Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead

On 23 January 1850, Dostoyevsky entered the prison fortress at Omsk, Western Siberia, to begin a four-year term of penal servitude for his part in the Petrashevist conspiracy. In 1854, some ten months after his release from prison, he wrote to his younger brother Andrey: I consider those four years as a time during which I was buried alive and shut up in a coffin. Just how horrible that time was I have not the strength to tell youit was an indescribable, unending agony, because each hour, each minute weighed upon my soul like a stone.

In the prison Dostoyevskys sufferings were compounded by the fact that, for at least the first year of his sentence, he found himself almost totally isolated. He was a nobleman, while nearly all the other convicts seemed to belong to the peasantry and the artisan classes. The full horror of his experience of prison is given vivid utterance in the first letter he wrote after his release. It was addressed to his brother Mikhail:

I had got to know something of the convict population back in Tobolsk; here in Omsk I was to live for four years in close proximity to it. These men were coarse, irritable and malicious. Their hatred of the nobility knew no limits, and so they received us noblemen with hostility and a gleeful schadenfreude. If they had had half a chance they would have devoured us. Consider for yourself what sort of protection we had against them, when we had to live, drink, eat and sleep with them for several years, and when to complain was impossible, given the myriad variety of the insults and affronts to which we were exposed. Youre noblemen, iron noses, you nosed us to death. When you were a gentleman you used to make our lives a misery, now youre worse off than the lowest trash among us, youre our brother now: such was the refrain they repeated to me in chorus for four years on end. A hundred and fifty enemies never wearied of persecuting us; this was their amusement, their entertainment, their occupation, and the only thing that saved us from this misery was our equanimity, our moral superiority, which they could not help but comprehend and which they respected as a sign that we were not subservient to their will. They always acknowledged our superiority to them. They had no inkling of what our crime might have been. We ourselves never said anything about this, and so we had to put up with all the persecution and vindictiveness which they brought to their dealings with the nobility, and which were the very breath of life for them. Our living conditions were terrible. A military prison is much tougher than a civilian one. Throughout those four years I lived nowhere but within the confines of the prison, leaving it only in order to go to work. The work we had to do was physically arduous (although not always, however), and it would happen that I would grow exhausted in the rain, the wet, the sleet or, during winter, in the intolerable cold. I once spent four hours on special emergency work when the mercury in the thermometer had frozen and the temperature must have been forty below. I got frost-bite in one of my legs. We lived all of a heap, crowded together in one barrack. Imagine, if you will, this dilapidated old wooden building which had long ago been scheduled for demolition, and which was now quite unfit for use. In summer the airlessness inside was intolerable, likewise the cold in winter. All the floors had rotted through. The floor was covered in nigh on two inches of muck; it was easy to slip and fall. In winter the small windows were covered in hoar-frost, making it almost impossible to read for much of the day. The ice on the windowpanes was also nearly two inches thick. There were leaks in the roof, and a constant draught prevailed. We were packed in like herrings in a barrel. Only six logs were used to heat the stove; there was no warmth (the ice in the room barely melted at all), but terrible fumes and this went on all winter. The convicts washed their linen in the barracks, and the whole of the small room would be fairly awash with water. There was no space to turn round in. From dusk to dawn no one could go outside to relieve himself, as the barracks were locked up; instead, a tub was placed in the passage, and the stink was intolerable. All the convicts stank like pigs, and they would say that they could not help behaving like pigs, that man is only human. We slept on a bare plank bed, and were permitted one pillow. We had to cover ourselves with our short sheepskin coats, our legs sticking out all night uncovered. All night we shivered. There were fleas, lice and cockroaches by the bushel. In winter we wore our short coats, which were often of the most miserable quality and which hardly kept us warm at all, and our short-legged boots for walking about in the snow and the subzero temperatures, if you please. For food we were given bread and a cabbage soup which contained a quarter of a pound of beef per man; but the beef was ready diced, and I never saw any of it. On holidays there was kasha with practically no vegetable oil in it at all. On fast days there were cabbage leaves and water and hardly anything else. I suffered terrible stomach trouble and was ill several times. You can judge for yourself whether it would have been possible to live without money; if I had had no money, I would certainly have died and no one, not one of those convicts, could have stood such a life. But each man worked at some trade or other, sold his merchandise and made a copeck or two. I lived on tea and the occasional piece of beef which I bought for myself, and this saved me. It was also forbidden to smoke, for men might have suffocated in such airless conditions. Smoking was done on the sly. I was often a patient in the hospital. Because my nerves were upset I suffered fits of epilepsy, but these were rare. I also have rheumatism in my legs. Apart from this, I feel quite well. Add to all these delights the almost total unavailability of books what you got, you got on the sly the continual animosity and quarrelling around you, the cursing, the shouting, the noise, the hubbub, always being under guard, never alone, and this for four years without a break, you will, I think, forgive me for saying that life was terrible.