Polish Encounters, Russian Identity

6. Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners from the House of the Dead

100 six Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners from the House of the Dead Nina Perlina Dostoevsky’s response to the outbreak of the Polish Revolt in 1863 is well known: he treated the insurgents’ demand for the independence of their country and a restoration of the Polish borders of 1772 as a challenge to the might of the Russian Empire and a threat to the moral integrity of all Russian people. Having read about the beginning of the revolt from newspapers, Dostoevsky began his private notebook of 1863 with the question: ‘‘What is the real war?— The Polish war is the war of two Christianities [Christian denominations— N.P.], this is the beginning of the future war of Russian Orthodox Christianity with Catholicism, in other words—of the Russian genius and European civilization . Here the progress is ours—and not an official progress (in agreement with the Dutch formula), but the peoples’ progress.’’1 After 1863 Dostoevsky’s tolerant, evenly balanced cultural attitude toward the West and Poland acquired an aggressive, nationalistic, militant stance; beginning from the midsixties his novels depicted Polish characters only as insignificant, background figures portrayed through lampoon images. Viewing Dostoevsky through the prism of ‘‘Polonophobia/Polonophilia,’’ one could rightfully assume that ‘‘the great Russian writer Dostoevsky did not like Poles,’’ if only his famous novel Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners 101 Notes from the House of the Dead did not provide a remarkable exception to this general assertion. But then it is important to keep in mind that Notes from the House of the Dead was written before the fatal date of 1863 and, more important, that as a narrative the work is presented to us as a text authored not by Dostoevsky but by another person—Aleksandr Petrovich Gorianchikov. This fictional hero, a convict of noble birth, a memoirist and thinker, was familiar with the same events of life in a military prison as Dostoevsky was; he confronted the same hardships of penal servitude but experienced and interpreted these ordeals as an ‘‘other’’ individual, another ‘‘I.’’ Dostoevsky did not treat his protagonist Gorianchikov as a conventional storyteller who simply ventriloquized the author’s ideas. Quite to the contrary, he portrayed Gorianchikov as a mimetically persuasive image, an individual personality, and not the author’s alter ego.2 In his ‘‘Scenes from the House of the Dead’’ (Gorianchikov ’s title of his memoirs) he devoted a long chapter entitled ‘‘Companions’’ to a largely sympathetic depiction of a group of Polish insurgents, his fellow prisoners, also of noble birth. Notes from the House of the Dead—a work written by a former political prisoner that depicted the morbid living conditions of criminal and political convicts locked in a penal colony, would never have seen the light of day if not for the new situation created in Russian culture by the ‘‘Great Reforms’’ of 1861–63. Supported by the liberating spirit of the era, Dostoevsky, nevertheless , had difficulties with the publication of his chapter that portrayed the Poles. Prepared for Vremia, May 1862, it was not approved by the censor; the issue included only chapters 7, 9, and 10, signaling the existence of the omitted chapter 8 by a set of dots.3 In December 1862, Dostoevsky received permission to have this chapter published, and it was included in the last issue of his journal.4 But the two-volume collection of his works that was published earlier in 1862 did not have this chapter. Dostoevsky restored it only in the 1865 edition of his Collected Works, and then omitted it again in the 1875 edition. Thus most of his readers were familiar with the incomplete text of Notes (without the chapter on Polish prisoners). Therefore, when in February 1876, in Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky chose to discuss one of his most important subjects, ‘‘On the Love of the People. The Necessary Contact with the People: Peasant Marey,’’ and there addressed his own prison experience of entering into contact with convicts from the Russian lower class and those from the Polish well-educated classes, he had widened rather than bridged the gap between Diary and Notes, as well as between himself and his fictional authorhero Aleksandr Petrovich Gorianchikov. In Notes from the House of the Dead the necessity to discriminate between Dostoevsky’s autobiographical ‘‘I’’ and the personality of his fictional character Gorianchikov provided a challenging task. Contemporary readers of Notes knew that the author of the novel and the author-hero...