Scenes from the House of the Dead,” as he called them - seemed interesting to me. I select a few chapters to try.

I. House of the Dead

The fort stood near the ramparts. The large yard was surrounded by a fence of tall, pointed posts. The fence had a strong gate guarded by sentries. There was a special world here, with its own laws, clothing, morals and customs.

On either side of the wide courtyard were two long, one-story barracks for prisoners. In the depths of the yard there is a kitchen, cellars, barns, sheds. In the middle of the yard there is a flat area for checks and roll calls. There was a large space between the buildings and the fence where some prisoners liked to be alone.

At night we were locked in the barracks, a long and stuffy room lit by tallow candles. In winter they locked up early, and in the barracks there was commotion, laughter, curses and the clanking of chains for about four hours. There were about 250 people constantly in the prison. Each region of Russia had its representatives here.

Most of the prisoners are civil convicts, criminals deprived of all rights, with branded faces. They were sent for periods of 8 to 12 years, and then sent throughout Siberia for settlement. Military-class criminals were sent for short periods of time and then returned to where they came from. Many of them returned to prison for repeated crimes. This category was called "always". Criminals were sent to the “special department” from all over Rus'. They did not know their term and worked more than other convicts.

One December evening I entered this strange house. I had to get used to the fact that I would never be alone. The prisoners did not like to talk about the past. Most could read and write. The ranks were distinguished by different colored clothes and differently shaved heads. Most of the convicts were gloomy, envious, vain, boastful and touchy people. What was most valued was the ability not to be surprised by anything.

There was endless gossip and intrigue going on in the barracks, but no one dared to rebel against the internal regulations of the prison. There were outstanding characters who had difficulty obeying. People came to the prison who committed crimes out of vanity. Such newcomers quickly realized that there was no one to surprise here, and fell into the general tone of special dignity that was adopted in the prison. Swearing was elevated to a science, which was developed by continuous quarrels. Strong people did not get into quarrels, they were reasonable and obedient - this was beneficial.

Hard labor was hated. Many in the prison had their own business, without which they could not survive. The prisoners were forbidden to have tools, but the authorities turned a blind eye to this. All kinds of crafts were found here. Work orders were received from the city.

Money and tobacco saved from scurvy, and work saved from crime. Despite this, both work and money were prohibited. Searches were carried out at night, everything prohibited was taken away, so the money was immediately wasted away.

Anyone who did not know how to do anything became a reseller or moneylender. Even government items were accepted as collateral. Almost everyone had a chest with a lock, but this did not prevent theft. There were also kissers who sold wine. Former smugglers quickly found use for their skills. There was another constant income - alms, which was always divided equally.

II. First impressions

I soon realized that the severity of the drudgery of the work was that it was forced and useless. In winter there was little government work. Everyone returned to the prison, where only a third of the prisoners were engaged in their craft, the rest gossiped, drank and played cards.

It was stuffy in the barracks in the mornings. In each barracks there was a prisoner who was called a parashnik and did not go to work. He had to wash the bunks and floors, take out the night tub and bring two buckets of fresh water - for washing and for drinking.

At first they looked at me askance. Former nobles in hard labor are never recognized as their own. We especially got it at work because we had little strength and we couldn’t help them. The Polish nobles, of whom there were five, were disliked even more. There were four Russian nobles. One is a spy and informer, the other is a parricide. The third was Akim Akimych, a tall, thin eccentric, honest, naive and neat.

He served as an officer in the Caucasus. One neighboring prince, considered peaceful, attacked his fortress at night, but was unsuccessful. Akim Akimych shot this princeling in front of his detachment. He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted and he was exiled to Siberia for 12 years. The prisoners respected Akim Akimych for his accuracy and skill. There was no craft that he did not know.

While waiting in the workshop for the shackles to be changed, I asked Akim Akimych about our major. He turned out to be a dishonest and evil person. He looked at the prisoners as his enemies. In the prison they hated him, feared him like the plague and even wanted to kill him.

Meanwhile, several Kalashnikovs came to the workshop. Until adulthood, they sold the rolls that their mothers baked. Having matured, they sold completely different services. This was fraught with great difficulties. It was necessary to choose a time, a place, make an appointment and bribe the guards. But still, I managed to sometimes witness love scenes.

The prisoners ate lunch in shifts. At my first dinner, there was talk among the prisoners about a certain Gazin. The Pole who was sitting next to him said that Gazin was selling wine and drinking away his earnings. I asked why many prisoners looked at me askance. He explained that they were angry with me because I was a nobleman, many of them would like to humiliate me, and added that I would encounter troubles and abuse more than once.

III. First impressions

The prisoners valued money as much as freedom, but it was difficult to keep it. Either the major took the money, or they stole their own. Subsequently, we gave the money for safekeeping to an old Old Believer who came to us from the Starodubov settlements.

He was a small, gray-haired old man, about sixty years old, calm and quiet, with clear, light eyes surrounded by small radiant wrinkles. The old man, along with other fanatics, set fire to the Edinoverie church. As one of the instigators, he was exiled to hard labor. The old man was a wealthy tradesman, he left his family at home, but he firmly went into exile, considering it “torment for his faith.” The prisoners respected him and were sure that the old man could not steal.

It was sad in the prison. The prisoners were drawn to wrap up their entire capital in order to forget their melancholy. Sometimes a person worked for several months only to lose all his earnings in one day. Many of them liked to get themselves bright new clothes and go to the barracks on holidays.

Trading wine was a risky but profitable business. For the first time, the kisser himself brought wine into the prison and sold it profitably. After the second and third times, he established a real trade and acquired agents and assistants who took risks in his place. The agents were usually wasted revelers.

In the first days of my imprisonment, I became interested in a young prisoner named Sirotkin. He was no more than 23 years old. He was considered one of the most dangerous war criminals. He ended up in prison because he killed his company commander, who was always dissatisfied with him. Sirotkin was friends with Gazin.

Gazin was a Tatar, very strong, tall and powerful, with a disproportionately huge head. In the prison they said that he was a fugitive military man from Nerchinsk, he was exiled to Siberia more than once, and finally ended up in a special department. In prison he behaved prudently, did not quarrel with anyone and was unsociable. It was noticeable that he was intelligent and cunning.

All the brutality of Gazin’s nature manifested itself when he got drunk. He flew into a terrible rage, grabbed a knife and rushed at people. The prisoners found a way to deal with him. About ten people rushed at him and began to beat him until he lost consciousness. Then they wrapped him in a sheepskin coat and carried him to the bunk. The next morning he got up healthy and went to work.

Having burst into the kitchen, Gazin began to find fault with me and my friend. Seeing that we decided to remain silent, he trembled with rage, grabbed a heavy bread tray and swung it. Despite the fact that the murder threatened trouble for the entire prison, everyone became quiet and waited - such was their hatred of the nobles. Just as he was about to put down the tray, someone shouted that his wine had been stolen, and he rushed out of the kitchen.

All evening I was occupied with the thought of the inequality of punishment for the same crimes. Sometimes crimes cannot be compared. For example, one stabbed a person just like that, and the other killed, defending the honor of his fiancee, sister, daughter. Another difference is in the people punished. An educated person with a developed conscience will judge himself for his crime. The other doesn’t even think about the murder he committed and considers himself right. There are also those who commit crimes in order to end up in hard labor and get rid of a hard life in the wild.

IV. First impressions

After the last check, the authorities in the barracks remained with a disabled person observing order, and the eldest of the prisoners, appointed parade major for good behavior. In our barracks, Akim Akimych turned out to be the eldest. The prisoners did not pay attention to the disabled person.

The convict authorities always treated prisoners with caution. The prisoners were aware that they were afraid, and this gave them courage. The best boss for prisoners is the one who is not afraid of them, and the prisoners themselves enjoy such trust.

In the evening our barracks took on a homely appearance. A group of revelers sat around the mat playing cards. In each barracks there was a prisoner who rented a rug, a candle and greasy cards. All this was called “Maidan”. A servant at the Maidan stood guard all night and warned of the appearance of the parade major or guards.

My place was on the bunk by the door. Akim Akimych was located next to me. On the left was a group of Caucasian highlanders convicted of robbery: three Dagestan Tatars, two Lezgins and one Chechen. The Dagestan Tatars were siblings. The youngest, Aley, a handsome guy with big black eyes, was about 22 years old. They ended up in hard labor for robbing and stabbing an Armenian merchant. The brothers loved Aley very much. Despite his outward gentleness, Aley had a strong character. He was fair, smart and modest, avoided quarrels, although he knew how to stand up for himself. In a few months I taught him to speak Russian. Alei mastered several crafts, and his brothers were proud of him. With the help of the New Testament, I taught him to read and write in Russian, which earned him the gratitude of his brothers.

The Poles in hard labor formed a separate family. Some of them were educated. An educated person in hard labor must get used to an environment that is foreign to him. Often the same punishment for everyone becomes ten times more painful for him.

Of all the convicts, the Poles loved only the Jew Isaiah Fomich, a man of about 50 years old, small and weak, who looked like a plucked chicken. He came accused of murder. It was easy for him to live in hard labor. Being a jeweler, he was swamped with work from the city.

There were also four Old Believers in our barracks; several Little Russians; a young convict, about 23 years old, who killed eight people; a bunch of counterfeiters and a few dark characters. All this flashed before me on the first evening of my new life, amid the smoke and soot, with the clanking of shackles, among curses and shameless laughter.

V. First month

Three days later I went to work. At that time, among the hostile faces, I could not discern a single friendly one. Akim Akimych was the friendliest of all to me. Next to me was another person whom I only got to know well many years later. It was the prisoner Sushilov, who served me. I also had another servant, Osip, one of the four cooks chosen by the prisoners. The cooks did not go to work, and could refuse this position at any time. Osip was chosen for several years in a row. He was an honest and meek man, although he came for smuggling. Together with other cooks, he sold wine.

Osip prepared food for me. Sushilov himself began to do my laundry, run errands for me, and mend my clothes. He couldn't help but serve someone. Sushilov was a pitiful man, unresponsive and downtrodden by nature. Conversation was difficult for him. He was of average height and vague appearance.

The prisoners laughed at Sushilov because he changed hands on the way to Siberia. To change means to exchange name and fate with someone. This is usually done by prisoners who have served a long term of hard labor. They find klutzes like Sushilov and deceive them.

I looked at the penal servitude with greedy attention, I was amazed by such phenomena as my meeting with prisoner A-vy. He was one of the nobles and reported to our parade major about everything that was happening in the prison. Having quarreled with his relatives, A-ov left Moscow and arrived in St. Petersburg. To get money, he resorted to a vile denunciation. He was exposed and exiled to Siberia for ten years. Hard labor untied his hands. To satisfy his brutal instincts, he was ready to do anything. It was a monster, cunning, smart, beautiful and educated.

VI. First month

I had several rubles hidden in the binding of the Gospel. This book with money was given to me by other exiles in Tobolsk. There are people in Siberia who selflessly help exiles. In the city where our prison was located, there lived a widow, Nastasya Ivanovna. She couldn’t do much because of poverty, but we felt that we had a friend there, behind the prison.

In these first days I thought about how I would put myself in prison. I decided to do as my conscience dictates. On the fourth day I was sent to dismantle old government barges. This old material was worth nothing, and the prisoners were sent so as not to sit idly by, which the prisoners themselves well understood.

They began to work sluggishly, reluctantly, ineptly. An hour later the conductor came and announced a lesson, after completing which it would be possible to go home. The prisoners quickly got down to business and went home tired, but happy, even though they had only gained about half an hour.

I was in the way everywhere, and they almost drove me away with curses. When I stepped aside, they immediately shouted that I was a bad worker. They were happy to mock the former nobleman. Despite this, I decided to keep myself as simple and independent as possible, without fear of their threats and hatred.

According to their concepts, I had to behave like a white-handed nobleman. They would scold me for this, but they would respect me privately. This role was not for me; I promised myself not to belittle my education or way of thinking in front of them. If I were to suck up and become familiar with them, they would think that I was doing it out of fear, and they would treat me with contempt. But I didn’t want to isolate myself in front of them either.

In the evening I was wandering alone outside the barracks and suddenly I saw Sharik, our cautious dog, quite large, black with white spots, with intelligent eyes and a bushy tail. I stroked her and gave her some bread. Now, returning from work, I hurried behind the barracks with Sharik squealing with joy, clasped his head, and a bittersweet feeling pricked my heart.

VII. New acquaintances. Petrov

I started to get used to it. I no longer wandered around the prison as if lost, the curious glances of the convicts did not stop at me so often. I was amazed by the frivolity of the convicts. A free man hopes, but he lives and acts. The prisoner's hope is of a completely different kind. Even terrible criminals chained to the wall dream of walking through the prison yard.

The convicts mocked me for my love of work, but I knew that work would save me, and I did not pay attention to them. The engineering authorities made the work easier for the nobles, as weak and inept people. Three or four people were appointed to burn and grind the alabaster, headed by master Almazov, a stern, dark and lean man in his years, unsociable and grumpy. Another job I was sent to do was turn the grinding wheel in the workshop. If they were turning something large, they sent another nobleman to help me. This work remained with us for several years.

Gradually my circle of acquaintances began to expand. Prisoner Petrov was the first to visit me. He lived in a special section, in the barracks farthest from me. Petrov was short, strongly built, with a pleasant, high-cheekbone face and a bold look. He was about 40 years old. He spoke to me casually, behaved decently and delicately. This relationship continued between us for several years and never became closer.

Petrov was the most decisive and fearless of all the convicts. His passions, like hot coals, were sprinkled with ash and quietly smoldered. He rarely quarreled, but was not friendly with anyone. He was interested in everything, but he remained indifferent to everything and wandered around the prison with nothing to do. Such people manifest themselves sharply at critical moments. They are not the instigators of the cause, but its main executors. They are the first to jump over the main obstacle, everyone rushes after them and blindly walks to the last line, where they lay their heads.

VIII. Determined people. Luchka

There were few determined people in penal servitude. At first I avoided these people, but then I changed my views even on the most terrible killers. It was difficult to form an opinion about some of the crimes, there was so much strange about them.

The prisoners loved to boast about their “exploits.” Once I heard a story about how prisoner Luka Kuzmich killed a major for his own pleasure. This Luka Kuzmich was a small, thin, young Ukrainian prisoner. He was boastful, arrogant, proud, the convicts did not respect him and called him Luchka.

Luchka told his story to a stupid and narrow-minded, but kind guy, his bunk neighbor, prisoner Kobylin. Luchka spoke loudly: he wanted everyone to hear him. This happened during shipment. With him sat about 12 crests, tall, healthy, but meek. The food is bad, but the major plays with them as his Lordship pleases. Luchka alarmed the crests, they demanded a major, and in the morning he took a knife from a neighbor. The major ran in, drunk, screaming. “I am a king, I am a god!” Luchka got closer and stuck a knife in his stomach.

Unfortunately, expressions such as: “I am the king, I am the god,” were used by many officers, especially those who came from the lower ranks. They are obsequious before their superiors, but for their subordinates they become unlimited rulers. This is very annoying for the prisoners. Every prisoner, no matter how humiliated he may be, demands respect for himself. I saw the effect noble and kind officers had on these humiliated ones. They, like children, began to love.

For the murder of an officer, Luchka was given 105 lashes. Even though Luchka killed six people, no one in the prison was afraid of him, although in his heart he dreamed of being known as a terrible person.

IX. Isai Fomich. Bathhouse. Baklushin's story

About four days before Christmas we were taken to the bathhouse. Isai Fomich Bumshtein was the most happy. It seemed that he did not regret at all that he had ended up in hard labor. He did only jewelry work and lived richly. City Jews patronized him. On Saturdays he went under escort to the city synagogue and waited until the end of his twelve-year sentence to get married. He was a mixture of naivety, stupidity, cunning, impudence, simplicity, timidity, boastfulness and impudence. Isai Fomich served everyone for entertainment. He understood this and was proud of his importance.

There were only two public baths in the city. The first was paid, the other was shabby, dirty and cramped. They took us to this bathhouse. The prisoners were glad that they would leave the fortress. In the bathhouse we were divided into two shifts, but despite this, it was crowded. Petrov helped me undress - because of the shackles it was difficult. The prisoners were given a small piece of government soap, but right there, in the dressing room, in addition to soap, you could buy sbiten, rolls of bread and hot water.

The bathhouse was like hell. About a hundred people crammed into the small room. Petrov bought a place on a bench from some man, who immediately ducked under the bench, where it was dark, dirty and everything was occupied. All this screamed and cackled to the sound of chains dragging along the floor. Dirt poured from all sides. Baklushin brought hot water, and Petrov washed me with such ceremony, as if I were porcelain. When we got home, I treated him to a scythe. I invited Baklushin to my place for tea.

Everyone loved Baklushin. He was a tall guy, about 30 years old, with a dashing and simple-minded face. He was full of fire and life. Having met me, Baklushin said that he was from the cantonists, served in the pioneers and was loved by some high officials. He even read books. Having come to me for tea, he announced to me that there would soon be a theatrical performance that the prisoners organized in the prison on holidays. Baklushin was one of the main instigators of the theater.

Baklushin told me that he served as a non-commissioned officer in a garrison battalion. There he fell in love with a German washerwoman Louise, who lived with her aunt, and decided to marry her. Her distant relative, a middle-aged and wealthy watchmaker, the German Schultz, also expressed a desire to marry Louise. Louise was not against this marriage. A few days later it became known that Schultz made Louise swear not to meet with Baklushin, that the German was keeping her and her aunt in a black body, and that the aunt would meet with Schultz on Sunday in his store to finally agree on everything. On Sunday, Baklushin took a gun, went into the store and shot Schultz. He was happy with Louise for two weeks after that, and then he was arrested.

X. Feast of the Nativity of Christ

Finally, the holiday came, from which everyone expected something. By evening, the disabled people who went to the market brought a lot of provisions. Even the most thrifty prisoners wanted to celebrate Christmas with dignity. On this day, prisoners were not sent to work; there were three such days a year.

Akim Akimych had no family memories - he grew up as an orphan in someone else’s house and from the age of fifteen he went into hard service. He was not particularly religious, so he prepared to celebrate Christmas not with dreary memories, but with quiet good behavior. He did not like to think and lived by rules that were established forever. Only once in his life did he try to live by his own wits - and he ended up in hard labor. He derived a rule from this - never reason.

In a military barracks, where bunks stood only along the walls, the priest held a Christmas service and blessed all the barracks. Immediately after this, the parade major and commandant arrived, whom we loved and even respected. They went around all the barracks and congratulated everyone.

Gradually the people walked around, but there were many more sober people left, and there was someone to look after the drunk ones. Gazin was sober. He intended to walk at the end of the holiday, collecting all the money from the prisoners’ pockets. Songs were heard throughout the barracks. Many walked around with their own balalaikas, and in a special section there was even a choir of eight people.

Meanwhile, twilight began. Among the drunkenness, sadness and melancholy were visible. The people wanted to have fun on the great holiday - and how difficult and sad this day was for almost everyone. It became unbearable and disgusting in the barracks. I felt sad and sorry for them all.

XI. Performance

On the third day of the holiday there was a performance in our theater. We did not know whether our parade major knew about the theater. A person like the parade major had to take something away, deprive someone of their rights. The senior non-commissioned officer did not contradict the prisoners, taking their word that everything would be quiet. The poster was written by Baklushin for gentlemen officers and noble visitors who honored our theater with their visit.

The first play was called “Filatka and Miroshka are rivals,” in which Baklushin played Filatka, and Sirotkin played Filatka’s bride. The second play was called "Kedril the Glutton." At the end, a “pantomime to music” was performed.

The theater was set up in a military barracks. Half of the room was given over to the audience, the other half was a stage. The curtain stretched across the barracks was painted with oil paint and sewn from canvas. In front of the curtain there were two benches and several chairs for officers and outside visitors, who were not moved throughout the holiday. Behind the benches stood the prisoners, and the crowd there was incredible.

The crowd of spectators, pressed on all sides, awaited the start of the performance with bliss on their faces. A glimmer of childish joy shone on the branded faces. The prisoners were delighted. They were allowed to have fun, forget about shackles and long years of imprisonment.

Part two

I. Hospital

After the holidays, I fell ill and went to our military hospital, in the main building of which there were 2 prison wards. Sick prisoners announced their illness to the non-commissioned officer. They were recorded in a book and sent with an escort to the battalion infirmary, where the doctor registered the really sick people in the hospital.

The prescription of medications and the distribution of portions was handled by the resident, who was in charge of the prison wards. We were dressed in hospital linen, I walked along a clean corridor and found myself in a long, narrow room where there were 22 wooden beds.

There were few seriously ill people. To my right lay a counterfeiter, a former clerk, the illegitimate son of a retired captain. He was a stocky guy of about 28 years old, intelligent, cheeky, confident in his innocence. He told me in detail about the procedures in the hospital.

Following him, a patient from the correctional company approached me. It was already a gray-haired soldier named Chekunov. He began to wait on me, which caused several poisonous ridicule from a consumptive patient named Ustyantsev, who, fearing punishment, drank a mug of wine infused with tobacco and poisoned himself. I felt that his anger was directed more at me than at Chekunov.

All diseases, even sexually transmitted ones, were collected here. There were also a few who came just to “relax.” Doctors allowed them in out of compassion. Externally, the ward was relatively clean, but we did not flaunt internal cleanliness. Patients got used to this and even believed that this was the way it should be. Those punished by spitzrutens were greeted very seriously and silently cared for the unfortunate. The paramedics knew that they were handing over the beaten man to experienced hands.

After the doctor’s evening visit, the room was locked and a night tub was brought in. At night, prisoners were not allowed out of their wards. This useless cruelty was explained by the fact that the prisoner would go out to the toilet at night and run away, despite the fact that there was a window with an iron bar, and an armed sentry would escort the prisoner to the toilet. And where to run in winter in hospital clothes. No illness can free a convict from the shackles. For the sick, the shackles are too heavy, and this weight aggravates their suffering.

II. Continuation

Doctors walked around the wards in the morning. Before them, our resident, a young but knowledgeable doctor, visited the ward. Many doctors in Rus' enjoy the love and respect of the common people, despite the general distrust of medicine. When the resident noticed that the prisoner had come to take a break from work, he wrote down a non-existent illness for him and left him lying there. The senior doctor was much more stern than the resident, and for this we respected him.

Some patients asked to be discharged with their backs not healed from the first sticks, in order to quickly get out of court. Habit helped some people endure punishment. The prisoners spoke with extraordinary good nature about how they were beaten and about those who beat them.

However, not all stories were cold-blooded and indifferent. They talked about Lieutenant Zherebyatnikov with indignation. He was a man of about 30, tall, fat, with rosy cheeks, white teeth and a booming laugh. He loved to flog and punish with sticks. The lieutenant was a refined gourmet in the executive field: he invented various unnatural things in order to pleasantly tickle his fat-filled soul.

Lieutenant Smekalov, who was the commander of our prison, was remembered with joy and pleasure. The Russian people are ready to forget any torment for one kind word, but Lieutenant Smekalov has gained particular popularity. He was a simple man, even kind in his own way, and we recognized him as one of our own.

III. Continuation

In the hospital I got a clear idea of ​​all types of punishment. All those punished by spitzrutens were brought to our chambers. I wanted to know all the degrees of sentences, I tried to imagine the psychological state of those going to execution.

If the prisoner could not withstand the prescribed number of blows, then, according to the doctor’s verdict, this number was divided into several parts. The prisoners endured the execution itself courageously. I noticed that large quantities of rods are the heaviest punishment. Five hundred rods can cut a person to death, and five hundred sticks can be carried without danger to life.

Almost every person has the qualities of an executioner, but they develop unevenly. There are two types of executioners: voluntary and forced. The people experience an unaccountable, mystical fear of the forced executioner.

A forced executioner is an exiled prisoner who has been apprenticed to another executioner and left forever at the prison, where he has his own household and is under guard. The executioners have money, they eat well and drink wine. The executioner cannot punish lightly; but for a bribe, he promises the victim that he will not beat her very painfully. If they do not agree to his proposal, he punishes barbarously.

It was boring being in the hospital. The arrival of a newcomer always created excitement. Even the crazy people who were brought in for testing were happy. The defendants pretended to be crazy in order to escape punishment. Some of them, after playing around for two or three days, calmed down and asked to be discharged. The real madmen were a punishment for the entire ward.

Seriously ill people loved to be treated. Bloodletting was accepted with pleasure. Our banks were of a special kind. The paramedic lost or damaged the machine used to cut the skin, and was forced to make 12 cuts for each jar with a lancet.

The saddest time came late in the evening. It became stuffy, and I remembered vivid pictures of my past life. One night I heard a story that seemed like a fever dream.

IV. Akulkin's husband

Late at night I woke up and heard two people whispering to each other not far from me. The narrator Shishkov was still young, about 30 years old, a civil prisoner, an empty, eccentric and cowardly man of short stature, thin, with restless or dully thoughtful eyes.

It was about the father of Shishkov's wife, Ankudim Trofimych. He was a rich and respected old man of 70 years old, had trades and a large loan, and had three employees. Ankudim Trofimych was married a second time, had two sons and an eldest daughter, Akulina. Shishkov's friend Filka Morozov was considered her lover. At that time, Filka’s parents died, and he was going to squander his inheritance and become a soldier. He did not want to marry Akulka. Shishkov then also buried his father, and his mother worked for Ankudim - she baked gingerbread for sale.

One day, Filka encouraged Shishkov to smear Akulka’s gate with tar - Filka did not want her to marry the old rich man who wooed her. He heard that there were rumors about Akulka and backed down. Shishkov's mother advised him to marry Akulka - now no one would marry her, and they gave her a good dowry.

Until the wedding, Shishkov drank without waking up. Filka Morozov threatened to break all his ribs and to sleep with his wife every night. Ankudim shed tears at the wedding; he knew that he was giving his daughter away to torment. And Shishkov, even before the wedding, had prepared a whip with him, and decided to make fun of Akulka, so that she would know how to get married by dishonest deception.

After the wedding, they left them with Akulka in a cage. She sits white, not a trace of blood on her face from fear. Shishkov prepared the whip and placed it by the bedside, but Akulka turned out to be innocent. He then knelt before her, asked for forgiveness, and vowed to take revenge on Filka Morozov for the shame.

Some time later, Filka invited Shishkov to sell his wife to him. To force Shishkov, Filka started a rumor that he does not sleep with his wife because he is always drunk, and his wife is receiving others at this time. Shishkov was offended, and from then on he began to beat his wife from morning to evening. Old man Ankudim came to intercede, and then retreated. Shishkov did not allow his mother to interfere; he threatened to kill her.

Filka, meanwhile, became completely drunk and went to work as a mercenary for a tradesman, for his eldest son. Filka lived with a tradesman for his own pleasure, drank, slept with his daughters, and pulled his owner by the beard. The tradesman endured - Filka had to join the army for his eldest son. When they were taking Filka to turn him in as a soldier, he saw Akulka on the way, stopped, bowed to her in the ground and asked for forgiveness for his meanness. Shark forgave him, and then told Shishkov that now she loves Filka more than death.

Shishkov decided to kill Shark. At dawn, he harnessed the cart, drove with his wife into the forest, to a remote village, and there he cut her throat with a knife. After that, fear attacked Shishkov, he left both his wife and his horse, and he ran home to his backside and hid in the bathhouse. In the evening they found dead Akulka and found Shishkov in the bathhouse. And now he has been in hard labor for four years now.

V. Summer time

Easter was approaching. Summer work began. The coming spring worried the shackled man, giving birth to desires and longing. At this time, vagrancy began throughout Russia. Life in the forests, free and full of adventure, had a mysterious charm for those who experienced it.

One prisoner out of a hundred decides to escape, the other ninety-nine only dream about it. Defendants and those sentenced to long terms escape much more often. After serving two or three years of hard labor, the prisoner prefers to finish his sentence and go out to a settlement, rather than risk risk and death in case of failure. By the fall, all these runners themselves come to prison for the winter, hoping to run again in the summer.

My anxiety and melancholy grew every day. The hatred that I, a nobleman, aroused in the prisoners poisoned my life. On Easter, the authorities gave us one egg and a loaf of wheat bread. Everything was exactly like Christmas, only now you could walk and bask in the sun.

Summer work turned out to be much harder than winter work. The prisoners built, dug, laid bricks, and did metalwork, carpentry, or painting. I either went to the workshop, or to the alabaster, or was a brick bearer. I became stronger from work. Physical strength is necessary in hard labor, but I wanted to live even after prison.

In the evenings, the prisoners walked in crowds around the yard, discussing the most ridiculous rumors. It became known that an important general was coming from St. Petersburg to inspect all of Siberia. At this time, one incident happened in the prison, which did not excite the major, but gave him pleasure. During a fight, one prisoner poked another in the chest with an awl.

The prisoner who committed the crime was named Lomov. The victim, Gavrilka, was one of the hardened vagabonds. Lomov was from wealthy peasants of the K district. All Lomovs lived as a family, and, in addition to legal affairs, were engaged in usury, concealing vagabonds and stolen property. Soon the Lomovs decided that they had no control, and began to take more and more risks in various lawless enterprises. Not far from the village they had a large farm where about six Kirghiz robbers lived. One night they were all slaughtered. The Lomovs were accused of killing their workers. During the investigation and trial, their entire fortune went to waste, and the Lomovs’ uncle and nephew ended up in our penal servitude.

Soon Gavrilka, a rogue and tramp, appeared in the prison and took the blame for the death of the Kirghiz upon himself. The Lomovs knew that Gavrilka was a criminal, but they did not quarrel with him. And suddenly Uncle Lomov stabbed Gavrilka with an awl because of a girl. The Lomovs lived as rich people in the prison, for which the major hated them. Lomov was tried, although the wound turned out to be a scratch. The criminal's sentence was extended and he was put through a thousand. The major was pleased.

On the second day after arriving in the city, the auditor came to our prison. He entered sternly and majestically, followed by a large retinue. The general walked around the barracks in silence, looked into the kitchen, and tried the cabbage soup. They pointed me out to him: they say, one of the nobles. The general nodded his head, and two minutes later he left the prison. The prisoners were blinded, puzzled, and left bewildered.

VI. Convict animals

The purchase of Gnedok entertained the prisoners much more than the high visit. The prison relied on a horse for household needs. One fine morning she died. The major ordered the immediate purchase of a new horse. The purchase was entrusted to the prisoners themselves, among whom were real experts. It was a young, beautiful and strong horse. He soon became the favorite of the entire prison.

The prisoners loved animals, but the prison was not allowed to raise a lot of livestock and poultry. Besides Sharik, there were two other dogs living in the prison: Belka and Kultyapka, whom I brought home from work as a puppy.

We got geese by accident. They amused the prisoners and even became famous in the city. The entire brood of geese went to work with the prisoners. They always joined the largest party and grazed nearby at work. When the party moved back to the prison, they also rose. But, despite their devotion, they were all ordered to be slaughtered.

The goat Vaska appeared in the prison as a small, white kid and became everyone’s favorite. From Vaska grew a large goat with long horns. He also got into the habit of going to work with us. Vaska would have lived in prison for a long time, but one day, returning at the head of the prisoners from work, he caught the eye of the major. They immediately ordered the goat to be slaughtered, the skin sold, and the meat given to the prisoners.

An eagle also lived in our prison. Someone brought him to the prison, wounded and exhausted. He lived with us for three months and never left his corner. Lonely and angrily, he awaited death, not trusting anyone. In order for the eagle to die in freedom, the prisoners threw it from a rampart into the steppe.

VII. Claim

It took me almost a year to come to terms with life in prison. Other prisoners could not get used to this life either. Restlessness, vehemence, and impatience were the most characteristic features of the place.

Dreaminess gave the prisoners a gloomy and gloomy appearance. They didn't like to show off their hopes. Innocence and frankness were despised. And if anyone started to dream out loud, he was rudely confronted and ridiculed.

Apart from these naive and simple talkers, everyone else was divided into good and evil, gloomy and bright. There were much more gloomy and angry people. There was also a group of desperate people, there were very few of them. Not a single person lives without striving for a goal. Having lost purpose and hope, a person turns into a monster, and everyone’s goal was freedom.

One day, on a hot summer day, the entire penal servitude began to be built in the prison yard. I didn’t know anything, and yet the penal servitor had been silently worried for three days. The pretext for this explosion was food, which everyone was unhappy with.

The convicts are grumpy, but they rarely rise together. However, this time the excitement was not in vain. In such a case, instigators always appear. This is a special type of people, naively confident in the possibility of justice. They are too hot to be cunning and calculating, so they always lose. Instead of the main goal, they often rush into trifles, and this ruins them.

There were several instigators in our prison. One of them is Martynov, a former hussar, a hot-tempered, restless and suspicious person; the other is Vasily Antonov, smart and cold-blooded, with an insolent look and an arrogant smile; both are honest and truthful.

Our non-commissioned officer was scared. Having lined up, the people politely asked him to tell the major that the hard laborer wanted to talk to him. I also went out to line up, thinking that some kind of check was taking place. Many looked at me in surprise and mocked me angrily. In the end, Kulikov came up to me, took my hand and led me out of the ranks. Puzzled, I went to the kitchen, where there were a lot of people.

In the entryway I met the nobleman T-vsky. He explained to me that if we were there, we would be accused of rioting and brought to justice. Akim Akimych and Isai Fomich also did not take part in the unrest. There were all the cautious Poles and several gloomy, stern prisoners, convinced that nothing good would come of this matter.

The major flew in angry, followed by the clerk Dyatlov, who actually ran the prison and had influence on the major, a cunning but not bad person. A minute later, one prisoner went to the guardhouse, then another and a third. Clerk Dyatlov went to our kitchen. Here they told him that they had no complaints. He immediately reported to the major, who ordered us to be registered separately from the dissatisfied. The paper and the threat to bring the dissatisfied to justice had an effect. Everyone suddenly seemed happy with everything.

The next day the food improved, although not for long. The major began to visit the prison more often and found unrest. The prisoners could not calm down for a long time; they were alarmed and puzzled. Many laughed at themselves, as if punishing themselves for their pretension.

That same evening I asked Petrov if the prisoners were angry with the nobles for not coming out with everyone else. He didn't understand what I was trying to achieve. But I realized that I would never be accepted into the partnership. In Petrov’s question: “What kind of comrade are you to us?” - one could hear genuine naivety and simple-minded bewilderment.

VIII. Comrades

Of the three nobles who were in the prison, I only communicated with Akim Akimych. He was a kind man, he helped me with advice and some services, but sometimes he made me sad with his even, dignified voice.

In addition to these three Russians, during my time eight Poles stayed with us. The best of them were painful and intolerant. There were only three educated: B-sky, M-ky and old Zh-ky, a former professor of mathematics.

Some of them were sent for 10-12 years. With the Circassians and Tatars, with Isai Fomich, they were affectionate and friendly, but avoided the rest of the convicts. Only one Starodub Old Believer earned their respect.

The highest authorities in Siberia treated criminal nobles differently than other exiles. Following the top management, lower commanders also became accustomed to this. The second category of hard labor, where I was, was much harder than the other two categories. The structure of this category was military, very similar to the prison companies, which everyone spoke of with horror. The authorities looked at the nobles in our prison more cautiously and did not punish them as often as they did ordinary prisoners.

They tried to make our work easier only once: B-kiy and I went to the engineering office as clerks for three whole months. This happened under Lieutenant Colonel G-kov. He was affectionate with the prisoners and loved them like a father. In the very first month after his arrival, G-kov quarreled with our major and left.

We were rewriting papers, when suddenly an order came from the higher authorities to return us to our previous jobs. Then for two years B. and I went to work together, most often in the workshop.

Meanwhile, M-ky became sadder and gloomier over the years. He was inspired only by remembering his old and sick mother. Finally, M-tsky’s mother obtained forgiveness for him. He went out to settle and stayed in our city.

Of the rest, two were young people sent for short periods of time, poorly educated, but honest and simple. The third, A-chukovsky, was too simple-minded, but the fourth, B-m, an elderly man, made a bad impression on us. He was a rude, bourgeois soul, with the habits of a shopkeeper. He was not interested in anything other than his craft. He was a skilled painter. Soon the whole city began to demand B-m to paint the walls and ceilings. His other comrades began to be sent to work with him.

B-m painted the house for our parade major, who after that began to patronize the nobles. Soon the parade major was put on trial and resigned. After retiring, he sold his estate and fell into poverty. We later met him in a worn-out frock coat. He was a god in uniform. In a frock coat he looked like a footman.

IX. The escape

Soon after the change of major, hard labor was abolished and a military prison company was founded in its place. The special department also remained, and dangerous war criminals were sent to it until the most difficult hard labor was opened in Siberia.

For us, life continued as before, only the management had changed. A staff officer, a company commander and four chief officers were appointed, who were on duty in turns. Instead of disabled people, twelve non-commissioned officers and a captain were appointed. Corporals were brought in from among the prisoners, and Akim Akimych immediately turned out to be a corporal. All this remained in the commandant’s department.

The main thing was that we got rid of the previous major. The intimidated look disappeared, now everyone knew that the right one would only be punished instead of the guilty one by mistake. The non-commissioned officers turned out to be decent people. They tried not to watch how vodka was carried and sold. Like the disabled, they went to the market and brought provisions to the prisoners.

The following years have faded from my memory. Only a passionate desire for a new life gave me the strength to wait and hope. I was reviewing my past life and judging myself harshly. I swore to myself that I would not make past mistakes in the future.

Sometimes we had escapes. Two people were running with me. After the change of major, his spy A-v was left without protection. He was a daring, decisive, intelligent and cynical man. The prisoner of the special department, Kulikov, a middle-aged but strong man, drew attention to him. They became friends and agreed to run away.

It was impossible to escape without an escort. A Pole named Koller, an elderly energetic man, served in one of the battalions stationed in the fortress. Having come to serve in Siberia, he fled. He was caught and kept in prison for two years. When he was returned to the army, he began to serve zealously, for which he was made a corporal. He was ambitious, arrogant and knew his worth. Kulikov chose him as a comrade. They came to an agreement and set a day.

This was in the month of June. The fugitives arranged it in such a way that they, together with the prisoner Shilkin, were sent to plaster the empty barracks. Koller and a young recruit were guards. After working for an hour, Kulikov and A. told Shilkin that they were going for wine. After some time, Shilkin realized that his comrades had escaped, quit his job, went straight to the prison and told everything to the sergeant major.

The criminals were important, messengers were sent to all the volosts to report the fugitives and leave their signs everywhere. They wrote to neighboring districts and provinces, and sent Cossacks in pursuit.

This incident broke the monotonous life of the prison, and the escape resonated in all souls. The commandant himself arrived at the prison. The prisoners behaved boldly, with strict respectability. The prisoners were sent to work under heavy escort, and in the evenings they were counted several times. But the prisoners behaved decorously and independently. Everyone was proud of Kulikov and A-v.

The intensive search continued for a whole week. The prisoners received all the news about the maneuvers of their superiors. About eight days after the escape, the fugitives were tracked down. The next day they began to say in the city that the fugitives had been caught seventy miles from the prison. Finally, the sergeant major announced that by evening they would be taken straight to the guardhouse at the prison.

At first everyone got angry, then they became depressed, and then they started laughing at those caught. Kulikov and A-va were now humiliated to the same extent as they had previously been extolled. When they were brought in, tied hand and foot, the whole prison camp poured out to see what they would do with them. The fugitives were shackled and brought to justice. Having learned that the fugitives had no other choice but to surrender, everyone began to cordially monitor the progress of the case in court.

A-vu was awarded five hundred sticks, Kulikov was given one and a half thousand. Koller lost everything, walked two thousand and was sent somewhere as a prisoner. A-va was punished lightly. In the hospital he said that he was now ready for anything. Returning to the prison after punishment, Kulikov behaved as if he had never left it. Despite this, the prisoners no longer respected him.

X. Exit from hard labor

All this happened in the last year of my hard labor. This year my life was easier. Between the prisoners I had many friends and acquaintances. I had acquaintances among the military in the city, and I resumed communication with them. Through them I could write to my homeland and receive books.

The closer the release date approached, the more patient I became. Many prisoners sincerely and joyfully congratulated me. It seemed to me that everyone became friendlier to me.

On the day of liberation, I walked around the barracks to say goodbye to all the prisoners. Some shook my hand in a comradely way, others knew that I had friends in the city, that I would go from here to the gentlemen and sit next to them as an equal. They said goodbye to me not as a comrade, but as a master. Some turned away from me, did not answer my farewell and looked with some kind of hatred.

About ten minutes after the prisoners left for work, I left the prison, never to return to it. To the forge to unshackle, I was accompanied not by a guard with a gun, but by a non-commissioned officer. It was our own prisoners who unchained us. They fussed and wanted to do everything as best as possible. The shackles fell off. Freedom, new life. What a glorious moment!

Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Notes from a Dead House

Part one

Introduction

In the remote regions of Siberia, among the steppes, mountains or impenetrable forests, you occasionally come across small towns, with one, many with two thousand inhabitants, wooden, nondescript, with two churches - one in the city, the other in the cemetery - towns that look more like good village near Moscow than the city. They are usually quite sufficiently equipped with police officers, assessors and all other subaltern ranks. In general, in Siberia, despite the cold, it is extremely warm. People live simple, illiberal lives; the order is old, strong, sanctified for centuries. The officials who rightly play the role of the Siberian nobility are either natives, inveterate Siberians, or visitors from Russia, mostly from the capitals, seduced by the non-credited salaries, double runs and tempting hopes for the future. Among them, those who know how to solve the riddle of life almost always remain in Siberia and take root in it with pleasure. They subsequently bear rich and sweet fruits. But others, frivolous people who do not know how to solve the riddle of life, will soon become bored with Siberia and ask themselves with longing: why did they come to it? They eagerly serve out their legal term of service, three years, and at the end of it they immediately bother about their transfer and return home, scolding Siberia and laughing at it. They are wrong: not only from an official point of view, but even from many points of view, one can be blissful in Siberia. The climate is excellent; there are many remarkably rich and hospitable merchants; there are many extremely wealthy foreigners. The young ladies bloom with roses and are moral to the last extreme. The game flies through the streets and stumbles upon the hunter. An unnatural amount of champagne is drunk. The caviar is amazing. The harvest happens in other places as early as fifteen... In general, the land is blessed. You just need to know how to use it. In Siberia they know how to use it.

In one of these cheerful and self-satisfied towns, with the sweetest people, the memory of which will remain indelible in my heart, I met Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a settler who was born in Russia as a nobleman and landowner, then became a second-class exile and convict for the murder of his wife. and, after the expiration of the ten-year term of hard labor prescribed for him by law, he humbly and quietly lived out his life in the town of K. as a settler. He, in fact, was assigned to one suburban volost, but lived in the city, having the opportunity to earn at least some food in it by teaching children. In Siberian cities one often encounters teachers from exiled settlers; they are not disdained. They teach mainly the French language, which is so necessary in the field of life and which, without them, in the remote regions of Siberia they would have no idea. The first time I met Alexander Petrovich was in the house of an old, honored and hospitable official, Ivan Ivanovich Gvozdikov, who had five daughters, of different years, who showed wonderful hopes. Alexander Petrovich gave them lessons four times a week, thirty silver kopecks per lesson. His appearance interested me. He was an extremely pale and thin man, not yet old, about thirty-five, small and frail. He was always dressed very cleanly, in a European style. If you spoke to him, he looked at you extremely intently and attentively, listening to every word of yours with strict politeness, as if he were pondering it, as if you asked him a task with your question or wanted to extract some secret from him, and, finally, he answered clearly and briefly, but weighing every word of his answer so much that you suddenly felt awkward for some reason and you yourself finally rejoiced at the end of the conversation. I then asked Ivan Ivanovich about him and found out that Goryanchikov lives impeccably and morally and that otherwise Ivan Ivanovich would not have invited him for his daughters; but that he is a terrible unsociable person, hides from everyone, is extremely learned, reads a lot, but speaks very little, and that in general it is quite difficult to talk to him. Others argued that he was positively crazy, although they found that, in essence, this was not such an important flaw, that many of the honorary members of the city were ready to favor Alexander Petrovich in every possible way, that he could even be useful, write requests, etc. They believed that he must have decent relatives in Russia, maybe not even the last people, but they knew that from the very exile he stubbornly cut off all relations with them - in a word, he was harming himself. In addition, we all knew his story, we knew that he killed his wife in the first year of his marriage, killed out of jealousy and denounced himself (which greatly facilitated his punishment). Such crimes are always looked upon as misfortunes and regretted. But, despite all this, the eccentric stubbornly avoided everyone and appeared in people only to give lessons.

At first I didn’t pay much attention to him, but, I don’t know why, little by little he began to interest me. There was something mysterious about him. There was not the slightest opportunity to talk to him. Of course, he always answered my questions, and even with such an air as if he considered this his primary duty; but after his answers I somehow felt burdened to question him longer; and on his face, after such conversations, some kind of suffering and fatigue was always visible. I remember walking with him one fine summer evening from Ivan Ivanovich. Suddenly I took it into my head to invite him to my place for a minute to smoke a cigarette. I cannot describe the horror that was expressed on his face; he was completely lost, began to mutter some incoherent words and suddenly, looking angrily at me, he started running in the opposite direction. I was even surprised. Since then, whenever he met me, he looked at me as if with some kind of fear. But I didn’t calm down; I was drawn to him by something, and a month later, out of the blue, I went to see Goryanchikov. Of course, I acted stupidly and indelicately. He lived on the very edge of the city, with an old bourgeois woman who had a daughter who was sick with consumption, and that daughter had an illegitimate daughter, a child of about ten years old, a pretty and cheerful girl. Alexander Petrovich was sitting with her and teaching her to read the minute I came into his room. When he saw me, he became so confused, as if I had caught him committing some crime. He was completely confused, jumped up from his chair and looked at me with all his eyes. We finally sat down; he closely watched my every glance, as if he suspected some special mysterious meaning in each of them. I guessed that he was suspicious to the point of madness. He looked at me with hatred, almost asking: “Are you going to leave here soon?” I talked to him about our town, about current news; he remained silent and smiled evilly; It turned out that he not only did not know the most ordinary, well-known city news, but was not even interested in knowing them. Then I started talking about our region, about its needs; he listened to me in silence and looked into my eyes so strangely that I finally felt ashamed of our conversation. However, I almost teased him with new books and magazines; I had them in my hands, fresh from the post office, and I offered them to him, still uncut. He cast a greedy glance at them, but immediately changed his mind and declined the offer, citing lack of time. Finally, I said goodbye to him and, leaving him, I felt that some unbearable weight had been lifted from my heart. I was ashamed and it seemed extremely stupid to pester a person whose main goal was to hide as far away from the whole world as possible. But the job was done. I remember that I noticed almost no books on him, and, therefore, it was unfair to say about him that he reads a lot. However, driving past his windows twice, very late at night, I noticed a light in them. What did he do while he sat until dawn? Didn't he write? And if so, what exactly?

Notes from the House of the Dead- a work by Fyodor Dostoevsky, consisting of a story of the same name in two parts, as well as several short stories; created in -1861. Created under the impression of imprisonment in the Omsk prison in 1850-1854.

History of creation

The story is documentary in nature and introduces the reader to the life of imprisoned criminals in Siberia in the second half of the 19th century. The writer artistically comprehended everything he saw and experienced during four years of hard labor in Omsk (from to 1854), having been exiled there in the Petrashevites case. The work was created from 1862 to 1862; the first chapters were published in the magazine “Time”.

Plot

The story is told from the perspective of the main character, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman who found himself in hard labor for 10 years for the murder of his wife. Having killed his wife out of jealousy, Alexander Petrovich himself admitted to the murder, and after serving hard labor, he cut off all ties with relatives and remained in a settlement in the Siberian city of K., leading a secluded life and earning a living by tutoring. One of his few entertainments remains reading and literary sketches about hard labor. Actually, the author calls the “living House of the Dead”, which gave the title of the story, the prison where the convicts are serving their sentences, and calls his notes “Scenes from the House of the Dead.”

Finding himself in prison, the nobleman Goryanchikov acutely experiences his imprisonment, which is aggravated by the unusual peasant environment. Most of the prisoners do not accept him as an equal, at the same time despising him for his impracticality, disgust, and respecting his nobility. Having survived the first shock, Goryanchikov begins to study with interest the life of the inhabitants of the prison, discovering for himself the “common people”, their low and sublime sides.

Goryanchikov falls into the so-called “second category”, into the fortress. In total, in the Siberian penal servitude in the 19th century there were three categories: the first (in the mines), the second (in the fortresses) and the third (factory). It was believed that the severity of hard labor decreases from the first to the third category (see hard labor). However, according to Goryanchikov, the second category was the strictest, since it was under military control, and the prisoners were always under surveillance. Many of the second-class convicts spoke in favor of the first and third classes. In addition to these categories, along with ordinary prisoners, in the fortress where Goryanchikov was imprisoned, there was a “special department” in which prisoners were assigned to hard labor indefinitely for especially serious crimes. The “special department” in the code of laws was described as follows: “A special department is established at such and such a prison for the most important criminals, pending the opening of the most severe hard labor in Siberia.”

The story does not have a coherent plot and appears before readers in the form of small sketches, however, arranged in chronological order. The chapters of the story contain the author’s personal impressions, stories from the lives of other convicts, psychological sketches and deep philosophical reflections.

The life and morals of prisoners, the relationships of convicts to each other, faith and crimes are described in detail. From the story you can find out what jobs convicts were hired for, how they earned money, how they brought wine into the prison, what they dreamed about, how they had fun, how they treated their bosses and work. What was prohibited, what was allowed, what the authorities turned a blind eye to, how the convicts were punished. The national composition of convicts, their attitude towards imprisonment and towards prisoners of other nationalities and classes is considered.

Characters

• Goryanchikov Alexander Petrovich is the main character of the story, on whose behalf the story is told.
• Akim Akimych is one of the four former nobles, a comrade of Goryanchikov, a senior prisoner in the barracks. Sentenced to 12 years for shooting a Caucasian prince who set fire to his fortress. An extremely pedantic and stupidly well-behaved person.
• Gazin is a kissing convict, a wine merchant, a Tatar, the most powerful convict in the prison. He was famous for committing crimes, killing small innocent children, enjoying their fear and torment.
• Sirotkin is a 23-year-old former recruit who was sent to hard labor for the murder of his commander.
• Dutov is a former soldier who rushed at the guard officer in order to delay the punishment (being driven through the ranks) and received an even longer sentence.
• Orlov is a strong-willed killer, completely fearless in the face of punishment and testing.
• Nurra is a highlander, Lezgin, cheerful, intolerant of theft, drunkenness, pious, a favorite of the convicts.
• Alei is a Dagestani, 22 years old, who was sent to hard labor with his older brothers for attacking an Armenian merchant. A neighbor on the bunk of Goryanchikov, who became close friends with him and taught Aley to read and write in Russian.
• Isai Fomich is a Jew who was sent to hard labor for murder. Moneylender and jeweler. He was on friendly terms with Goryanchikov.
• Osip, a smuggler who elevated smuggling to the level of an art, carried wine into the prison. He was terrified of punishment and many times swore off smuggling, but he still broke down. Most of the time he worked as a cook, preparing separate (not official) food (including for Goryanchikov) for the prisoners’ money.
• Sushilov is a prisoner who changed his name at the stage with another prisoner: for a silver ruble and a red shirt, he exchanged his settlement for eternal hard labor. Served Goryanchikov.
• A-v - one of the four nobles. He received 10 years of hard labor for false denunciation, from which he wanted to make money. Hard labor did not lead him to repentance, but corrupted him, turning him into an informer and a scoundrel. The author uses this character to depict the complete moral decline of man. One of the escape participants.
• Nastasya Ivanovna is a widow who selflessly takes care of the convicts.
• Petrov is a former soldier who ended up in hard labor after stabbing a colonel during training because he unfairly hit him. He is characterized as the most determined convict. He sympathized with Goryanchikov, but treated him as a dependent person, a wonder of the prison.
• Baklushin - ended up in hard labor for the murder of a German who had betrothed his bride. Organizer of a theater in a prison.
• Luchka is a Ukrainian, he was sent to hard labor for the murder of six people, and while in prison he killed the head of the prison.
• Ustyantsev is a former soldier; to avoid punishment, he drank wine infused with tobacco to induce consumption, from which he later died.
• Mikhailov is a convict who died in a military hospital from consumption.
• Zherebyatnikov is a lieutenant, an executor with sadistic tendencies.
• Smekalov - lieutenant, executor, who was popular among convicts.
• Shishkov is a prisoner who was sent to hard labor for the murder of his wife (the story “Akulkin’s Husband”).
• Kulikov - gypsy, horse thief, guarded veterinarian. One of the escape participants.
• Elkin is a Siberian who was imprisoned for counterfeiting. A cautious veterinarian who quickly took away his practice from Kulikov.
• The story features an unnamed fourth nobleman, a frivolous, eccentric, unreasonable and non-cruel man, falsely accused of murdering his father, acquitted and released from hard labor only ten years later. Dmitry's prototype from the novel The Brothers Karamazov.

Part one

• I. House of the Dead
• II. First impressions
• III. First impressions
• IV. First impressions
• V. First month
• VI. First month
• VII. New acquaintances. Petrov
• VIII. Determined people. Luchka
• IX. Isai Fomich. Bathhouse. Baklushin's story
• X. Feast of the Nativity of Christ
• XI. Performance

Part two

• I. Hospital
• II. Continuation
• III. Continuation
• IV. Akulkin's husband Story
• V. Summer time
• VI. Convict animals
• VII. Claim
• VIII. Comrades
• IX. The escape
• X. Exit from hard labor

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