Dostoevsky's Time in Hell

What his prison novel can tell us about being human

This is a script of a video from my YouTube Channel, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW71hQg1kDxmFIfijA8dL0Q

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“Just how horrible that time was I have not the strength to tell you. It was an indescribably, unending agony” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

On the 23rd April 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested for subversive activities against the Tsar and the Russian government. He was initially sentenced to death, before finally having his sentence commuted to four years hard labor in a harsh Siberian prison camp. This experience was a living Hell for the writer, and yet he also saw it as one of the most important experiences of his life. And some suspect it is this time that gave him a uniquely penetrating insight into the human condition, and a razor sharp analysis of the inner workings of the psyche. It was this even that transformed him from a youthful, unrefined genius into a full-blown prophet.

And luckily for us, he penned a semi-autobiographical work based on his time there. This book, The House of The Dead, forms the foundation for almost all of his later works, and is also one of the most profound explorations of human suffering ever put to prose.

Get ready to learn the most fundamental human needs, whether absolute power corrupts absolutely, and how even in the most desperate of situations, there is always a glimmer of hope, however irrational that may be.

Before we get started, do be aware that there is so much more to Dostoevsky’s book than I can possibly cover here. I will also be focusing on the more “timeless” aspects of the work, rather than, say, its analysis of the Russian class system, though that too is very interesting. Also, spoilers for many of Dostoevsky’s major novels ahead.

But with that out of the way, let’s begin with perhaps the most obvious consequence of being in a Russian prison, the deprivation of freedom.

1. Freewill, Freedom, and Rebellion

In a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky described his time in prison as akin to being dead and buried. It was, for him, like his life had temporarily ended, only to reappear upon his eventual release. And a lot of this feeling of being shut in a coffin had to do with the fact it was so physically and psychologically stifling. It was here that Dostoevsky cemented an opinion that would later form a surprisingly large theme in his works - that a feeling of freedom is a fundamental human need.

The House of the Dead follows a sort of fictionalised version of Dostoevsky, a man named Aleksandr Petrovich, during his own term in a Siberian prison. And the first theme that gets explored in the novel is the erosion of the freedom of the narrator. We watch him arrive, get his fetters put on, and slowly settle into the reality that this prison will be his world for the next 10 years. He realises all of the things he will no longer be able to do. He will no longer control his time, he will not be by himself for any part of his sentence, and most importantly, he will not be able to leave. His liberty has been utterly stripped from him, as it had for each and every one of the prisoners. And Dostoevsky explores at length the effect this had on both their behavior and their psychology.

The first response of many to this deprivation of freedom is resignation. Dostoevsky describes how a common coping mechanism among the prisoners was essentially to make sweet lemons out of their situation. They would go through the motions of accepting that this was their deserved place. As Dostoevsky put it:

“‘We’re lost men’ they would say. ‘We didn’t know how to live our lives in freedom, so now we have to…stand in line to be counted’”

However, this acceptance was also only surface deep. Dostoevsky says that almost no prisoner he met was truly contrite, or truly repentant of whatever crimes they had committed. The acceptance was pragmatic, rather than moral. It reflects something the philosopher Jon Elster proposed about the human mind. When confronted with a situation we feel is unbearable to accept, Elster thinks we have a tendency to modify it in our minds to seem as if it is less bad, either by focusing on its more positive aspects, or, in this case, framing it as “how things should be”. And much of Dostoevsky’s analysis of freedom in this semi-fiction concerns the extent to which this acceptance manages to hold for the prisoners, and when it snaps.

First, there is the exception to the rule. The one person in the prison who is so naturally respectful of authority and duty that they were genuinely at peace with their situation. This was Akim Akimitch, and he is perhaps the only man among them who felt no need to be free. This may be why Dostoevsky’s protagonist often finds him slightly unnerving. At the very least, he is in the extreme minority

Apart from that, Dostoevsky describes the different means by which the prisoners attempted to seize their freedom over the course of their stay. The usual way of doing this was to get outrageously drunk for a night, simply in order to show that they could. Because drink and money were scarce, prisoners would save up for these binges for months, and then blow it all on vodka and strut around the barracks like they owned the place. Part of the reason they did this was expressly because it was against the prison rules. The disobedience was a way of saying “I am still free in some ways, you cannot control my drinking, despite your best efforts”. One prisoner, Gazin, who Dostoevsky says was despised by almost everyone, used to regularly become drunk and violent as his conquest for a little slice of freedom. Each time this would result in him being viciously beaten into unconsciousness by the other prisoners, and yet he would embark on the same course of action in a few months time, so precious were these moments of autonomy.

When there is a temporary escape by two prisoners, the other men live vicariously through them. They root for them, and praise them, and say they are sure the authorities will never catch them. And yet when they are eventually re-captured and brought back to the compound, they are met with derision and scorn, because by their failure they not only dashed their own chances at freedom, but also prevented all the other prisoners from escaping into the outside world via their imagination. We will be revisiting this theme of imagination later when we discuss the concept of hope in the novel.

But perhaps the most stark attempts to reclaim freedom were though obviously self-destructive behaviour. Dostoevsky says that the guards would wonder at how a prisoner could be well-behaved for years, not showing the slightest bit of poor behaviour or irritation with the authorities, and yet one day snap, and attack an officer knowing that they would be beaten severely for it. One man, Petrov, even attempts to kill the Major in charge of the prison, despite the fact that if he succeeded, it would almost certainly backfire on him.

In Dostoevsky’s opinion, this is a little like a tiger lashing out when backed into a corner. But it is not a physical corner, but a psychological one. When the prisoner becomes acutely aware of the fact that they truly are unfree, and that this lack of freedom is a threat to their very humanity, any physical punishment will pale in comparison to the torture of this loss of agency. As Dostoevsky will expand upon in Notes from The Underground, the self-destructive nature of the rebellious action is not a negative, but an integral part of the strategy. After all, anyone can act in their own interests - the entire prison system is constructed so that compliance is in the best interests of the prisoners. So in order to affirm their total liberty as agents, there is only one thing left to do - something self-destructive and irrational enough that no simple machine or hedonic automaton would ever do it. But this too is in vain. In one poignant scene, a prisoner only has his fetters removed after he dies of consumption, reflecting that the only real route to freedom without official release or permanent escape was death.

And it may have been observing the extent to which prisoners valued what little freedom they could achieve which solidified in Dostoevsky’s mind that a feeling of liberty was one of the most significant philosophical needs of mankind. I suspect this might be one reason he became so opposed to the philosophy of mechanistic determinism later in life. He thought that if people began to truly believe they were unfree, then they would fall into despair just like many of the prisoners in his novel. This begins what will become a theme in Dostoevsky’s time in prison. In each of the physical conditions of the prison he spots philosophical conditions that were by no means limited to the prison walls, but could follow them out into the world, turning that into a coffin as well.

This theme continues in the next aspect of The House of The Dead. Because the lack of freedom is only one side of the equation. There is also the inevitable flipside of imprisonment, the enforcement of power.

2. Power and its Abuses

If there is one figure that could be called the “villain” of The House of The Dead it is the Major in charge of the prison. Dostoevsky describes him as follows:

“This man was frightening, because he had almost unlimited power over two hundred souls. In himself he was just a man of spite and impropriety, nothing more.”

This is genuinely one of my favourite lines in all of Dostoevsky’s writings because it is unbelievably rich in meaning. First, the reference to “two hundred souls” draws a subtle analogy with the system of serfdom in Russia, where serfs were often referred to as “souls”. And then there is the direct contrast between the extreme outer power the Major wields, but also the incredibly meagre inner power. This mixture of the two is what causes him to be so vicious to the prisoners.

The abuses of the Major are frequent and shocking. He has prisoners beaten simply for sleeping on the wrong side of their beds, or just to reassure himself of his power. He ruled with an iron fist, wielding his authority seemingly arbitrarily, and, above all, he refused to acknowledge the humanity of the convicts. He saw them as fundamentally beneath him. Not merely people who required reformation or punishment, but as those whose souls were tarried, and as a result bore a permanent mark of inferiority in his mind.

And while the Major is singled out for special attention, he is only emblematic of a wider phenomenon to do with power and those who wield it. To use Dostoevsky’s own words:

“Tyranny is a habit…I submit that habit may coarsen and stupefy the very best men to the level of brutes…such power is temptation”.

We see this pattern everywhere. From the lieutenant who raises flogging to almost an art form, tormenting the prisoners psychologically before he broke them physically, to the individual guards who reportedly “took it as a personal affront” when the prisoners did not beg for mercy. Clearly for Dostoevsky it took a very special constitution to receive power and not have this turn into a sense of undeserved, spiritual or moral superiority.

This link between power, a sense of superiority, and bona fide brutality emerges in Dostoevsky’s later novels. Raskolnikov kills a pawnbroker partly out of a sense that he is superior, and so is right to exert power over her. It is this that allows him to commit the murderous act. In Demons the leader of a revolutionary group, Pyotr Stepanovich, sees in his own power the right to do whatever he wants, including throwing his own allies under the bus, and committing a senseless killing. It is very rare that we find kind wielders of power in Dostoevsky’s novels. There is the elder Zozima in The Brothers Karamazov, and the inspector in Crime and Punishment, but on the whole Dostoevsky’s works are replete with abuses of power, big and small, and the arrogance that often comes along with it. It is worth noting here that this thought did not stem from his time in prison, as we see a similar theme in his first major work, Poor Folk, but it was clearly significantly refined in prison.

The particular idea that cruelty in power comes from some inner lack or inner weakness is also found in The House of The Dead, and arguably prefigures Nietzsche, who made a similar observation. For instance, there is a convict named Aristov (based on one of Dostoevsky’s own barrack-mates) whom Dosotevsky describes as almost uniquely cruel, having killed “every moral feeling in himself”. And he is particularly hungry for power, becoming an informant for the Major in order to gain some influence over the prison authorities. Yet at the same time, Dostoevsky sees this as stemming from his own lack of inner depth. He views Aristov as pretty much devoid of any higher concerns, and ruled purely by his physical appetites. His lust for power is thus judged as both repellant and also vaguely pitiful. It is worth noting this is the person Dostoevsky would base the sadistic yet nihilistic Svidrigailov on, who eventually takes his own life in Crime and Punishment.

However, this suspicion of external power is contrasted with the extreme reverence held throughout the work for internal power. For instance, a Polish prisoner known as Z, the rest of his name is censored, is a notable character. He was a devoutly religious man, and was also seen as fairly unassuming, and was respected among the prisoners, if not particularly liked. In one incident he was beaten by the Major as punishment, and he laid down without flinching to take it, even as an older man. His strength of character was so great that the Major felt compelled to apologise to him. It is not quite right to call him happy, as like many of the other prisoners he was deeply troubled. But through it all he managed to maintain his inner sense of meaning. It is a bit like the attitude of Viktor Frankl in his time in a concentration camp. In Hell, mere endurance is superhuman, and endure Z did. We’ll be revisiting this theme of meaning in the next section.

The other contrast between inner and outer power is found in the persistence of that power. Towards the end of the work the Major is finally dismissed on the basis of his abuse. And at that moment all of his gravitas and might dissolves, and we get the following description:

“All his charisma had vanished along with his uniform…in his frock coat he suddenly became a complete nonentity”

Whereas the Polish prisoner retains his dignity even in powerlessness, the Major’s power is all derived from contingent, external things, and so it vanishes in an instant. In the dark of prison, where Dostoevsky had nowhere to turn to, and no power of his own, it is not surprising that he made this same observation that Boethius did over a thousand years earlier, rotting in his own prison cell and bemoaning his own fate.

I think this sophisticated analysis of power, its varieties, and its effects is seen scattered through Dostoevsky’s later works. Principally this idea of internal or moral/spiritual power reaches its apotheosis in Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov, a young man beloved by all and who ends up with a surprising amount of insight and influence for his age, primarily because of the extreme reserves of inner strength and purpose he can call upon, and his total lack of the kind of avarice, pride, and faux-superiority which characterises someone like the Major.

As becomes clear in the rest of his works, Dostoevsky thinks that true inner power, however ridiculous it may seem, comes from an indiscriminate brotherly love of all in the world. Perhaps he saw the dark antithesis of this idea in the Major and Aristov.

But next I want to examine perhaps the most fundamental observation Dostoevsky made about our philosophical needs while in prison. And how it links with his fierce loyalty to faith itself.

3. Hope, Hopelessness, and Humanity

In the ancient Greek legend of Pandora’s Box, all the evils of life are unleashed from their container and rampage through the world. And yet along with all of those nightmares like pestilence and famine, there is hope, a tiny glimmer of it, to console mankind in their troubles. Nietzsche famously re-interpreted hope as another evil in the box, simply one that disguised itself as a friend. But Dostoevsky took a far different view. In his stay at prison he became convinced that hope was absolutely invaluable to the thriving of the human spirit, and the very ability to bear the torments of life.

But first, what is hope? Well, according to the philosopher Cheshire Calhoun, hope comes in two varieties. The first is intentional hope - that is, hopes about particular things. I might hope that my channel grows well next year, or that cheese is on offer at Tesco, and so on. But the second is basal hope. This is a far more general and almost existential attitude. It is the background view which says “my life is worth preserving for the future”. Michael Molina compares this to the difference between being happy about something and simply being in a cheerful mood. Whereas the first is tied to some particular thing, the second forms part of the backdrop against which we perceive the rest of the world. I might be happy if this video (script) does well, but if I have a cheerful attitude, then anything I see is more likely to make me happy. This may be one reason Nietzsche wishes us to have a “dancing” attitude to life - he wants a certain lightness of spirit to pervade how we see reality.

Dostoevsky draws a general divide between the prisoners in Siberia who have hope, and those who do not. This hope comes in a variety of forms, both physical and spiritual. There is the straightforward hope that comes with looking towards their release, but even for those imprisoned for life, there is the hope that a new Major might run the prison, or that there might be better food, or that things can in some sense “get better”. There are even those prisoners who hope that, against all the odds, they will one day have their sentences commuted, and indeed this does happen to someon. There is also theological hope. One old man who is devoutly religious is often found weeping in the night, and Dostoevsky describes him as “tormented by a profound, incurable melancholy”. But something keeps him going, and that seems to be his faith. Despite his sadness, he manages to eliminate any hatred in his heart, and finds a measure of solace despite the almost unbearable conditions. Even with his misery, he remained unbroken, and filled with the kind of basal hope that lends him a “laugh of clearness and simplicity, in which there was something of the child”.

Above all, it is hope that allows some prisoners to genuinely undergo a transformation in their suffering, however temporary. This perhaps comes out most clearly in the chapter focusing on a Christmas show that the prisoners put on. While the general air of the prison was almost always filled with despair, cynicism, and a sheer absence of hope, the performance gave them something to look forward to, and to invest their sense of meaning in. It fulfilled the same function as the private projects Dostoevsky said prisoners often worked on in their barracks, but with the added aspect of community. When the curtain rises on the performance, even the most hardened prisoner is cheering and whooping for them. In that show there was, however fleetingly, the essence of hope, the general attitude that things can get better, and that, despite what anyone says and how anyone treats them, the prisoners are still human.

For Dostoevsky, this sense of humanity seems closely tied to a kind of basal hope. When someone is in despair or desperation, he thinks they respond by viewing themselves as something inhuman, and even behaving as such. In one notable passage, Dostoevsky talks about a type of prisoner who had snapped and committed a murder, only for this to totally abolish his sense of hope. Dostoevsky describes the “sinking sensation in his heart which is caused by his own apprehension of himself”. He cuts himself off from humanity, and tries to celebrate his own wickedness, but to no avail. Eventually he becomes a shell of himself, and a “slobbering, snivelling, abject creature”. Just as a sense of hope transformed the prisoners from unhappy and hostile to joyous and friendly, a lack of hope could turn a previously upstanding person into something more bestial, both in his actions and in his own eyes. We see this in many of his characters, like how Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov managed to recover her own hope in the reassurance by Alyosha that she has the dignity afforded to all people, whatever she has done.

And it is here that Dostoevsky himself undergoes one of the most profound transformations in his attitude to faith and to Christianity. Whereas in his younger years he had flirted with atheism and materialism, it was in this most desperate of circumstances that he observed the strange ability religion had to restore the sense of the human in even the most despairing of prisoners. When the convicts attend a service at Easter, Dostoevsky notes the simple faith and repentance that was suddenly shown in each of these people who had previously seemed so cynical and rebellious. How they realised that “they too were men” and that “before God we are all equal”. These experiences may have underpinned his later faith in the ability of religion, and Orthodox Christianity in particular, to both be a comfort in the most dire of situations, and also to genuinely affect change in someone’s heart. We don’t need to be religious to consider this point. I don’t personally believe in God, but I do find this psychologically fascinating, and it helps clarify why Dostoevsky was so firm in the power of faith right to the end of his life.

Because in some ways Dostoevsky’s views on religion were forged and refined in this crucible. His unwavering belief in the transformative power of faith is an extreme view as it was created in extreme circumstances, to endure the extreme. Without acknowledging this, a vital component of the foundation of his thought is lost. It is partly why, for him, faith, hope, and recognised humanity form the pillars for the development undergone by so many of his characters. These prisoners were men deep in despair, but Dostoevsky found himself truly believing their souls were not lost.

But lastly, I want to continue down this theme of humanity. Because I think it is in The House of The Dead, and Dostoevsky's experiences in prison more generally, that we begin to make sense of his own radical perspective on mankind itself.

4. The Best and Worst of the Soul

If there is one thing Dostoevsky is known for in his writings, it is his almost unique ability to explore the heights and depths of the human mind. A character like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is capable of incredibly noble sentiment - helping those in need, defending the honour of the near defenseless Sonia, and loving at a deep level. Yet he is just as able to act horrifically: he kills two people in cold blood, lashes out in anger, and sometimes genuinely believes he is superior to all others, and has the right to treat them as he pleases. In Raskolnikov are the seeds of the best and worst humanity has to offer. Other times Dostoevsky simply displays the extremes to which man can be pushed. Characters like Smerdyakov or the Underground Man are resentful and hateful in the extreme, to the point that some people even find them unrealistic. By contrast, Sonia or the Elder Zosima or Alyosha are often so kind, self-sacrificial, and honest that they become ideals for many readers. I think this is one reason his work is sometimes described as “fantastic realism”. There is this heady mixture of ordinary human qualities pushed to their extremes. And yet I think that with the backdrop of his time in prison, this view of humanity as capable of a kind of true hyperbole really comes into focus.

Compare the characters Dostoevsky met in prison, and the wide gulf between them. There are those like Aristov or the Major, who were genuinely repulsive in their personalities and their demeanor. Who would happily trample over other men to achieve their aims and who had fallen to a level that almost seems Demonic. We also see how their attitude flows out among the other prisoners, turning them even more cynical, hardneed, and heartless than they were before. We observe how they rob others of their humanity without a thought. We meet prisoners like Gazin, who was said to have done horrible things to children, and who often became violent with others. And we are told how unrepentant many were about even the most brutal of crimes

But we also meet people like the faithful old man, who manages to remain compassionate, honest, and kind even in the face of unimaginable conditions. We see the young prisoner Aley, who is there because he was swept up in his brothers’ crimes and was too respectful of them to refuse to partake. Dostoevsky describes him as possessing a childlike innocence even in Hell, and one that was greatly appreciated by those around him. There were the women who aided the prisoners by bringing small gifts or money. There were the townspeople who provided our protagonist with books in his final years of captivity. There was Baklouchin, who despite being imprisoned for life still had such passion and care for the convicts’ performance, and who was unparalleled in his friendliness.

But perhaps most interestingly there are those in the work who are capable of the extremes of good and of evil, of kindness and of cruelty, of compassion and of violence. There is Petrov, a prisoner who became totally devoted to our protagonist, innocently asking him questions about history, yet at the same time is capable of the most horrific violence, and who everyone else regards with unmistakable fear. We see how even the most hardy of prisoners is capable of humility, and of tender feeling. We notice them having moments of sympathy with one another, moments of community, and moments of genuine care. Dostoevsky openly admits that he was mistaken in his initial assessment that these were irrevocably fallen men, incapable of goodness. As much as they fight and insult, they also joke and help. Even in this state, and even having committed some truly awful crimes, these are still people fully capable of love, kindness, and true friendship. Another prisoner, Sushilov, weeps as our protagonist is freed, saying:

“How will I ever manage without you, Alexandr Petrovich? Who’ll be left for me when you’re gone?”

By his own admission, Dostoevsky says he went into his imprisonment convinced he would be dwelling with people who had lost their humanity, only to see how it endured, burning in murderers, cutthroats, and more.

And even where he did not find kindness, he found remarkable complexity. In the ruthless bandit, Orlov, who was able to kill without feeling and simply did not seem to understand the concept of morality, Dostoevsky still found a remarkable courage and strength of will that left an indelible impression on him. He saw killers tremble in fear at an officer wielding a birch. He saw the supposedly morally upright guards indulge in cruelty beyond that shown by the convicts. He saw how power could turn someone brutal, and how it could be wielded skilfully, for the greater good of all. He saw how sometimes it was the mere knowledge that someone trusted them, cared for them, and had faith in them, that turned some of the most cynical convicts into showing real compassion for others, and discovering depth in themselves. He describes how he found extreme spiritual achievement in those who at first seemed animalistic, and a profound brutal callousness in even the most learned and supposedly “developed” men. It may have been here that Dostoevsky took up the same view held by the Christian mystic Maester Eckhart: that the spark of divinity can be sought within each of us, and never truly leaves, however hard we try to smother it. With the right conditions, it might be nurtured into a new life.

Dostoevsky describes with penetrating precision the way in which each prisoner’s or guard’s behaviour was like a pebble in a pond, rippling outwards to affect everyone else’s conduct as well. Here we see the germs of his later view that mankind will either stand or fall together. We will either slowly learn to regard one another with a universal brotherly love, or we will degrade into ever-worsening hatred, suspicion, and mistrust. Given this, his idea that we are responsible not just for our own sins, but the sins of every other man, woman, and child on this earth, becomes more comprehensible.

By the time Dostoevsky, and our protagonist, leave the prison, this is what they have to say. And I want to read this in full because it is just so tragically beautiful.

“How much youth had been buried in vain within these walls; how much power and strength had perished here for nothing! For the whole truth must be told: all these men were quite remarkable. These were perhaps the most gifted, the strongest of all our people. But mighty powers had perished in vain, perished abnormally, unlawfully, irrevocably. Yet who is to blame? That was the question: who was to blame?”

Having been confronted with some of the worst life has to offer, seen some of its cruelest aspects, and met some genuinely hateful people, Dostoevsky could have easily become a dismissive kind of cynic. But that did not happen. Rather, he left with the germs of this almost unique mix of pessimism and idealism that is part of what makes his later writings so wondrous to read. Dostoevsky became keenly aware of the depths to which humanity can sink, to just how far into Hell we can travel simply on our own steam. And yet he also left with the unshakable belief that there is innocence, kindness, and love within everyone. Later, in one of his final public addresses, he expresses his firm faith that if we nurse this gem of goodness to the point of universality, we can truly make this world not just better, but a genuine paradise.

Just like his God, Dostoevsky too descended into the realm of the dead, and yet somehow managed to emerge on the other side with his hope in mankind not just restored, but carved in stone. It is no wonder he describes his release not just as freedom, but as resurrection.