Svidrigailov Was Right!

I am most pleased to report that I have not spent a decade in a Siberian gulag, half my life on Devil’s Island, or even a night in the local lockup. Beyond a couple cuffings for hopping freight trains and a detainment in the Seattle airport for my purported resemblance to an arch evil-doer named Kruger, I’ve been mercifully free of incarceration. But memoirs and novels about prison have long intrigued me. Or perhaps, chilled me is a better explanation: The descriptions of another side of history, the lack of freedom, and of course the escapes all make for the most exciting vicarious reading I know.

Buried Alive—an early
translation of The House of the Dead

I just finished Dostoyevky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, and found it hard to put down.

The literary genre of prison writing has a long, strange history. Searching about on the web, I compiled this short and curious list of famous prison tales—or other works that may not have seen the light of day except for prison time.

Jail provided writing hours for many a famous memoir or philosophical musing. Roman philosopher Boethius wrote his treatise The Consolation of Philosophy during a one-year sentence while awaiting execution; his conversation with Lady Philosophy examines the nature of free will and bemoans humankind’s evil doings. Conversely, Napoleon Bonaparte dictated his memoirs will exiled on the island of St. Helena and Adolf Hitler penned his autobiography and call to arms, Mein Kampf, during his imprisonment following the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

Marco Polo finally found time to chronicle his travels to China while in jail back home in Genova. Similarly, during his incarceration John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German while locked in Wartburg Castle, and the Marquis de Sade used his eleven years in La Bastille as quality time to write prolifically. 

Errol Flynn, galley slave

Cervantes found inspiration for Don Quixote during his days as a galley slave during the years 1575-1580. Working the oars on galleys was of course a jail sentence for the times—and one which few were expected to survive. (One of my fave Hollywood visions of galley slavery is in the 1940 Michael Curtiz swashbuckler The Sea Hawk [the dastardly Spaniards!] with the insurmountable Errol Flynn [although the film bears no resemblance to Sabatini’s novel].)

For Dostoyevsky, his time in Siberia informed all of his being and his subsequent writings. He was arrested in 1849 as part of the Petrashevsky circle of political dissidents and sentenced to death for attempting to foment revolution. Taken to Semyonovsky Square in the heart of St. Petersburg to be shot by a firing squad, he was reprieved by Tsar Nicholas I moments before his execution—a reprieve that Dostoyevsky came to believe was planned all along as a punishment and ultimate mockery. He was sent to four years of hard labor in the prison fortress in Omsk in western Siberia, then released into compulsory military service for five more years in the Seventh Line infantry battalion at Semipalatinsk in southwestern Siberia.

Dostoyevsky’s years in the Omsk prison was the source for the thinly veiled novel, Notes from the House of the Dead. In these pages, he describes many events and encounters that would re-appear in Crime and Punishment, The Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. He learned prison slang that he used in his later books. But most of all, he overcame at least some of his nobleman status and worldview to better understand the muzhik, allowing him to write with verisimilitude about Russian life in a way of which Tolstoy could never truly conceive.

Reading Notes from the House of the Dead restoked my long-running fascination for prison tales, prompting me to list some of my favorite vicarious reads:

Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo has to be among the best—if also, the most fanciful. His descriptions of Edmond Dantès’ years in the Chateau d’If (now a tourist attraction!) are spine-tingling and make my palms sweat even now, thinking about it all again. And Dantès’ subsequent escape and revenge are of course the perfect ending—although how he could ever turn his back on the beautiful Mercédès as an act of punishment still is simply not possible in this book of impossibilities. (See the recent film version from 2002, which convincingly rights this wrong.) Dumas based the novel on the true story of one Pierre Picaud, but I remain curious where he uncovered the rich details about life within Chateau d’If. Perhaps other accounts of the day? Or his own chilled imagination?

Chateau d'If postcard to the beautiful Mercédès back home

Henri Charrière’s Papillon and the sequel Banco are his purported memoirs of his fourteen years sentenced to French Guiana and Devil’s Island as well as several thrilling escapes. True or not, it’s still stunning. (Stay away from the excreable film adaption with Steve McQueen, unless you want to be as bored as Papillon himself in solitary confinement.)

There are of course numerous more prison memoirs, but my other favorites include Brendan  Behan’s Borstal Boy (the dastardly English!), Oriana Fallaci’s A Man about Greek revolutionary Alexandros Panagoulis, Jean Genet’s novels, even Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (the dastardly Mexicans!). 

And then there’s Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962), based on the author’s imprisonment from 1945 to 1953 as a Soviet political “offender” in a labor camp at Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan. Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing a letter to a friend with less-than-complimentary remarks about Stalin—in particular, calling him “Old Man Whiskers”—and sentenced to an eight-year term. In describing just one simple day of prison life, Solzhenitsyn leaves it to your own imagination to stretch that sentence out for what seems to stretch away into eternity. 

Think of good old Svidrigailov’s description of that spider-filled room—and shudder.