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Chapter Four - A Mummy or a Resurrected Self?
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80 Chapter Four A Mummy or a Resurrected Self? O F A L L O F Dostoevsky’s novels, the one that is most directly concerned with the relationship between legal punishment and moral betterment is The House of the Dead. Earlier chapters have considered this novel’s reflections on a whole constellation of problems, from commensurability between crimes and punishments, to punishment’s goals and justification, to subjective experience of punishment. In this chapter, I will examine The House of the Dead as both a prison novel and a conversion narrative to see what it has to say about the connection between the empirical experience of punishment and individual moral regeneration. Instead of accounting for Gorianchikov’s “resurrection” in political, ideological, or religious terms, as is common in Dostoevsky criticism , I will consider his transformation against the historical background of the prison reform movement in Russia and in the West. What I hope to show is that the puzzling tensions, ambivalences, and even contradictions characteristic of the novel’s portrayal of Gorianchikov’s experience both parallel the tensions of this broader debate and reproduce Dostoevsky’s own hesitation about punishment. It is this hesitation, moreover, that I see as fundamental to the poetics of uncertainty pervading the novel as it wavers continually between affirmation and rejection of punishment’s moral effects. Toward the end of the chapter, I will also consider Dostoevsky ’s attempts to overcome this hesitation in Crime and Punishment and, in particular, in the essay “Environment.” This latter work is Dostoevsky ’s most forceful statement on the subject, where he exchanges his former ambivalence for an unequivocal, even strident, insistence on the need to punish the deserving. This surge of confidence was not destined to last, however. The Kornilova case reawakened in Dostoevsky his former anxieties, which spilled out into his writings in ways that I have discussed in the previous chapter. They also reverberated through Dostoevsky ’s last novel The Brothers Karamazov in ways that I will examine in this chapter. A Mummy or a Resurrected Self? 81 THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD AS A PRISON NOVEL The first novel of Dostoevsky’s transitional period that separates the earlier pre-Siberian works from the later era of “great novels,” The House of the Dead (1861–62) is often viewed as a “creative laboratory” for his later writings.1 It anticipates many of Dostoevsky’s familiar preoccupations and rehearses some of his future arguments. Written soon after Dostoevsky’s return from Siberia, where he had served four years in a hard-labor prison and nearly six more as a soldier—and later an officer—in the Russian army, The House of the Dead draws heavily on Dostoevsky’s own prison experiences . It is not surprising therefore that among its central themes one finds the question of criminality, and a related, although largely overlooked, problem of punishment. While The House of the Dead has long been recognized as a classic example of prison literature, so far little has been said about its relationship to the historical realities of the prison reform movement and the debate on punishment that was unfolding in the Russian press around the time of its publication. As critics have noted, The House of the Dead makes clear that the realities of prison life described in the novel date to the era of Nicholas I, whose reign ended in 1855. They point out that a number of details, including the narrator’s allusions to the recent improvement in prison conditions, suggest that while writing in the early 1860s, Dostoevsky is, in fact, looking to the past. At the same time, The House of the Dead is typically credited with drawing attention to the deplorable state of Russian prisons and sparking public discussion about that problem. The reader of Joseph Frank’s authoritative account of Dostoevsky’s life, for example, may be puzzled by the following tension. On the one hand, Frank locates the events of the novel in “the legendary past” of Nicholas’s reign because of the text’s allusions to “recent changes for the better in prison-camp conditions.”2 On the other hand, he downplays the significance of these changes to commend the novel for initiating a debate on the Russian penal system. “The publication of House of the Dead,” Frank writes, “immediately unleashed a huge debate in the press about Russian justice and the system of imprisonment: all sorts of reforms were suggested or advocated as a result of the...