The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first question that intrigued me the instant I laid my eyes on the book was, “Why the name House of the Dead?” Particularly, why the word “Dead” for convicts? Is it

(a) Because the life that convicts lived was supposedly the worst ever?
(b) Because their presence didn't actually matter in this world, and hence, they might better be dead?
(c) Or for the reason that they possessed character not fit to be possessed by common people (people possibly more human?)?

I wondered, and hoped to find the answers soon. Considering the fact that Dostoevsky had himself spent 4 years of his life as a convict in Siberia, and that that this book is an account of the life that he witnessed in prison, I was sure to find answers both satisfactory and justifying. And so, I moved on.

Dostoevsky, through a fictional character named Alexander Petrovitch, proceeded to tell us about the prison life in Siberia. The answer, to my question regarding the name of book, came in as soon as in the second chapter. Describing the prison, Dostoevsky said, “On one side of the palisade is a great gate, solid, and always shut; watched perpetually by the sentinels, and never opened, except when the convicts go out to work. Beyond this, there are light and liberty, the life of free people! Beyond the palisade, one thought of the marvellous world, fantastic as a fairy tale. It was not the same on our side. Here, there was no resemblance to anything. Habits, customs, laws, were all precisely fixed. It was the house of living death.”

So, he meant restricted state of life as being “Dead”. To support this he provided with an account of the tough life that convicts had to live through. The filthy clothes, wooden planks as bed, the iron chains which convicts had to wear, the inferior food and further punishment of strokes if convicts did something wrong. But did he just want us to understand this much? Or were their some other sublime issues on his mind?

Of course, the life inside a convict prison is hard, very hard indeed, for the likes of us can only possibly imagine the horrors, which are at times lived by convicts and hence, we sometimes sympathize with them. But we cannot, at any cost, feel acutely the anxiety, fear and restlessness that become enduring facts of their lives. We cannot perhaps even bring about ourselves to visualize the state of depravity which they accept as the rule. It is no doubt a separate issue that they deserve punishments for their crimes, but till they are living, they have every right to live in as dignified a manner as deem appropriate by the law of land. I believe that along with making us understand such, Dostoevsky also managed to bring to light some more grim issues, raising some questions, which lay bare as the story moved.

In chapter 3, he said, “Tyranny is a habit capable of being developed, and at last becomes a disease. I declare that the best man in the world can become hardened and brutified to such a point, that nothing will distinguish him from a wild beast. Blood and power intoxicate; they aid the development of callousness and debauchery; the mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty in the form of pleasure; the man and the citizen disappear for ever in the tyrant; and then a return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible.” Doesn't here the author tends to compare the tyrant to living dead? Someone who is no more human for he doesn't possess the feelings of compassion upon which the life endures?

And also in the lines “I have spoken of the executioners. The instincts of an executioner are in germ in nearly every one of our contemporaries; but the animal instincts of the man have not developed themselves in a uniform manner. When they stifle all other faculties, the man becomes a hideous monster.”

What also made me wonder was the mention of animals at the prison. They included some dogs, geese, a goat and an eagle. It surprised me that some of them were revealed to be killed by some convicts at the prison for gains. Why were the animal killings described in juxtaposition with the prison? Did author tried to convey some meaning here? (The innocents or more humans, killed by the living dead?)

But it isn't that the convicts weren't shown to have good times. They were described in conditions when they drank too much or stole or fought for buying liquor. One very important chapter of the book is where convicts perform theater during Christmas holidays. This is the liveliest part of book, where the convicts are shown animated and happy for something good. At the end of performance Dostoevsky wrote, “The convicts now separated, happy, delighted, and full of praise for the actors and gratitude towards the non-commissioned officers. There was not the least quarrel, and they all went to bed with peaceful hearts, to sleep with a sleep by no means familiar to them.” This does speak about hope and revival, in other words, resurrection from the dead. I think he meant if convicts were given a fair chance to do better in the prison, than they were bound to do, they could rise from their state, because they were essentially at heart, human only.

In chapter 7, he tried to categorize the convicts on the basis of their hopes. But added that it wasn't possible because “Reality is a thing of infinite diversity, and defies the most ingenious deductions and definitions of abstract thought, nay, abhors the clear and precise classifications we so delight in. Reality tends to infinite subdivision of things, and truth is a matter of infinite shadings and differentiations.”

In other words, he stated that we do not have any control over reality. We are living in a world inhabited by both living and the dead. Living are those whose hearts are compassionate and dead are those who are not stirred by feelings and emotions as experienced by the living. But we may not actually be able to differentiate between two, because the dead might, at times want to rise, and the living might prove to be deader at some time. And so, the outcome of the society may not turn out as we want it to be, i.e. a House only for the Living.




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