Memoirs from the House of the Dead

"During his lifetime, it was thought to be one of the most important books he’d written. Tolstoy didn’t have a huge amount of praise for his rivals, but when he read House of the Dead he said he “didn’t know a better book in all our literature.” People think of Dostoevsky as writing these almost melodramatic plots with a large cast, what’s been described as ‘fantastic realism.’ It’s an intensified version of reality. Whereas House of the Dead is journalism, really, but it couldn’t be called that at the time so it’s framed as a novel. It’s part of a genre called Zapiski, which means ‘notes’ or ‘scribbles’. It’s nominally about a third person, but it’s obviously heavily influenced by his experience in prison. I don’t think you could have later writers like Solzhenitsyn without this book. “He’d win arguments by pulling up his trouser leg, showing the scars from his shackles” It’s also not very well known to English readers, and it’s a good way of understanding what Dostoevsky went through, how he became the writer that his contemporaries saw him as. He would go to literary salons and people revered him because of what he had been through; he’d win arguments by pulling up his trouser leg, showing the scars from his shackles… it was a big part of who he was, and his literary persona. It’s also just a great book. There are incredible scenes – my favourite is a bathhouse scene, in a traditional Russian steam room. They’re all slapping themselves with birch twigs, about 80 prisoners crammed in a five by five metre cube. Grime is washing off them onto the people crouching below. He describes the sludge on the floor as being an inch thick, they’re slipping around in it and their chains are getting caught up in each other’s. And as they slap themselves with the birch twigs, you see all the scars from their various lashings and other corporal punishments getting redder and redder. That scene will stay with you forever. Even his first biographers noted that there were very close relations between his life and some of the subjective passages scattered through his fiction. Other academics have noted that he made use of his life experience, mobilising it as a way of showing his authenticity. A good example is when he talks about what it’s like for the condemned man in the last minute of his life: anyone reading that passage for the first time would have known that it was something he spoke about from experience, that mock execution. Most biographies will walk up to the line of fiction and talk about influence but are unwilling to overtly pick from the fiction events that appear to be resonant with his life experience. But there are so many clear parallels to his life. I suppose what I was interested in was trying to be faithful to his patterns of thinking. His fiction is one way to gain that insight."