Dostoyevsky's Prison Diaries
GOLD, HERBERT
Dostoyevskv's Prison Diaries Reviewed by Herbert Gold Author, "The Man Who Was Not with It" and other novels Memoirs from the House of the Dead. By Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Oxford. 294 pp....
...The journalist here represented, however, is content to note his summary reactions...
...Yet we feel here that the experience is insufficiently controlled, not yet recreated and "real," just because, paradoxically, not fictional enough...
...Its predominating meaning for our time-^perhaps other times will take other meanings—is that madness can seem to be rational...
...While, therefore, not one of the great prison documents, the book is a shock and a warning and a curious by-path for a student of Dostoyev-sky's art...
...Dostoyevsky adjusts with something that we can almost call grace and simplicity to the nightmare of his Siberian imprisonment, in a place where "all the prisoners stank like pigs, and thev said it was impossible not to behave like pigs—'Men are only human.' " Life goes on, despite epilepsy, pestilence, murder, sadism, starvation, perversion...
...It is as if he has relinquished his special genius for projecting human beings with a hallucinating fictional reality...
...This is perhaps the optimistic lesson to be drawn from this curiously abstracted, almost vague book by the great novelist...
...In this work, on the other hand, he is a great artist in the throes of a bitter and terrifying experience, giving us the travelogue of his experience because he has not yet accumulated the moral energy necessary to communicate its meaning on anything but the abstract level...
...Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him...
...Despite its weaknesses,, it is the work of a great writer, and we are taught again something about how much we need literature to present and master the facts of our lives...
...The novelist makes us feel the unlimited possibilities of the human soul...
...except at moments, he is content to give us strangely undramatic, retrospective, almost bucolic summaries of people and feeling...
...Or perhaps, exhausted by the experience, he does not dare to relive it...
...This book asks to be read as personal history, not as a novel, despite a paltry effort to give it a fictional form...
...I can still live!' he thinks, and obstinately banishes all doubts and other tiresome thoughts...
...Then, a few sentences further on, he tells us that they had "a certain peculiar personal dignity...
...and Dostoyevsky recounts all this with such equanimity that we are tempted to wonder if he did not even integrate the horrors almost happily, thirstily, into his vital economy...
...It is certainly not barren of the acute psychological insight which we expect: "Every convict feels that he is not in his own home, but as it were on a visit...
...Only the great novelist at the top of his art has the power to enlist,us in a conspiracy to destroy our cijstomary world in order to rebuild ourselves in the light of his vision of reality...
...In the great novels, Dostoyevsky gives us a sort of journal of his spiritual passage, projected through characters who represent the extremes of possibility...
...Sometimes this lack of dramatic focus leads to contradiction, as when he writes that the prisoners were "sullen, envious, terribly conceited, boastful, touchy, and preoccupied in the highest degree with forms...
...This is the sort of dramatic contradiction which we recognize as deeply human in, let's say, the elder Karamazov...
...Despite the events of murder¦ betrayal, mass destruction, and .the torment of whole peoples which have become the commonplaces of modern life, Memoirs from the House of the Dead still has its power to shock and warn...
...He looks on twenty years as if it were two, and is quite confident that even at 55, when he emerges from prison, he will still be the youth he is now, at 35...
...Gossip, intrigue, cat-tiness, envy, squabbles, malice were always to the fore in this life outside life...
...3.50...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 1
