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The Dead Wives in the Dead House: Narrative Inconsistency and Genre Confusion in Dostoevskii's Autobiographical Prison Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Abstract
In Notes from the Dead House, fictional narrator Aleksandr Petrovich Gorianchikov appears as wife murderer in the preface and as a political prisoner in the memoirs. In the preface, Gorianchikov experiences moral anguish over his crime. But the memoirs actively employ social analysis to shift the burden of guilt from convicts onto the social structure. This authoritarian structure, which divides society into an underclass of ignorant “children” ruled by violent “fathers,” notably excludes women. The murder of a second wife in an inset tale brutally enacts this exclusion: while Gorianchikov's social analysis helps him understand many of the prisoners, it cannot account for the convict Shishkin's murder of his wife Akulka. Gorianchikov's personal guilt for murdering his wife constitutes a response to—and a repetition of—the moral bewilderment that emerges out of Akulka's death. Seen in this light, the formal tensions between preface, memoir, and inset tale are motivated by and demonstrate a conflict between social analysis and individual responsibility.
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Donna Orwin generously responded to this essay with insightful and detailed commentary that inspired my most serious revisions. Shoshana Felman and Michael Holquist both lent their critical acumen to more than one draft. I am also grateful to Juliette Apkarian, John Mackay, and Vladimir Golstein for crucial suggestions. Finally, I wish to thank Alex Woloch, who read every draft. His ideas and advice improved the structure, the writing, and the rigor of the whole.
1 “Notes from the Dead House” is the literal translation of Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, which is usually translated as “Notes from the House of the Dead.“
2 Early on Dostoevskii decided to distance himself from the text emerging from his prison notes by creating a fictional narrator: “These Notes from the Dead House have now taken shape in my mind according to a complete and finished plan…. My figure will vanish. These are the notes of an unknown; but 1 guarantee their interest.” Dostoevskii, F. M., Pis'ma, ed. Dolinin, A. S. (Moscow, 1928-1959), 2:605 Google Scholar. Here I use Frank's, Joseph translation in Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (Princeton, 1986), 214 Google Scholar. All other translations are my own. Because of the fictional narrator, there has been much debate concerning the genre to which Dead House belongs, with critics generally placing themselves somewhere between the extreme poles of defining the text as, strictly speaking, either a memoir or a novel. Georgii Chulkov, for instance, writes that Notes from the Dead House belongs to “a genre that borders an artistic sketch, on the one hand, a memoir on the other.“ See Chulkov, , Kak rabolal Dostoevskii (Moscow, 1939), 81 Google Scholar. I. T. Mishin positions himself slightly further away from the pole “memoirs” than Chulkov when he writes that Dead House is a transitional form from notes or sketches “toward a sociophilosophical novel.“ See Mishin, “Khudozhestvennye osobennosti ‘Zapisok iz mertvogo doma,'” Uchenyezapiski Armavirskogo pedagogicheskogo instituta A, no. 2 (1962): 22. Other critics who emphasize Dead House's generic tendencies toward the novel include Viktor Shklovskii who calls it a “documentary novel” in Za iprotiv (Moscow, 1957), 64-84; and “a new, original, artistic union of the novel” in Povesti oproze (Moscow, 1966), 2:214. Perhaps the critic most inclined to emphasize the autobiographical aspects in his classification of the text is N. M. Chirkov who calls it “an artistic memoir.” See Chirkov, , O Stile Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1967), 16 Google Scholar. Chirkov regards the text, however, as an important step in die development of Dostoevskii's realism.
3 See, for instance, Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad, 1972-1990), 4:28 Google Scholar, where Akim Akimich tells Gorianchikov that the peasant inmates “are not fond of gentlemen … especially political prisoners.“
4 See Jackson, Robert in The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, 1981), 35 Google Scholar. Other critics, Konstantin Mochul'skii, Lev Shestov, and Viktor Shklovskii, simply ignore the incongruity of Gorianchikov's crime. See Mochul'skii, , Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, trans. Minihan, Michael A. (Princeton, 1967)Google Scholar; Shestov, , “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche,“ The Philosophy of Tragedy inDostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, trans. Roberts, Spencer (Athens, Ohio, 1969), 141–322 Google Scholar; and Shklovskii, Zaiprotiv, 85-125.
5 Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 217.
6 After its serial publication in Russkii mir and Vremia, Notes from the Dead House was republished as a book in 1862, 1865, and 1875. For a more complete publication history, see Dostoevskii, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 4:276–78Google Scholar.
7 Morson, Gary Saul, “Paradoxical Dostoevskii,” Slavic and East European Journal 43, no. 3 (1999): 491–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Like Morson, Dale E. Peterson senses a deliberate significance in Dostoevskii's decision to make the narrator of Dead House not simply an “unknown” but specifically a wife-murderer. “Why,” he asks rhetorically, “had Dostoevsky chosen to cloak his actual identity as a political prisoner in the unseemly garb of the tormented criminal, Goryanchikov, a wife-murderer who completes his ten-year sentence yet remains a gloomy settler living on the outskirts of the prison town? Why burden the ethnographic record with the voice of a self-castigating social outcast?” Again like Morson, Peterson does not focus on this particular question but extrapolates from it to make a more general statement about Dostoevskii's achievement of an “aesthetics of disorder.” See Peterson, , Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham, 2000), 63 Google Scholar, 65. Similarly (and earlier than either Morson or Peterson), Jacques Catteau describes the textual tensions as deliberate. He argues that the incoherence of Gorianchikov's notes, the chronological vagaries and repetitions that make it so difficult to categorize Dead House as a genre, in fact work to establish a new category—“the literature of imprisonment.” Catteau's argument implies that the preface, itself incoherent when juxtaposed with the memoir, also illustrates this “literature of imprisonment.” See Catteau, , “De la Structure de la Maison des Morts de F. M. Dostoevskij,” Revue desEtudes slaves 54, nos. 1-2 (1982): 63–172 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the preface, the freed Gorianchikov clearly carries his imprisonment inside him as he shuns society and dies of guilt. My own essay locates the “bars” of this unending imprisonment in the oppressive patriarchal discourse Gorianchikov so meticulously records.
8 See Mochul'skii, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, 196; Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 218-19; and Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky, 41.
9 John Jones similarly questions the linear trajectory of understanding discerned in redemptionist readings of the text when he writes, “The novel counterfeits the jumbled actuality of a dead man's memoir, life as he lived and recorded it. And the result is the art of the remiss, of provisional assessment, gossip, idle conjecture, contradiction, uncertainty above all. A lot goes on but nothing is accomplished—except a novel.” See Jones, , Dostoevsky (Oxford, 1983), 158 Google Scholar.
10 Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:19.
11 For a discussion of the “good father” model of society, see Hunt, Lynn, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar. Martin, Alexander M. discusses the currency of this model in the Russian context in “The Family Model of Society and Russian National Identity in Sergei N. Glinka's Russian Messenger (1808-1812),” Slavic Review 57, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 28–49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:47- 48.
13 Ibid., 4:86, 97.
14 Ibid., 4:51-52.
15 The word Dostoevskii uses to refer to the man undergoing corporal punishment is, significantly, a feminine noun, zhertua, which can mean both “victim” and “sacrifice.“
16 Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:148-49.
17 Ibid., 4:151.
18 As early as 1861, A. Miliukov compared Dostoevskii to a Virgil leading us into “a terrible world of suffering,” a “new hell, only not fantastical, but real.” See Miliukov, A., “Zapiski iz mertvogo doma,” in Zelinskii, V., Kriticheskii kommentarii k sochineniiam F. M. Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1901), 2:38 Google Scholar. Viktor Shklovskii makes a similar comparison, only he assigns Akim Akimich and not Dostoevskii the role of Virgil. See Shklovskii, Za iprotiv, 104. In 1864, Aleksandr Herzen in “Nouvelle phase de la littérature russe” called Dead House, “un livre terrible, tin carmen horrendum qui restera à tout jamais attachée à la sortie du sombre règne de Nicholas, comme 1'inscription du Dante, a 1'entrée de l'enfer.” See Herzen, , Sobranie sochinmii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow, 1959), 18:169 Google Scholar. And Robert Jackson calls Dead House, “a drama of suffering, death, and resurrection that, in its conception at least, rivals Dante's Divine Comedy.” See Jackson, The Art ofDostoevsky, 35.
19 For a discussion of The Divine Comedy's firm grounding in an unquestioned vision of divine order, see Erich, Auerbach's Dante, Poet of the Secular World (Chicago, 1929)Google Scholar.
20 Dostoevskii, Polnoesobranie sochinenii, 4:179.
21 Ibid., 4:118.
22 Ibid., 4:120-21.
23 Ibid., 4:122-23.
24 Ibid., 4:125.
25 Ibid., 4:186.
26 Ibid., 4:192.
27 See Jackson, The Art of Dostoevski 132-33.
28 Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:205.
29 Ibid., 4:199 (my emphasis).
30 Kolchin, Peter writes, “Pomeshchiki, too, often spoke of their serfs as children, but their actions suggest either that they were guilty of child abuse or that they regarded them as someone else's children toward whom they owed little responsibility. As Countess Bobrinskaia's head manager suggested, Russian serfs were ‘neglected orphan[s].'” Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 157 Google Scholar.
31 Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:207.
32 V. A. Tunimanov signals the difficult and contradictory nature of Gorianchikov's prison experience when he writes, “The story of Gorianchikov is not static, it is a process [protsess], full of dramatic effect, of the continual comprehending of truth [postepennogo postizheniia isliny]. The process is complex, contradictory, tense.” See Tunimanov, , Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo, 1854-1862 (Leningrad, 1980), 93 Google Scholar. For Tunimanov, Gorianchikov never comprehends “the truth” once and for all; the work of comprehending never ends. Tunimanov uses particularly expressive words to describe Gorianchikov's encounter with prison truths. Protsess means both “process” and “trial,” suggesting the “truth” must be continually “tried.” Similarly, die verb form of postizhenie—postigat'—means not only “to comprehend,“ but “to strike,” “to overtake,” to “befall.” For Tunimanov, then, truth in the Dead House does not necessarily present itself as a passive object of progressive comprehension, but as an active agent that “strikes” or “befalls” like the strange and disturbing people and events that keep Gorianchikov in a continual state of surprise, if not utter shock.
33 Dostoevskii, Polnoesobraniesochinenii, 4:172.
34 Gorianchikov's social analysis fails here because it remains grounded within the very same patriarchal discourse it critiques. This is why Akuika must be given the traits of the angels and saints in Russian icon painting—large eyes representing great spirituality, and a small mouth representing a diminished worldliness. See Jackson, Art of Dostoevsky, 92. Akulka's death is represented as a moral outrage against a Christian ethical sensibility rather than as the unsurprising result of a patriarchal system combined with class oppression. Foregrounding an outraged ethical sensibility and momentarily abandoning social analysis, the text avoids the question of political rights and representation for a woman like Akuika.
35 Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:173.
36 See Bakhtin, M. M., Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Emerson, Caryl (Minneapolis, 1984), 185 Google Scholar.
37 I allude, of course, to Bakhtin's analysis of this passage, ibid., 73-75.
38 I am indebted to Caryl Emerson for pointing this out to me.
39 Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:11.
40 Ibid., 4:230.
41 Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 (Princeton, 1983), 83 Google Scholar.
42 Dostoevskii, Polnoesobranie sochinenii, 4:168-69, 169, 170, 171, 172.
43 Ibid., 4:65, 68-69, 69, 199, 230.
44 Ibid., 4:152.
45 Ibid., 4:231.