Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

As I look back upon the past and think how much time has been spent to no avail, how much of it was lost in delusions, in mistakes, in idleness, in not knowing how to live; what little store I set upon it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit—for this my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every moment could have been an age of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!*

People live simply, unprogressively; the customs are old, firm, sanctified by the ages.

This is a theme we are already intrduced to and persists in many of Dotstoyevsky's wors after this one. Traditional Russian values vs th progression Europeans.

able to solve the riddle of life almost always stay in Siberia and delight in taking root there.

A motif in Dosto work and huge implication: true happiness exists in man when he is happy even when he has nothing.

Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a settler, a Russian-born gentleman and landowner, who was later sent to second-degree hard labor for the murder of his wife,

character. addiotiomally: many of the respected members of the town were ready to show Alexander Petrovich every kindness, that he could even be of use in writing petitions, and so on. It was supposed that he must have many relations in Russia, maybe even not among the least of people, but it was known that since his exile he had resolutely broken off all connections with them—in short, he only harmed himself. Besides, we all knew his story, knew that he had killed his wife in the first year of their marriage, had killed her out of jealousy and then turned himself in (which had lightened his punishment considerably). Such crimes are always considered a misfortune and are looked upon with pity. But despite all that, the odd fellow stubbornly shunned everyone and appeared among people only to give lessons.

Ivan Ivanovich Gvozdikov, an old-fashioned, distinguished, and hospitable official, who had five very promising daughters of various ages.

character

I asked Ivan Ivanovich about him right then and learned that Goryanchikov led an irreproachable and moral life, and that otherwise Ivan Ivanovich would not have invited him for his daughters, but that he was terribly unsociable, hid himself from everyone, was extremely learned, read a great deal, but spoke very little, and that generally it was rather difficult to get into conversation with him.

character development

It suddenly occurred to me to invite him to my place for a moment to have a cigarette. I cannot describe the look of horror that came to his face; he was completely at a loss, started to mutter something incoherent, and suddenly, casting an angry glance at me, rushed off in the opposite direction.

i love dostoyevsky’s losermen addition: yaoi?

he not only did not know the most ordinary town news known to everyone, but was not even interested in knowing it.

Goryanchikov is me fr

What was he doing, sitting there till dawn?

He's the guy from Dream of a Ridiculous Man lmao. On a more srs note, this can be a motif being introduced.

Alexander Petrovich had died that autumn,

WTF I LIKED HIM. Anyway, what are the thematic pications of his death?

died in solitude and had not even once sent for a doctor. They had already nearly forgotten him in town. His lodgings stood vacant.

This is an interestung emphsis made which leads me to think that isolation is a major motif. I should've guessed earlier, sine the story is literally set in Siberia but oh well.

he paced up and down his room all night, thinking about something and sometimes talking to himself; that he loved her granddaughter Katya very much and was very affectionate with her,

:(

It was a description, though a disjointed one, of the ten years of life at hard labor that Alexander Petrovich had endured.

Ohhh so this loser (/affectionate) is our main character! I should've known.

You could look at God’s world through the chinks in the fence:

He is kinda an opposite of he Underground Man. We see his persectives of the ouutside world from behind bars, meanwhile we see the Underground Man fom the outside loking in through a floorboard. So, a second major theme: looking at God's world from behind bars and trying to understand it

Here you were in a special world, unlike anything else; it had its own special laws, its own clothing, its own morals and customs, an alive dead house, a life like nowhere else, and special people.

Third major theme: this living dead house in its special corner of the world with its special people.

in prison there was time enough to learn patience.

Good quote

There were people who remembered him entering the prison for the first time, young, carefree, mindful neither of his crime nor of his punishment. He was leaving a gray-haired old man with a sad and gloomy face.

devastating

Six months earlier he had received news that his former wife had remarried, and he had been deeply saddened. Now she herself came to the prison, sent for him, and gave him alms. They talked for about two minutes, wept a little, and said good-bye forever. I saw his face when he came back to the barrack … Yes, you could learn patience in that place.

ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATING. He learned patience in prison, but his wife had impatient passions of her own outside. A motif: patience

Man is a creature who gets used to everything, and that, I think, is the best definition of him.

Development of the third major theme: How man lives. I guess this is one of the major overarching themes of all of Dostoyevsky's works - not how man survives, but how and for what he lives. Calling it a "living dead house" is intentional. I am once again appreciating his contrast wth the Underground Man. The Underground Man defined man as a being that walks around on two legs, being ungrateful.

These were criminals totally deprived of all civil rights, cut-off slices of society, their faces branded in eternal witness to their outcast state.

The mispronouncition of departed vs deported was a choice made by Dostoyevsky ad a great one. Such a deported may may as well be departed - this is a dead life.

This category was called “perpetual.”

Perpetual damnation vs the purgatory of the previous category?

They themselves considered that they were lifers

So these are the ones on earth; those among us who live dead lives. This is how I interpret Goryanchikov's "categories" and of course, this is a symbol.

In other words, I am describing old times, things long past and gone …

OH SO THAT IS A SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENT TO OUR SYMBOL

each of them had his own story, hazy and oppressive, like the fumes in your head after last night’s drunkenness.

“We’re literate folk!” they often said, with some strange self-satisfaction.

I reckon a great many of them are... "bookish"; s knizhnosti in Russian. It's probably what got the majority of crimi als to be conscious and therefore suffer and then want to cause suffering - whatever their individual philosophies are.

not in a figurative but in the literal sense. Certainly more than half of them could read and write.

Oh... well that undermines my previous note)

it is impossible not to agree that literacy develops self-assurance in people.

There it is lol

this strange family;

pusillanimous.

Pusillaminous: displaying a lck of courage WAS THAT WHERE WE GOT THE WORD PUSSY FROM ?!?!

it was hell, pitch-darkness. Yet no one dared to rebel against the internal statutes and accepted customs of the prison; everyone submitted.

Such men came to the prison as had gone all too far, who had leaped beyond all measure in freedom, so that in the end they committed their crimes as if not of themselves, as if not knowing why, as if in delirium, in a daze; often out of a vanity chafed in the highest degree.

Raskolnikov. Verkhovensky and Stavrogin too, if they make it to prison (though, Stavrogin never will.)

As if the title of convict, of condemned man, constituted some sort of rank, and an honorable one at that.

Often a man endures for several years, resigns himself, suffers the harshest punishments, and suddenly explodes over some small thing, a trifle, almost nothing.

crime, it seems, cannot be comprehended from given, ready-made points of view, and its philosophy is a bit more difficult than people suppose.

Of course, prisons and the system of forced labor do not correct the criminal; they only punish him and ensure society against the evildoer’s further attempts on its peace and quiet. In the criminal himself, prison and the most intense forced labor develop only hatred, a thirst for forbidden pleasures, and a terrible light-mindedness.

These are ideas which will come back amazingly in The Brother's Karamazov. And they are correct. Repentance needs to be caused by the criminal's inner sensations and he needs to arrive to that conclusion himself.

the famous system of solitary confinement also achieves only a false, deceptive, external purpose. It sucks the living juice from a man, enervates his soul, weakens it, frightens it, and then presents this morally dried-up, half-crazed mummy as an example of correction and repentance.

Dostoyevsky's amazing criticism against the penal system but this has a metaphorical interpretation to it, and it shows the most through characters like the Man with The Ridiculous man, and probably even Raskolnikov. The Karamazovs even deal with this theme. Yes, this is a theme but it ties in with the third one.

The memory of one parricide in particular will not leave me.

About Dostoyevsky: this probably inspired TBK. The crime sounds like Dmitry Karamazov's charge. oh no expandeed dostoverse brainrot returns to me.

Without his own special, personal occupation, to which he was committed with all his mind, with all his reckoning, a man could not live in prison.

This is a important development of the second theme: the alive dead house and its special people. What is the prison, in a thematic sense? In hre, Goryanchikov makes it sound frightfully similar to life. Dostoyevsky himself does not agree with Goryanchikov and evidently sees "prison" as an anti-life. So we went in a circle: what is prison?

Without work, and without lawful, normal property, a man cannot live, he becomes depraved, he turns into a brute.

Without HAVING or WANTING, that is. It shows in the Underground Man, Ptitsin, Lebyadkin, and uhhhh thats all i can think of rn

money can be spent always and everywhere, the more so as forbidden fruit is twice sweeter.

One prisoner, a man sincerely devoted to me (I say that without any exaggeration), stole my Bible, the only book we were allowed to have in prison. He confessed it to me the same day, not out of repentance, but out of pity for me, because I spent so long looking for it.

SASHA IS SO CUTE LMAOOO yes i am calling goryanchikov sasha now.

after being punished, he would promise and swear to give up smuggling.

:( i love him whoever that is and hope that hs soul is in Heaven (he was probably real)

The girl rushed after me … “Here ‘unfortunate,’ take a little kopeck for Christ’s sake,” she cried, running ahead of me and putting the coin in my hand. I took her little kopeck, and the girl went back to her mother perfectly content. I held on to that little kopeck for a long time.

My heart is broken this is literally that scene from CNP Part II Chapter III where Rodya walks along K Bridge and a girl with hse mother gives him a quarter kopeck saying the same things. Except when Rodya threw the coin into the water, Sasha kept it. Water is a symbol of physical and spiritual suicide in CNP. When Rodya threw the alms given to him "for Christ's sake," he rejected salvation. But Sasha does the opposite. This prisoner wants freedom.

the punishment and hardness of this labor lay not so much in its difficulty and ceaselessness as in its being forced, imposed, under the lash.

That says a lot

if they wanted to crush, to annihilate a man totally, to punish him with the most terrible punishment, so that the most dreadful murderer would shudder at this punishment and be frightened of it beforehand, they would only need to give the labor a character of complete, total uselessness and meaninglessness.

I was horrified by the enormous number of cockroaches in it. But the prisoners paid no attention to that.

EXCUSE ME????? Nah their diet included one gregor samsa a day

“You Moldavian plague!” “The Siberian pest on you!” “Go talk to a Turkish saber!” And the abuse took off.

THIS IS HILARIOUS WHAT

“For pity’s sake! He set fire to my fortress! What should I do, bow down to him for it?”

Theres the unwillingness to forgive)

schismatic,

Sorry i have a physical reaction to this word (schismatic is raskol'nik in russian)

So Tresorka died.

I think there is some significance to this death. Tresorka was the only thing that humanised Akim Akimych.