Dostoyevsky's House of the Living - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Dostoyevsky’s House of the Living

“I was in prison…and you came to see me.”

-Saint Matthew 25: 34-26

Dostoyevsky is possibly the best writer of narratives of redemption, probably because of his time in prison. I first read The House of the Dead along with other of his novels some years ago. Recently I was "guilted" by Fr. Ron (I did not want to go) into volunteering at prison with con, which in the event has proven to be one of the few experiences in my life in which I felt - one cannot know, of course - that I was doing exactly what God expected of me. This volunteer work with the chaplain, a sturdy Baptist, and with wise and experienced volunteers and mentors, especially Al and George, led me to re-read Dostoyevsky’s semi-autobiographical prison novel.

As a young man Dostoyevsky was drawn into the Petrashevsky Circle in Saint Petersburg, which may or may not have planned the violent overthrow of the government. The group was arrested in1849, held in the Peter and Paul fortress in Saint Petersburg, tried, and sentenced to death. The Czar’s pardon of the conspirators even as they faced a firing party is well known.

Dostoyevsky spent four years in a Siberian prison camp and then a term as a soldier until he was permitted to return to Saint Petersburg in 1859.

The parallels in the unit I visit and Dostoyevsky's prison are remarkable, even to the general layout of the prison and to the diverse characters and nationalities of the images. In the local prison, though, prisoners are respected and treated with dignity in preparation for their return to freedom. Successful completion of anger management and other counseling programs are mandatory for release.

But please note than I know almost nothing about penology or psychology, and my two hours each week visiting the lads are as nothing. I am neither a Pollyanna nor a Darwinian, but only a sympathetic if naïve observer.

First, about that famous cable tv: there are in fact two of them, rather small, high up on a wall in the common area, and remotely controlled by the duty officer. No prisoner has much time for watching tv, though, for everyone has a work detail. A man might be dozing on his bunk in the early evening, but that’s because his work assignment begins in the kitchen at 0300 and he must also attend classes. There are no private rooms; all live in dorms that very much resemble my recruit training barracks in the long-ago.

Prisons do not exist so that visitors like me can write sappy articles about “What I learned in prison” because prison is about the prisoner, about helping him learn about himself and his place in civilization. Dostoyevsky would say that learning is a part of a man’s redemption, on either side of the shiny wire.

But I have learned this: the difference between a man behind the wire and a man outside the wire is often only that one man is behind the wire and the other is outside the wire.

Okay, that’s a bit precious, but a reality is that there are far more criminals on the outside than on the inside.

Another reality in the unit I visit is the diversity of individuals with regard to faith traditions, race, intellect, accomplishments, education, and skills. I have met once-wealthy businessmen who admitted that their success in life led them to a feeling of arrogance and immunity. I have met twenty-somethings who did stupid stuff because popular culture and their local subcultures led them to existential despair. The CPA is in a bunk next to the low-level drug dealer. Someone conversant in seven languages and who holds a master’s degree is bunked next to the kid who helped himself to someone else’s car on a dare.

C. S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that in the army, “Every few days one seemed to meet a scholar, an original, a poet, a cheery buffoon, or at the least a man of good will.” And so it is in prison as it is in the army or on the job.

My prison is a transit unit, with folks coming and going constantly, either on their way to a long-term sentence at one of the large units, serving a short sentence here, or, happily, cycling through the various programs and consultations in preparation for release. I regret that I seldom get to know anyone very well, but in the context of the mission that’s probably for the best.

Unfortunately, all prison visits in my state are now forbidden during the coronavirus time. I do miss the guys, and hope I have been of some small service in their rehabilitation. I pray for them daily, and hope to be permitted to resume working with them soon.


http://www.encspb.ru/object/2804022508;jsessionid=777C33E31108B724645FFEDA4512B4CF?lc=en

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/02/24/dostoyevskys-unabomber

-30-

Some People Are Not in Prison - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Some People Are Not in Prison

 

“What are we here for? We are not alive though we are living

and we are not in our graves though we are dead.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

The difference between people in prison
And people who are not in prison
Is that some people are in prison
And some people are not

On Reading Crime and Punishment (a Russia Series, 29) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On Reading Crime and Punishment

Old Moby Dick is a right good whale
He really knows how to end a tale
                                                        With his tail!
When tedious men give the reader fits
Moby splashes, and dashes ‘em to bits.
But in Saint Petersburg – or Petrograd –
Rodian keeps talking, and that’s too bad,
All about his woes, and his sinful fall;
Alas! There is no whale to end it all.


(Postscript – I finally finished C & P. As always with Dostoyevsky, the journey ended in hope.)

A Russian Series, 9: The Fifth Karamazov - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Fifth Karamazov

When young we identify with Alyosha
His optimism and his innocence
His fragile, flowering Orthodox 1 faith
A happy, almost-holy fool for Christ

When older, the sensual Dimitri,
With irresponsible lusts and desires
Grasping for the rewards of the moment
Now, ever now, wanting everything now

Then older still, as intellectual Ivan
Sneeringly aloft, above all faith and flesh
A constructor of systems and ideas
From the back pages of French magazines

Though never do we identify with
Nest-fouling, leering, lurking Smerdyakov
Our secret fear, unspoken fear, death-fear:
That he might be who we untruly are

But hear, O hear, the holy bells of Optina 2
Those Russian messengers 3 singing to us
Inviting us to meet Alyosha again
At Father Zosima’s poor 4 hermitage


1 Russian Orthodox
2 The name of the real monastery upon which Dostoyevsky modeled his fictional one
3 The Brothers Karamazov was first published as a serial in The Russian Messenger
4 Poor only by secular standards

Old Karamazov

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Old Karamazov

Young Karamazov – once upon a time
Strolled dreaming through the happy hopes of youth
And surely wondered about spring and love
Wrote clumsy verse, perhaps, for a pretty girl
Then fell unfortunately into fashion:
The acquisition of proud vanities
Through the disposition of dreams and souls
Until he was only an old man who
Sat brooding through the bitter schemes of age
Old Karamazov – lost upon a time

The Revolution

Lawrence Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com


The Revolution

Little men arguing in shabby rooms
Meetings, manifestos, revolvers, bombs
Informers, spies, social organization,
Speeches, minutes, dues, What is to be Done?
The great cause of the Proletariat
Greetings from our good comrades in Smolensk
Nihilism, committees, secrecy
The thirst for culture is aristocratic
Nihilism is the only art of the people
Rumors, whispers, clandestine magazines
The unification of workers and peasants
Resolutions passed in the factory soviet
Clenched fists to reject the personal life
Electrification and equality
Cigarettes, vodka, the people’s justice
Against the parasitical bourgeoisie
Solidarity to destroy the kulaks
His poetry reeks of sentimentality
Self-centered intellectual decadence
The people’s will for the people’s party
Education for the twentieth century
Lift high the red banner, fill full the graves

Dostoyevsky at the Garage Sale

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Dostoyevsky at the Garage Sale

Commerce in used goods has lost its aura of shame and has become acceptable in our culture, and possibly constitutes a significant part of our declining economy. We are told by the propagandists that American manufacturing is on the rise, but the displays of shoddy foreign manufactures suggests to the consumer that this might not be so. Can an economy really be based on selling insurance, snakefingers, drugs, and questionable information to each other?

After World War II this nation was the world’s greatest manufacturer, and in the late 1950s one only with difficulty found a product made anywhere else. In our time, though, if one wants an American-made hammer, shirt, camera, dinner service, pocket knife, or toy train, he no longer shops downtown (which no longer exists) or from the Montgomery Ward catalogue (which no longer exists), but probably at that modern American custom, the Saturday morning garage sale (which seldom features a garage).

In the past year y’r ‘umble scrivener has found: two wagon wrenches (aka monkey wrenches), a Kodak 33mm Pony camera, a made-in-Chicago metal pencil sharpener, several pocket knives, a cast-iron rope pulley for a water well, a handsaw, and any number of hand tools and power tools, all American made, not as investments but mostly for their immediate utility (the camera is on a shelf and the handsaw is Miz Bee-ish fence art).

At a recent Friends of the Kirbyville Public Library book sale I found a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, published in 1938 by The Heritage Press. The book is hardbound in boards and linen, measures about seven by ten inches, is translated by Constance Garnett, and features engravings by a refugee German, Fritz Eichenberg. The paper is not particularly heavy but it is well-made (after all, it’s into its eighth decade) and cream-colored, which, with the large text, is easy on the eyes.

This book was not manufactured as an objet d’art; it was meant to be read, and I’m reading it. Most good stories are about redemption, and thus civilization, and with Dostoyevsky the concept of redemption can be cubed and squared. After all, who among us has ever faced a firing squad? Happily, the Czar sent a just-in-time reprieve (which no Communist would ever do), and Dostoyevsky spent the following ten years in a penal colony (which, again, is not a common experience among us). The man definitely had something to say, unlike our modern I, I, I, me, me, me writers whose focus is upon their hurt feelings and their scripted outrage.

And George Macy had something to say too: in the middle of a terrible economic Depression (we’ll never know how many died in those grim times), with the ascendancy of Communism, National Socialism, and whatever ism one might apply to Japan (who once again has begun coveting Chinese land), Mr. Macy chose to say that civilization will go on, even under food rationing and air-raids. Mr. Macy commissioned the printing of books, farming out the acquisition of papers and boards and cloth, typesetting, printing, and binding to various small companies throughout the country, and selling them under the imprint of The Heritage Club. These books sold for a dollar or so, a fabulous sum at the time, and anyone who bought a book had to think, plan, and save for such a rare event. Mr. Macy said that civilization should go on, and whoever bought this particular volume in 1938 probably skipped some meals so that civilization would indeed continue.

The Easton Press (http://www.eastonpress.com/) is the successor to the several Macy companies and other publishers, and continues to publish books, some to be read and some apparently merely for display.

Their edition of Crime and Punishment is bound in leather, and is available for $64.90. In terms of purchasing power, that is much, much less than the dollar edition of 1938.

Even so, one is not sure that the sellers know what the book is. The advertisement reads: “Impoverished and desperate, a young man is driven to the murder of a loathsome pawnbroker - and finds himself trapped in a hell of paranoia and terror. Dostoevsky's enthralling novel is, at once, an extraordinary psychological study, a harrowing mystery and a brilliant detective thriller.” The first sentence is good, a brief synopsis, but while details in the second sentence are correct, overall, the point of the story is missed, and that is the theme of redemption. Dostoyevsky is a Christian writer, not Agatha Christie or a scriptwriter for the BBC, and he is always about salvation.
Curiously, the “Sandglass” insert of 1938 makes the same mistake, referring to Crime and Punishment as “one of the great psychological studies.”

Well, Dostoyevsky knew his own book was about salvation, not about psychology, and certainly not about sustainability and greenness.

I wonder if someone will come across Dostoyevsky’s pocket knife at a garage sale.

-30-