Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1862)

“Reality resists classification,” Dostoevsky writes in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, which recounts his time in prison.  This statement could almost be a slogan for all of his writing.  If ever he is presented with a person that appears to be all one thing, he immediately hunts for that person’s paradox.  

When you look at the specfics, Dostoevsky says, you often find that a convict who hasn’t murdered at all can be more terrible than a murderer of six.  In fact, the murderers are sometimes the most childlike.  And some of the most dour criminals enjoy gently caressing the prison’s horse.  In short, penal life is full of surprises.  “One need only remove the outer husk,” Dostoevsky says, “and scrutinize the grain within attentively, closely and without prejudice, to see things in the people of which he had never even dreamed.”

This ability of his to take convicts as they were, rather than how he assumed they would be, led to remarkable benefits.  When he first came to prison, he could only see their “repulsive crust,” and he felt surrounded by malice.  But as he became willing to look, he noticed “among all the wounding words . . . the kind and affectionate word.”  Sometimes after years of only seeing brutish inhumanity from someone, 

“Suddenly a chance moment would reveal his soul in an involuntary convulsion and you saw in it such wealth, such feeling and heart, so clear an understanding of its own and others’ suffering, that your eyes would be opened and in the first moment you would hardly be able to believe what you yourself had seen.”

When thoroughly schooled in the reality of the situation, Dostoevsky realizes that “there is no reason to be afraid of convicts.  A man does not so lightly and so hastily attack another with a knife.”  He goes on to say, in his characteristically paradoxical fashion, that the same can’t be said of a person awaiting sentence—they are often desperate.

Dostoevsky comes to such a sympathetic understanding of those around him that when his friend, Petrov, stole from him his dearest possession (his only book) simply to buy a glass of vodka, Dostoevsky couldn’t even get mad because he understood stealing for Petrov was compulsive and not personal.  “I am certain,” Dostoevsky says, “that even in the act of stealing from he was sorry for me.”  They went on being friends.  And after seeing so much reality of the prison hospital, he says, “I could not look at lunatics unmoved.”  

But if I am to follow Dostoevsky’s example, I must also address the other side of this paradox.  In order to reach the humanity of others, Dostoevsky has to dismantle his prejudicial classifications.  But the act of seeking to understand others also requires a new classification.  If I simply stay on data-input mode, I won’t achieve Dostoevsky’s level of sympathy. He is, in fact, in a regular state of seeking to reclassify.  He’s always looking for new “types”; he’s interested in seeing how his new observations can be formed into trends across different people.  He wants to open the husk and scrutinize the grain, but he can learn much about a grain by noticing what parts it has in common with other grains.  

Yet this new classification is different.  The old classification was built on an ignorance of reality.  The new is built on the paradoxes of experience.  It’s also more fluid.  It can adjust with new data, as well as hold its shape more loosely.

Dostoevsky’s new attitude toward classification shapes the way he writes.  Characteristic of this memoir is its tendency to digress.  At first I saw this as sloppy.  I thought that Dostoevsky lacked either the skill or the motivation to synthesize his work into a unified whole.  But now I think there is more to his digressions than that.  The unity of a narrative is a sort of classification system, sorting reality into a discernable structure.  Therefore reality resists narrative unity.  But to abandon any attempt at unity is to refuse to try to understand reality at all, which leaves the author in as much prejudice as a rigid classification would.  This is the paradox of writing.  As I’ve come to expect, Dostoevsky embraces this paradox by pursuing a unity, but by disrupting that unity with digressions.  His writing style straddles the tension between direction and digression.  This push and pull seems effective in making an approach toward reality.  When the system gets too tight, the digression cuts it loose.  When the digression wanders too meaninglessly, the system steers me back.  Thus, reading Dostoevsky, I can be open to reality surprising me while still striving to understand it.  

Digressions are risky.  They try the reader’s patience.  I can be so afraid of losing the reader to boredom that I grasp so tightly to an outline that I don’t leave room for the story’s reality to breathe.  It takes a certain amount of confidence to digress.  It takes faith in the reader’s willingness to hang with you.  But I have to remember the reader is on the same quest I am—to make sense of this strange world.