Frames Blurring Boundaries of Interiority and Exteriority in Notes from a Dead House
Notes from a Dead House suggests that an attention to the distinction between inclusion and exclusion is particularly appropriate when considering prisons, seen through the fact that the institution of the prison seeks to enforce a sharp distinction between being ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the prison. The very first description of the prison emphasizes the sharp contrast between “God’s world,” outside of the fence, and “[o]ur prison,” contained within it (8). That the prison is “surrounded on all sides [...] by a high stockade,” a type of fence which contains no gaps, reinforces the claustrophobic separation from the outside world which the physical structure of the prison seeks to impose upon the prisoners (8). The resulting distinction between those inside and outside of the wall is so sharp that “[b]eyond those gates [i]s the bright, free world,” where “people [live] like everybody else,” but from “this side of the wall,” such a world appears “as some sort of impossible fairy tale” (8). In this sense, the wall of the prison serves as a frame in and by which the prisoners are rigidly enclosed and distinguished from those who are outside of the prison-frame.
The very form of Notes from a Dead House mirrors these investments in the distinction between interior and exterior through its almost compulsive use of frames. The bulk of the novel is a collection of notes written by Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a former nobleman imprisoned for ten years for murdering his wife. These notes, however, are not presented directly to the reader; rather, they are framed by the commentary of an unnamed other “first-person narrator, the ‘editor’ of Goryanchikov’s manuscript” (Pevear xii). After Goryanchikov’s death, the editor discovers his papers, in which he finds Goryanchikov’s “notes on hard labor,” which “fascinated [him]” (Dostoevsky 7). He then “select[s] two or three papers” and attaches them after his introductory comments so as to “let the public judge” their value and import (7). In this way, the editor’s introduction at the beginning of Part One of Notes from a Dead House serves to provide a frame around and through which Goryanchikov’s notes are presented to the reader. Similarly, frames are present even within Goryanchikov’s notes: in the middle of his narrative, he tells the story—clearly marked as separate from the rest of his notes not only by its anachronistic temporality but also by the heading which explicitly denotes the chapter as “A STORY” (211)—of Akulka’s husband. The boundaries of the chapter serve to frame this self-contained story, as after the chapter finishes, Goryanchikov moves back to re-enter his earlier narrative. That the subsequent chapter begins with the line “But here it is already the beginning of April” works to reveal that the freshly concluded story inhabits a different space and locality than the resumption of the prison narrative (211). On a formal level, then “[t]here is nothing loose or casual about the structure of the book itself” (Pevear xiii), for Notes from a Dead House emphasizes the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion through its employment of frames. These frames work to locate, at the penetralium of the text, the lived experience of incarceration which, “if [one] had not experienced [it] in reality, [one] could never have had even the vaguest notion” (Dostoevsky 11).
However, these frames are not impermeable. Although these aforementioned frames exist, the boundaries between them can be blurred, working to complicate the text’s conception of interior and exterior. The voice of the editor, for example, is not confined solely to his introductory framing remarks before Goryanchikov’s notes; rather, his editorial commentary reasserts itself in Chapter VII of Part Two. Here, before presenting the reader with the next chapter of Goryanchikov’s notes, the editor inserts himself in order “to make the following report to the reader”: that a man, featured in Goryanchikov’s notes, who had been imprisoned for patricide “was indeed in the right and had suffered ten years of hard labor for nothing,” since “his innocence had been revealed in court, officially” (249). As a result, the distinction between being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of Goryanchikov’s framed notes loses its sharpness.
The permeability of such frames works to undermine the prison’s attempt to create and enforce clearly delineated boundaries of ‘in’ and ‘out.’ Even the frame that separates those inside of the prison from those outside of it appears permeable in some ways: although “the outer wall of the prison” has foundations “dug deeply into the ground” and planks threateningly “sharped at the tips,” its “sturdy gates”—while “always locked, [and] always guarded day and night by sentries”—are in fact “opened on demand to let people out to work” (8). Throughout Goryanchikov’s notes, prisoners interact with villagers, whether to receive “[a]lms from town” which “[pour] into the prison” at Easter (226) or to do jobs, such as Kulikov, a prisoner whose knowledge and skills as a veterinarian enable him to “[earn] money in town by treating horses” (231). Non-incarcerated individuals do enter the prison space, such as when “gentlemen officers and noble visitors in general [...] honored our theater by their attendance even at the first performance” of the prison’s Christmas play (147). Even an eagle comes to “[live] with [them] in prison for a time,” revealing that even the very embodied image of the liberty to fly freely—a freedom which is denied to the prisoners—is able to penetrate the boundary dividing those ‘in’ the prison from those ‘out’ of it (246). Furthermore, the very fact that the editor is presenting Goryanchikov’s notes to “the public” undermines the hard separation which the prison, as an institution, seeks to impose between those ‘in’ the prison and those ‘out’ of it, by bringing the plight of a prisoner to the forefront of the consciousness of a non-incarcerated individual (7). It is thus, through the permeability of its frames, that Notes from a Dead House works to resist the sharp distinction between interior and exterior.
This is in no way meant to imply that there exists no distinction between being in prison and being out of it, nor to suggest that it is easy to transition between states of inclusion in and exclusion from such a space. To the contrary, the prison is a “special world” which, through its profound denial of freedom to those incarcerated within it, seeks to turn “living m[e]n [...] into [corpses]” (8, 52). Within the “special world” of the prison there exists “a life like nowhere else,” and one characteristic of this unique life—which has “its own special laws, its own clothing, its own morals and customs”—is the prevalence of performances of various types, all of which work to emphasize notions of interior and exterior (8). The ubiquity of such performances is a node of prison specificity in that, Goryanchikov suggests, they constitute phenomena unique to hard labor camps. Representative of “the custom of the prison” is the fact that prisoners act out scenes, “as in a comedy, for the general amusement” of others (25). The staged quarrel between two prisoners Goryanchikov witnesses near the beginning of his sentence in prison offers one example of such a performance. The very fact that Goryanchikov was unable to recognize this performance as a performance, instead “really think[ing] that there would be a fight,” reveals the way in which the dynamics of performance inside of the prison differ from those outside of it (25). That is, performances inside the prison are not limited solely to literal performances such as the Christmas play but extend both to the more generally pervasive performances of scenes among prisoners, such as the aforementioned “perfectly innocent” quarrel (25). Through such performances, Notes from a Dead House invites readers to consider how the experience of incarceration relates to the legibility—or lack thereof—of interiority.
In addition to attempting to enforce a sharp boundary between those within and outside of it, the prison also seeks to render the interiority of prisoners externally legible. Descriptions of the ways in which one’s status as a prisoner is decipherable on the physical body abound: the immediately-visible “shaven heads,”; the recognizably “ragged clothes” of prison gear; the fetters “attached permanently to your leg” which, “after several years [...] begin to make your legs wither”; the long-lasting “wounds from rods broken over the back”; as well as faces quite literally "branded in eternal witness to their outcast state" (10, 10, 177, 174, 10). In addition to all of the aforementioned physical ways in which incarceration is made legible, even the very labelling of incarcerated people as ‘prisoners,’ ‘criminals,’ or ‘convicts’ aims to label their inner qualities in an externally visible and finalizing manner. Yet it is not merely specifics about one’s status in the legal system which can be revealed through the medium of the body, for Goryanchikov almost compulsively ‘reads’ the interior emotional states of other prisoners through their exteriority. In doing so, he operates within the assumption of legibility endorsed by the prison system. He recognizes, for example, “from the first glance” at Korenev’s face that “the only thing left in [Korenev] was one savage craving for physical gratification, sensuality, [and] fleshly indulgence” (55); Similarly, when describing his friend Alei, the third brother of the Daghestan Tatars, Goryanchikov writes that “[Alei]’s whole soul was expressed in his handsome—one might even say beautiful—face,” suggesting that his external form offers a window by which his internal soul is revealed (60). Goryanchikov engages in similar acts of phrenological readings throughout his time in prison, suggesting a belief in the permeability of the exterior frame as a means of accessing the interior.
However, this narrative of permeable legibility is complicated by Dostoevsky’s spiritual transformation in the appendix to Notes from a Dead House. The presence of the appendix means that it is no longer merely the case that Goryanchikov’s notes, themselves framed by the editor’s commentary, frame the story of Akulka’s husband. Rather, Dostoevsky’s appendix, added in February 1876, works to re-frame the entirety of Notes from a Dead House, encompassing editorial commentary, Goryanchikov’s notes, and stories within stories. Yet the appendix’s contribution to complicating the inclusion-exclusion distinction present in Notes from a Dead House is not limited to the way in which it offers an additional frame, for it also draws attention to another area of blurred boundaries in the text: namely, the disintegration of the distinction between Dostoevsky and Goryanchikov. While the appendix constitutes the first explicit appearance of Dostoevsky’s first-person narrative voice, seen in the fact that he writes “I wrote Notes from a Dead House fifteen years ago,” it is not the case that Dostoevsky’s voice has not been present in the text before the appendix (300). Although Goryanchikov is fictionalized as a nobleman imprisoned “for a common-law crime” rather than for a political one, as Dostoevsky was, Goryanchikov’s “thoughts, [...] preoccupations, and [...] conscience are not at all those of a man who has murdered his wife” (Pevear xii, xiii). The narrator does “[keep] the persona of Alexander Petrovich throughout” his notes, but “the mask is dropped rather quickly” (xiii, xii). For example, one of Goryanchikov’s “first impression[s] of prison” is that the peasant prisoners “don’t like noblemen, [...] especially political criminals” (Dostoevsky 30). In this sense, although Goryanchikov is the narrator for the majority of Notes from a Dead House, “Dostoevsky’s personality does not disappear from view” in the semi-autobiographical memoir, once more blurring the distinction between being ‘in’ and ‘out’ of a frame (Pevear xiii).
On a contentual level, the appendix—as a response to the text as a whole and its reception—serves to re-cast much of Notes from a Dead House in a new light for both Dostoevsky and reader alike. In the appendix, Dostoevsky recounts a memory, which “embedded itself in [his] soul imperceptibly, on its own and without [his] will,” of an encounter in his youth with the peasant Marey (303). Although this was a “solitary and encounter, in an empty field,” Marey responds to the young Dostoevsky’s worry about the wolf with such tender and loving kindness that even “if [Dostoevsky] had been his own son, he could not have given [Dostoevsky] a look shining with more radiant love” (303). The fact that Marey displays such “deep and enlightened human feeling” in this interaction with “his little master,” despite being—on an external level—“a coarse, brutishly ignorant Russian serf, who back then was not yet expecting or even dreaming of his freedom,” reveals to Dostoevsky the depth of Marey’s inner experience, irrespective of his “dirt-covered” physical appearance (303). Dostoevsky accordingly recognizes the possibility of an interiority which is not easily accessible to others via the physical body. This realization holistically transforms his perception of all the men with whom he was imprisoned, for he realizes that “[he] could look at these unfortunate men with totally different eyes” (303). This internal revelation leads to a transformation of his external ways of seeing: his newfound understanding of the sanctity of interiority helps him to realize that while he can peer into a fellow incarcerated individual’s face, he can “not look into his heart” (304). Thus the prison’s project of trying to enforce externalized interiority through rendering prisoners legible emerges as one which inevitably and inherently fails to respect the sanctity of prisoners’ inner experience. It is not possible, as our narrating Goryanchikov-Dostoevsky figure realizes, to ‘read’ someone’s heart from their external appearance. Rather, affording them the fullest “respect for [their] human dignity”—which, to be clear, the prison as an institution does not—necessarily entails not believing in the wholesale transparency of self in the way that the prison encourages (111).
The form and content of Notes from a Dead House work together to undermine a traditional concept of prison as an institution empowered both to impose a sharp distinction between those ‘in’ it and those ‘out’ of it and to render prisoners transparent through enforced external legibility. The text accomplishes this subversion through its employment of frames within frames which initially appear impermeable but in fact allow for blurred boundaries. In this light, perhaps the prison performances of typecast roles can be understood as ways in which the prisoners resist the legibility imposed upon them. Performing fake scenes of quarreling, for example, obscures the legibility of those participating in the performance, since it in fact encourages a misreading such as the one which Goryanchikov—and potentially other imprisoned noblemen—believed. Similarly, some prisoners engage in performances of selfhood through which they emerge as recognizable types. Skuratov, for example, “belonged to [the] particular and remarkable type” of being “obviously one of those voluntary jokers, or, better, buffoons, who seemed to make it their duty to amuse their sullen comrades” (86). While such a performance makes him legible in the sense that his ‘type’ becomes immediately recognizable, it also simultaneously—and, arguably, more importantly—obscures his legibility. Doing so simplifies the act of perception for those around him so as to lull them into the ease of believing in his transparency as merely someone who “couldn’t help playing the fool” and accordingly lacks more complex depths (290). Yet engaging in such a performance simultaneously refuses to make accessible the innermost sanctum of his inner experience. In this sense, perhaps performing as a type serves as a frame: it enables perception of the frame while preserving the sanctity of the penetralium—a type of respect which the prison inherently denies—by making it inaccessible to others, since the outermost frame of the typecast fool is made so accessible that it is instantly recognizable.
Works Cited
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage-Random House, 2016.
Pevear, Richard. Foreword. Notes from a Dead House, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage-Random House, 2016, pp. vii-xvi.
