Dostoevsky’s Prison Book 📚💀

I finally just finished reading Notes of a Dead House, Dostoevsky’s 1862 prison-memoir. This book was written as fiction but was mostly autobiography with some fictive additions to protect himself and evade the Russian censors. This book is profound for many reasons. The biggest one is: It ultimately made Dostoevsky the writer he became.

He didn’t become the 19th century Russian master-author by going to engineering school. He learned about being a writer while serving four years of hard labor in Siberia for being part of a secret socialist club. This was the time of tsar Nicholas 1. A fragile time for rebellious thought. Ultimately, Dostoevsky (1821-1881) learned how to be a powerful writer by being in a forced hard labor camp because he began to grasp the depth, psychology, emotional landscape, and profound nuance and complexity of the human character.

He was forced to live and work with strangers, most of whom were peasants. (Muzhiks.) He himself was from the noble class, though his life had not been easy. Between age 14-16 both his parents died; his father was most likely murdered by serfs. He was emotionally lost, aimless, going to engineering school because his father had pushed him to. Really in his soul he was a writer. He’d published some work before prison, but it was being inside that changed his perspective. All his great works were published after he left Siberia.

He was only 28 years old when he got locked up; 32 when he left. After prison he was forced to join the military. When he was finally released he had much to write about, as you can imagine. He initiated the notion of the contemporary prison memoir. He arguably became the first modern literary psychologist. Dostoevsky was like a literary anthropologist. He had a knack for digging deeply into people’s unconscious drives. His own included. He loved animals. He was quiet in prison, mostly a silent observer. He felt the great, harsh clash of class-division, never being fully accepted by the peasants. The master author learned what freedom was, and it’s opposite. What love, redemption, forgiveness were. His mind was cracked open in the best possible way. He became not only a writer but a philosopher, prophet, spiritual guide for millions to come. I am one of those millions. Though he died 142 years ago, his words continue to resonate throughout the ages. In fact: I think his words now, in 2023, are even more relevant than they were back then. The man was ahead of his time.

I leave you with a quote from the book:

“...Here I am now trying to sort our whole prison into categories; but is that possible? Reality is infinitely diverse compared to all, even the most clever, conclusions of abstract thought, and does not suffer sharp and big distinctions. Reality tends towards fragmentation. We, too, had our own particular life, of whatever sort, but at least we had it, and not only an official, but an inner life of our own.”

*(Page 277, The Grievance, from the Everyman’s Library version of Notes of a Dead House, 2015, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.)