Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I can hear his measured, quiet, drawn-out “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us!…” “I’m not here forever, but only for a few years!” I think and lower my head to the pillow again.

However, it might well have seemed so to me after our prison.

Man..

highly dubious cleanness.

Lmao dostoyevsky has poetic narration fr

God’s already killed you, so lie down and die! But no, he goes on picking! Well, what are you picking for?”

DAMNNNNNN

“Lord, what a punishment!” At the moment he was sitting on his bed and greedily filling his nose with snuff from a little paper packet, so as to sneeze more forcefully and punctiliously.

Well that says a lot about us

Having finished sneezing, he opened the handkerchief, attentively examined the abundant phlegm accumulated in it, and immediately smeared it on his brown hospital robe, so that all the phlegm remained on the robe, while the handkerchief was only left a little damp. He did that for the whole week. This meticulous, niggardly preservation of his own handkerchief to the detriment of the hospital robe did not stir up any protest on the patients’ part, though one or the other of them might have to wear the same robe after him.

THT IS SO INHUMANELY DISGUSTING

I especially disliked the big and remarkably fat lice I sometimes met with in these robes.

WHAT.WHAT.

Having drunk it all, he silently set the cup down and, without even nodding to me, started pacing up and down the ward again.

Lol

And, naturally, they understood that a sick man, whether or not he was a prisoner, needs such a thing, for instance, as fresh air, like any other sick man, even of the highest rank.

Granted, they say a prisoner is an evildoer and unworthy of any benefits; but need one aggravate the punishment for someone who has already been touched by the finger of God?

Leg fetters are decidedly no precaution against anything; and if so, if they are prescribed for a condemned convict only as a punishment, then again I ask: why punish a dying man?

I remember the sun’s strong, slanting rays piercing the green, slightly frosted windows of our ward.

Dostoyevsky love slanting ray imagery) from here all the way to tbk. Maybe this was the impression that got him there.

Finally, his wandering and shaky hand found the amulet on his chest and began tearing it off, as if it, too, was a burden to him, bothered him, weighed him down.

“He had a mother, too!”—and walked away.

Humanity, kindness, brotherly compassion for a sick man are sometimes more necessary to him than any medicine.

LOVE THAT QUOTE

“Ah, no,” he added, interrupting the momentary silence, “there’s no counting all my beatings; and how could they be counted! There aren’t enough numbers.”

HEARTBREAKING

What soldier personally hates a Turk when he makes war on him? And yet the Turk cuts him down, stabs him, shoots at him.

“Yes, to look mercifully, no matter what a sinner you are. But here it’s not me, it’s the law! Think! I serve God and the fatherland; I’ll be taking a heavy sin on myself if I relax the law, think about that!”

It's sad because there are many Zherebyatnikovs now who use the same line.

They are even ready to exchange the most merciful man for the most severe, so long as he gives off their own homespun smell.

simply because he really wants to know about these things.

No wonder the prisoners love him. He acknoledges that they are men

I tried to picture to myself the psychological state of the men going to punishment.

It rly was dostoyevskys awakening

it was a rare man who preserved his equanimity in the face of punishment, not excepting even those who had previously been much and repeatedly beaten.

It burns, it scorches like fire—that was all I could find out, and that was the sole answer I got from all of them.

Yes i am remeberrinng the hell/purgatory/earth motif but imot discussing them in notes

Tyranny is a habit; it is endowed with development, and develops finally into an illness.

Great quote. Tyranny can also meean addiction or being accustomed to depravity.

Blood and power intoxicate: coarseness and depravity develop; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible and, finally, sweet to the mind and feelings.

THIS IS A HUGE DOSTO THEME IN ALL OF HIS POST PRISON WORKS

To acknowledge one’s guilt and ancestral sin is little, very little; it is necessary to break with them completely.

The characteristics of the executioner can be found in embryo in almost every contemporary man.

It is hard to conceive how far human nature can be distorted.

Ustyantsev coughs his putrid, consumptive cough and then moans weakly and each time says: “Lord, I’m a sinner!” And it is strange to hear this sickly, broken, and whining voice amidst the general silence.

One starts telling something about his past, about far away, about long ago, about being a tramp, about his children, about his wife, about the way things used to be. And you can feel just from his far-off whispering that nothing he is talking about will ever come back to him, and he himself, the storyteller, is a cut-off slice.

“And again I got into this habit: some days I’d beat her from morning till night; she got up wrong, she doesn’t walk proper. If I didn’t beat her, I got bored. She’d sit looking out the window and crying … She cried all the time. I felt sorry for her, but still I beat her.

Awful ((((

“Like exile, like child: where the eye falls, the hand follows”—so they say in Siberia about exiles.

But meanwhile, all the same, on the whole, the forest, the tramp’s life, is paradise compared to prison. It is so understandable; there can even be no comparison. Though it’s hard still, it’s your own will.

Taking away free-will is the mot inhumane thing to do, since man lives by his will alone. Free will is such a huge theme in all of his post prison books btw)

wherever he may be locked up, becomes somehow restless in spring, with the first welcoming rays of spring sunshine.

Is this why Dostoyevsky loves the slanting rays of light imagery? Bc that is heartbreaking

Sometimes they torment you so much that you finally lie there as if in a fever, and you feel yourself that you’re not asleep, but only delirious.

Gnedko eats and again nods his head, as if to say: “I know you, I do! I’m a nice horse, and you’re a good man!”

I love every animal interaction

Sharik,

WOOOO I MISSED HIM

Zhuchka

No pls its been two years since i read tbk but i havent recovered from zhuchka

Having lost any future career, she lived only for the sake of food and was fully aware of it.

These animas are ofc metphors for the prisoners themselves

“Proprieties mean nothing, if only you see my rapture!” Wherever I might be, at the shout “Kultyapka!” he would suddenly appear from around the corner, as if from nowhere, and with squealing rapture would come flying to me, rolling like a ball and turning somersaults on the way. I became terribly fond of the little monster.

OMG ITS SO ADORABLE AND SAASHA IS SO FOND I CANT. I LOVE THEM.

He had skinned him, dressed the hide, and used it to line the velvet winter half boots

what the fuck

He glanced questioningly and uneasily at the three of us in turn and only occasionally ventured to wag his bushy tail, which he kept between his legs, as if wishing to soften us by this sign of his trust in us.

I dontt think i can rread this..

a few words were said about a certain parricide from the nobility.

Ooh yes i remember the dmitry k mention :3

the criminal was indeed in the right and had suffered ten years of hard labor for nothing;

Literally dmitry k. u cat convince me otherwise

this dreaminess lent the majority of the prisoners a gloomy and dismal, somehow unhealthy look.

I think i alr mentioned how dostoyevsky likes dreamers in his books

and candor were held in contempt. The more unrealizable the hopes were, and the more the dreamer himself felt that unrealizability, the more stubbornly and chastely he concealed them within himself, but renounce them he could not.

since it is impossible to live with no hope at all, he invented a way out for himself in a voluntary, almost artificial martyrdom.

No living man lives without some sort of goal and a striving towards it. Having lost both goal and hope, a man often turns into a monster from anguish

Reality is infinitely diverse compared to all, even the most clever, conclusions of abstract thought, and does not suffer sharp and big distinctions.

He’s an eagle, and our major’s a …” and here they usually put in an unprintable word.

IM CRYING HSHAAAH THE CENSORS