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• 1 media/michael-yuan-7Zo4YeXmrEQ-unsplash.jpg 2021-10-14T20:01:38+00:00 Community as a Form of Resistance in Notes from a Dead House and Assata: An Autobiography 58 image_header 2021-11-29T05:10:11+00:00 Notes From a Dead House and Assata: An Autobiography tell the story of political imprisonment. Though the protagonists differ in race, class, gender, location, and time period, Dostoevsky and Shakur foreground the role of community in resisting the dehumanizing nature of incarceration. The goal of these texts is to communicate the experience of incarceration to the reader. Despite their radically different experiences and narrative choices, both protagonists form bonds with their fellow prisoners in order to survive their incarceration and reclaim their humanity.
  
  Assata Shakur and Fyodor Dostoevsky existed in a historical moment of extreme state repression where it was possible to be seized from your community at any moment and taken into the hands of the state. Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) which operated as an underground militant revolutionary organization in the U.S. throughout the 1970s. Shakur was arrested in 1973 and later sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a state trooper. She escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in 1979 and gained asylum in Cuba where she remains to this day. Dostoevsky was arrested in 1849 for his participation in a utopian socialist reading group that read books that were banned for their criticism of Tsarist Russia. He was sentenced to four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp directly followed by 6 years of forced military labor in exile. Notes from A Dead House was published in 1861 featuring the protagonist Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov (a man sentenced to ten years of forced labor in Siberia for the murder of his wife) who functions as a stand in for Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was not able to publish an autobiography of his experience in hard labor due to political repression.
  
  
  The conditions of each prison are described by the authors as dehumanizing: “There was no natural light, and the jailers refused to open the small windows located near the ceiling. The average temperature was 95 degrees. It was infested with ants and centipedes” (Shakur 66). The beginnings of each text are characterized by the themes of alienation and loneliness. Shakur and Goryanchikov have just been ripped from their communities and placed in a traumatizing space they have yet to learn how to navigate. Goryanchikov upon arrival feels deep isolation, depression and grief; he is a nobleman and the majority of the prison population are serfs. This class difference causes immediate mistrust and alienation from his fellow convicts. While this causes him pain throughout the novel, he initially believes that his fellow convicts are bad people he has no desire to connect with, stating “Later on, I came to realize that there was yet another torment in addition to confinement and compulsory labour, perhaps the sharpest of all. It was forced co-existence. To some degree, coexistence is forced upon us” (Dostoevsky 31). This attitude, his class status, and the labor conditions of the prison keep him from being able to form a community.
  
  
  This is in direct contrast to Shakur’s initial experience of incarceration. Upon arrival at the prison, she is kept in a single cell and not allowed to leave. She had been tortured before being placed in prison, and is immediately comforted by hearing the voices of other black women with whom she feels safe: “Behind the guard, through the open door, I could see some of the women standing around. They were all, it seemed, Black. They smiled and waved at me. It was so good to see them, it was like a piece of home” (Shakur 46). Shakur is a black woman from a working-class background, as are almost all the other women in the prison. She describes her fellow convicts with love and sees them as her community, but is unable to interact with them because the prison sees her ability to organize community as a threat to the system.
  
  Despite Goryanchikov’s challenges to having a community, he begins to form deep connections with his fellow convicts. At some point in the beginning of his term (Notes from A Dead House is not written linearly so it is difficult to tell when this begins to happen), Goryanchikov starts to consider whether his initial judgements of his fellow convicts are wrong: “‘These people, perhaps, are no worse than others whom I had left behind.’ But I shook my head doubtfully as I thought this. And yet, how right I was!” (Dostoevsky 82). One of the people he regards to be a good person is Sushilov, who desires to serve Goryanchikov in exchange for money. Though Goryanchikov is initially frustrated by this, when he later yells at Sushilov, he expresses deep regret and guilt. As he learns to trust the other prisoners and some begin to trust him, he starts to feel a sense of community in the prison which lightens his depression. He forms many relationships in which they mutually care for each other. In the appendix, Dostoevsky writes of a spiritual awakening he had during his sentence. He thinks of an interaction he had with his family's servant as a child in which the servant defied all his pre-existing expectations of who Dostoevsky thought he was, and treated him with unconditional love and patience. This causes him to reconsider his perception of the other prisoners because he realizes they all may be capable of treating him the way this servant did that day. Though this was Dostoevsky’s experience, this transformation can be seen in his character as well. When Goryanchikov forms connections, it is because of his newfound ability to see the complexity in his fellow prisoners and look past his judgments.
  
  Shakur works to be with other prisoners at any cost, often physically fighting to achieve this. Throughout her years of incarceration, she is repeatedly moved from prison to prison and often kept in solitary confinement. While Goryanchikov is mostly fighting with himself, Shakur is constantly fighting with the system. When she is being kept in solitary, she begins to push past the guards in the doorway when they would deliver her food and walk into the common area to be with the other women. She did this everyday, and she bonded with a woman named Eva: “Eva and I got on famously...She taught me a lot about prison, and she was forever telling some funny story about her life” (Shakur 60). After a while, the guards attempt to physically remove her from the communal area and bring her back to her cell. When the guards ask which prisoner is JoAnne Chesimard (Shakur’s government name), Eva claims that she is Assata, and the other women follow suit. This ends in Shakur and her community militantly resisting the guards taking her back to her cell. In every prison Shakur is in, she approaches the other black women with love, kindness, and solidarity, and manages to form a community.
  
  The prison described by Goryanchikov is a space in which connections are hard to form. The hard labor and the living conditions crush the human spirit: “There was no end to gossip and backbiting: our lives were a perpetual damnation” (Dostoevsky 20). Goryanchikov argues that “prison and hard labour do not reform the criminal, of course, but only serve to punish him and to safeguard society” (23). Despite this, the prisoners manage to build their own society inside the prison that replicates the outside world. Goryanchikov states, “No matter how humbled he may be, he instinctively demands respect for human dignity. The convict very well knows that he is a convict and an outcast, but no brands or fetters can make him forget that he is a man and that he must be treated as a human being therefore” (129). In this framework, Dostoevsky is arguing that building community within the prison system is a battle to regain humanity, and therefore a direct act of resistance to the system.
  
  This understanding of incarceration is the backbone of what Shakur communicates through her Autobiography. Shakur understands the prison system to be a replacement for slavery (therefore at its core, the prison industrial complex exists to dehumanize black people) and dedicated her life to the liberation of black people. While in prison, she released a statement to the public titled "To My People." In this statement Shakur writes, “We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains!” (Shakur 52). This is the revolutionary ideology underpinning her Autobiography. In every prison she occupies, she fights by any means necessary to connect to her people, thus regaining her humanity which exists as the antithesis to the state’s power.
  
  These texts threaten the power structures that exist to erase Shakur and Goryanchikov by demonstrating the value of forming bonds with other prisoners. Telling their stories directly counteracts the goal of their incarceration by communicating what goes on inside these institutions to the outside world, revealing to their readers the stories and the people who have been hidden.
  
  Bibliography
  Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from a Dead House. Trans. Richard and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 2016.
  Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Zed Books, 2001. 
• 1 2021-12-15T01:28:41+00:00 Religion in Russian Prison Literature 34 Xenya Currie image_header 2021-12-16T00:12:22+00:00

  Russian prison literature, or works written in the Russian language which pertain to experiences of incarceration, spans a long history, ranging from the seventeenth century to the present. Works in this literary tradition can be autobiographical, memoiristic, fictional, nonfictional; they can take the form of prose and poetry, novel and short story. Despite the great range of time over and circumstances in which works in this tradition have been written, various nodes of specificity emerge as continuous throughout many Russian prison texts. One such recurrent node is religion and appeals to religious belief, practice, and imagery. This is not to suggest that such appeals to religion appear in every single work in the tradition of Russian prison literature; rather, religion emerges as a relevant theme in various works throughout the tradition. This encyclopedia entry seeks to chronologically and non-comprehensively survey some such manifestations of religiosity in Russian prison literature.
  
  17th Century
  
  The Life Written by Himself
  
  One of the first works in the tradition of Russian prison literature was Archpriest Avvakum’s The Life Written by Himself, written from approximately 1669 to the mid-1670s. Avvakum Petrov (1620/1–1682) was an Old Believer, an Eastern Orthodox Christian who opposed the reforms to the Russian Orthodox Church introduced by Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century. In the Life, Avvakum recounts his experiences of imprisonment, exile, and persecution for his religious dissent. Avvakum’s Life establishes a model of the Russian prison text, one identifiable aspect of which is religiosity, that will be followed by later writers. Avvakum’s engagements with religion are immediate—he begins the Life with an appeal to the “[a]ll-holy Trinity” (Avvakum 37)—and persistent: he frequently references Biblical passages, recounts praying for divine aid, and retells experiences of God working miracles through him. That Avvakum frames his text as an hagiographic saint’s life reveals his self-presentation as a saint and a martyr. Key for Avvakum is the idea that “a true Christian [...] not only [...] live[s] in tribulations even unto death for the sake of the Truth, but passing away in ignorance of the world, [...] liveth forever in wisdom” (Avvakum 38). In appealing to this religious conviction and the ideal of Christ’s kenosis, Avvakum imbues his incarceration with religious significance, suggesting that despite his external imprisonment and suffering, he is in fact an internally liberated participant in divine wisdom.
  
  19th Century
  
  Notes from a Dead House
  
  Fyodor Dostoevsky's (1821–1881) 1862 Notes from a Dead House “was the first published account of life in the Siberian hard-labor camps” (Pevear xii). Dostoevsky’s semi-autobiographical account of his eight years of hard labor and military service after his arrest serves to humanize those who are incarcerated, a project imbued for him with religious significance. Although Notes from a Dead House’s fictional narrator Goryanchikov suggests throughout the text that his fellow prisoners are transparently legible to him, Dostoevsky’s spiritual transformation recounted in the appendix reverses this perception. A transcendent childhood encounter with the peasant Marey, who “could not have given [Dostoevsky] a look shining with more radiant love” (303) when comforting the frightened young Dostoevsky by praying that “Christ be with [him]” (302) and doing the sign of the cross, facilitates Dostoevsky’s recognition of the depth of Marey’s inner experience, regardless of his “dirt-covered” physical appearance (303). This revelation transforms Dostoevsky’s perception of those with whom he was imprisoned, such that “all the hatred and anger in [his] heart [...] vanished completely” (303). The emergent project, of affording both Dostoevsky’s fellow prisoners and Marey “respect for [their] human dignity,” is, for Dostoevsky, a deeply religiously-motivated type of vision (111).
  
  20th Century
  
  "After the Ball"
  
  Leo Tolstoy's (1828–1910) short story “After the Ball,” written in 1903 and published posthumously in 1911, also engages with religious imagery. Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis and transformation in the 1870s; as one of his post-crisis works, “After the Ball” employs religious imagery as a plea for sympathetic mercy. Religion serves to temporally place the story’s events, for Ivan Vasilyevich notes that it occurs during Butter Week, a religious and folk holiday celebrated the week before Russian Orthodox Lent begins. After the eponymous ball, Ivan Vasilyevich encounters a Tatar being beaten for desertion, whose repeated pleas for mercy are ignored by the colonel, the father of Ivan Vasilyevich’s love interest Varenka. The horror of the merciless violence to which the Tatar is subjected involuntarily invites invocations of God, for the blacksmith utters “O Lord” at the sight (Tolstoy 278). Tolstoy’s text condemns this violence through Ivan Vasilyevich’s affective response to it, for he experiences “an anguish that was almost physical to the point of nausea” and falls out of love with Varenka (278). Paralleling the Tatar’s suffering to Christ’s encourages Tolstoy’s reader to display the compassionate mercy, which the colonel fails to demonstrate, for the plight of prisoners and victims of state-sanctioned violence.
  
  Memoirs of a Revolutionist 
  
  Vera Figner’s (1852–1942) 1927 memoir, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, recounts her experience of imprisonment for over twenty years for her participation in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Figner’s religious belief fortifies her throughout the suffering she endures, allowing her to feel “[c]alm and radiant” as she “looks firmly ahead, fully conscious of the fact that what is coming cannot be escaped or averted” (Figner 205). That she regards Christ’s life as an ideal “example of self-sacrificing love” helps her understand her incarceration as a test of her willingness to suffer “for that good which [s]he has longed to attain, not for [her] own transitory self,” but for the sake of others (205). Although the prison, as a “living grave” (205), seeks to deny those imprisoned within it their human dignity, Figner encounters fellow prisoners who conduct themselves with profound goodness, such as her friend Ludmila Alexandrovna, a “loving, self-sacrificing spirit” who goes out of her way to avoid stepping on insects (202). Figner also finds comfort in an icon, given to her by her mother after her trial, of the “Most Holy Virgin of Joy Unexpected,” the sight of which encourages Figner to seek the small joys, without which prison life would be unendurable (228).
  
  "Requiem" 
  
  Religious imagery appears in Anna Akhmatova’s (1889–1966) poetic cycle “Requiem,” written between 1935 and 1961 about the Stalinist terror. Akhmatova parallels her son’s suffering to Christ’s, synecdochally encouraging sympathy for all incarcerated in the gulags and the “tall cross [they] bear” (Ehre 362). Yet Akhmatova’s appeals to the religious imagination also encourage a sympathetic understanding for the plight of those left behind, outside of the gulag; in section X, ‘Crucifixion,’ Akhmatova analogizes not only her son to Christ but also herself—and all the other women, particularly mothers, waiting in the prison lines—to Mary, the Mother of God. Akhmatova emphasizes the response to the crucifixion of the women who witnessed it. Mary is set apart because her grief, like Akhmatova’s, is so profound that it emerges as unwitnessable: although those around can gaze upon “Mary Magdalene trembl[ing] and we[eping]” and John “turn[ing] to stone,” “no one dared to lift his eyes / Where His Mother stood, silent and alone” (364). This invocation of religion encourages a recognition of the intensity of maternal grief which, Akhmatova suggests, both she and the Theotokos experience at their sons’ suffering.
  
  The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
  
  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s (1918–2008) The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, one of the best-known works of Russian prison literature, brings to light the horrors of the Soviet gulag system. Solzhenitsyn engages with religion to suggest that imprisonment permits a greater degree of internal freedom than is otherwise accessible without incarceration, for prison offers him “a free head” even when his “feet [cannot] run along” (Solzhenitsyn 607). Furthermore, prison “causes the profound rebirth of a human being,” through which one’s personality, character, and soul are transformed (604). This transformation carries, for Solzhenitsyn, a religious dimension, as it helps him realize that “[o]nce upon a time [he was] sharply intolerant,” “never forgave anyone,” and “judged people without mercy” (611). His carceral experiences also facilitate his spiritually-motivated conviction that he is unwilling to survive at any price when survival at any price entails survival “at the price of someone else” (603). As incarceration enables the “soul, which formerly was dry, [to ripen] from suffering” (611), it is Solzhenitsyn’s time in the gulag which helps him “come to love [his] neighbors in the Christian sense” and to attain a greater degree of internal freedom despite external imprisonment (603). 
  
  Bibliography 

  Akhmatova, Anna. “Requiem,” translated by Milton Ehre, Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 6.3, 2004, pp. 358–365. 
  
  Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage-Random House, 2016.
  
  Figner, Vera. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Authorized Translation from the Russian, Northern Illinois University Press, 1991. 
  
  Petrov, Avvakum. The Life Written by Himself. Translated by Kenneth N. Brostrom, Michigan Slavic Publications, 1979, pp. 35-113.
  
  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. 
  
  Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney, Harper & Row Publishers, 1975, pp. 597-617. 
  
  Tolstoy, Leo. “After the Ball.” Tolstoy’s Short Fiction: Revised Translations, Backgrounds, and Sources Criticism, edited by Michael R. Katz, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2008, pp. 271–279. 

• 1 media/Omsk.jpg media/Prisoners.jpg 2021-10-08T02:30:16+00:00 Three Aspects of Personhood as Defined by Dostoevsky, Kharms, and Leskov 18 Ava St. Pere image_header 2021-12-17T19:52:46+00:00 The study of personhood in Russian prison literature is an examination of humans stripped of worldly context. Where they lived, whom they loved, what they wore, and how much money they made become peripheral among hundreds of people muddled together into the same mundane space. There are confines inhibiting individuality outside of prison as well, but nowhere is it clearer than within these concrete walls. Prison, which withholds manmade signs of individuality and holds the bodies that remain, compromises and challenges our preconceptions of the self. Within these walls, what is left?
  
  Character exposition in Russian prison literature, fictional or not, suggests the fundamental composition of a person. Authors create characters stripped of their worldly domain who, through their struggle for individuality, teach us of this essence. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Leskov, and Daniil Kharms create their own unique narratives of imprisonment (to varying degrees of allegory) that shed light on principal aspects of personhood. Through character exposition and struggles for individuality, Notes from a Dead House, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” and “Blue Notebook No. 10” suggest three main elements of personhood that remain essential, even when incarceration steals everything else. These elements are body, autonomy, and essence.
  
  This first element, the body, is the initial aspect of personhood. It is our first impression of others, the element subject to our immediate judgement. It is the element Kharms first utilizes in “Blue Notebook No. 10” with the opening statement, “There lived a redheaded man” (Kharms 117). Although he challenges the physical element later in the text, here, he bows down to its importance for the reader’s visual comprehension of the redheaded man. Once Kharms strips away all elements of the man’s body, once the man loses his physical signifiers, Kharms claims that whom we’re talking about becomes unclear. Looking at this piece through the lens of incarceration, the red-headed man symbolizes a disembodied victim of 1937 Soviet Russia’s prison system. This erasure is a reality for many prisoners. When the state locks them away between four concrete walls away from the outside world, their lives are no longer relevant to liberated storytellers like that of “Blue Notebook No. 10.” The prisoners are simply people who once lived. They become hypotheticals in the absence of physicality.
  
  We can also discern the importance of the body in “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” with the narrator’s depiction of the protagonist, Katerina Lvovna. While she is not a literal prisoner until the end, men find ways to control her body from the story’s beginning. Before we learn anything of her character, tendencies, or emotions, we learn that she “was not exactly a beauty, but there was something pleasing about her nevertheless” (Leskov 3). Leskov’s narrator, whose physical judgement seems to come from a uniquely male gaze, begins by spoon-feeding us a vivid description of her stoic, cold appearance, and we therefore interpret her body before her mind. Her husband and father-in-law judge and repress her physicality as well when “they […] watch how she [sits] down, how she [walks], how she [stands]” (4). In this state of suppression Katerina’s body is dormant, but when she becomes involved with Sergei, one of her father-in-law’s stewards, her body reawakens. It is a glowing, lithe, “supine form” (19), much livelier than the initial “neck that could have been sculpted from marble” (3). Her body twines like a snake; it is graceful and supple; it appears bare despite the bunching layers of fabric. It is Sergei’s desire that resurrects Katerina’s body; he is the one to shape her newfound agency. With the line “I’m master of the whole of your white body!” his ownership becomes clear (18). From the narrator to her husband to Sergei to the prison system, men own her and imprison body. It is essential to her individuality, as her lively form with Sergei suggests, but her physical freedom only lasts so long when men control it.
  
  The materialization of form, primary in both of these stories, allows the reader to visualize and associate with these imprisoned characters. The body is, after all, a new prisoner’s initial comfort, the one remaining tangible good from the outside world. Goryanchikov, the narrator living out Dostoevsky’s prison experiences in Notes from a Dead House, describes a man’s “hide” as “his last capital,” what remains when he has no other belongings (Dostoevsky 42). He often introduces his comrades with evocative descriptions of their appearances, prompting the reader to visualize them before digesting their character. The narrator skillfully intertwines physique with character, aligning the two to match first impressions to actions. There is Gazin, the “terrible creature” who is “terribly strong, of above average height, of Herculean build, with an ugly, disproportionately huge head; he walked with a stoop and wore a perpetual scowl” (46-47), and there is Alei, whose “beautiful, open, intelligent, and at the same time good-naturedly naïve face won my heart at first sight” (60). His enforcing the connection between mannerisms and appearance magnifies the relevance of physical form. 
  
  
  Autonomy, or a person’s capacity to make independent decisions, is a second essential piece of self as suggested by these authors. It is something towards which humans naturally strive, even from within strict confines. When all other aspects of prisoners’ lives are in the state’s hands, financial freedom is one of the only ways a prisoner can express individuality. In Notes from a Dead House, Goryanchikov explains the importance of financial freedom when no other freedom is available, saying, “The whole meaning of the word “prisoner” is a man with no will; but in wasting money, he is acting by his own will” (79). He suggests that it is an essential part of personhood and that without any monetary freedom, the prisoners “would either have gone crazy, or dropped dead like flies...or, finally, gotten themselves into unheard-of villainies, some from anguish, others the sooner to be somehow executed and annihilated, or to somehow ‘change their fate’” (78). Without a morsel of financial freedom, the prisoners’ labor would be useless and maddening. The prisoners work for and dream of money, the end goal being, for those like Akim Akimych, a new suit (132), or for many others like Gazin, enough vodka to properly celebrate several months’ worth of work in one day (37). Prisoners make and spend primarily as an escape from the daily tedium. Indulgences are by nature enjoyable in any context, but in a monotonous prison, they are lifelines that also reproduce small pieces of free life. Autonomy, specifically monetary autonomy when the state strips a prisoner of all other forms of “will,” is essential to personhood and to purpose. What good would distinctive faces and distinctive souls be if people had no ability to act with them? 
  
  Katerina of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” displays a similar drive towards autonomy. Though she has reached monetary freedom (or whatever disfigured form of it was available to women of the time), she finds a different type of prison in womanhood. We learn of not only her boredom, but also the many levels of confinement keeping her from the outside world: “First, there was the boredom of life in a barred and bolted merchant’s house with a high fence and unchained watch dogs running about the yard, an unrelieved boredom that more than once reduced the young woman to a state of depression bordering on stupor” (4). Her life as a merchant’s wife restricts her to barren simplicities, and because of this boredom, she aches for an exciting break from a routine that is not so different from a prisoner’s. Sergei provides this excitement with his empty promises of love, and Katerina, so desperate for change, stops at nothing to achieve autonomy. 
  
  
  
  As we see from Goryanchikov’s comrades and Katerina, confinement’s threat to autonomy makes it all the more significant. Dostoevsky suggests that without this freedom prisoners would go insane or die, and Leskov tells the story of two people that go to such lengths for freedom that they end up in chains. When confinement denies its inhabitants of even the slightest freedoms, it limits the mind as much, if not more, than the body.
  
  But body and autonomy cannot compose a person without a person’s essence, a piece that is far more difficult to grasp. Kharms, in fact, presents this aspect by stripping away the body and leaving the reader to determine what remains. The simple fact that “There lived a redheaded man” yet there is no body, nothing physically tangible about this man, implies that something else comprises the “him” we still refer to at the end of the story (Kharms 45). With no body, at least in the eyes of the liberated world, he has no power, no legacy, and little agency, much like the prisoners in Dostoevsky or Leskov’s stories. Here is a man that has been stripped of the primary aspect of personhood. What is left?
  
  Perhaps it is this third aspect of personhood. It slips so easily from our grasp that we don’t know quite what it is, we only know that it is there. Consciousness, we could call it, or the secular soul, or essence. (These terms are of course not interchangeable; it is difficult to define something that takes such obscure forms.) There is a man. He has no body, no autonomy without a vessel to do his bidding, yet he still exists. There is something here that we cannot confine within a body or a prison. Life experiences, idiosyncrasies, and a state of consciousness conglomerate into this transcendent existence the redheaded man occupies. It is not something physical or quantitative, rather it is something about a person that remains with the prisoners even after that person is gone. It gives hope that someone’s essence can transcend physical confines, that their individuality will remain even after everything else is taken. 
  
  
  
  This is the part of a person that the narrator in Notes from a Dead House tries so desperately to put into words when describing his fellow inmates. His attempt at defining Akim Akimych is a fluid combination of physicality and idiosyncrasy. He is “tall, lean, weak-witted, terribly illiterate, extremely pedantic, and punctilious as a German” (Dostoevsky 29). He attempts to grasp and share this unique character through stories of his meticulous and fruitless attempts at control. In “Appendix: The Peasant Marey,” however, Dostoevsky realizes the futility of his and Goryanchikov’s attempts to typify prisoners based on their actions and reactions in such a public place. In remembering an intimate childhood encounter with the peasant Marey, he determines just how impossible it is to judge the character of his comrades in such a socially charged setting, for “I could not look into his heart” (Dostoevsky 304). One can only catch a glimpse of a person’s essence in those pure morsels of intimacy, devoid of premeditation or judgmental eyes.
  
  Perhaps this essence is what remains, even when the redheaded man loses his head and Kulikov receives fifteen hundred lashes (Dostoevsky 292) and Katerina’s “eyes [see] only darkness” (Leskov 56). This consciousness, or what some might call the soul, stays an essential part of personhood even when the other parts are in chains. It connects someone to the outside world and provides intimate hope for individuality, even in a weak body with dwindling autonomy. Despite the cruel circumstances, the conscious essence remains intact, and there is hope for a prisoner in its perseverance.
  
  Body, autonomy, and essence define and drive individuals in the works of Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Kharms. The body becomes the primary descriptor when a person is removed from their outer environment. Autonomy, specifically monetary autonomy, becomes all the more essential in the absence of all other forms of freedom. Essence acts as a beacon of hope for prisoners; it is the part that remains when the rest of the self is compromised, and it is the piece one leaves behind. Though there are other nuanced parts of personhood outside of what is outlined here, incarceration compromises these other parts of self and leaves the prisoner to adapt to the fundamental things that remain. These fundamentals are what Leskov shares with Sergei and Dostoevsky shares with Goryanchikov. They are what we as readers share with these characters and what give us the common ground necessary to empathize with humans in such a vastly different environment.
   

  Bibliography

  Dostoevsky, Fydor. Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage-Random House, 2016.

  Leskov, Nikolai. “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: A Sketch.” Translated by Robert Chandler. Hesperus Press Limited, 2003.

  Kharms, Daniil. “Blue Notebook #10.” Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. Edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich, Overlook Duckworth, 2009.