Notes from the House of the Dead.  It's a catchy title.  Based on the author's own experiences of penal servitude in Siberia as a political prisoner, Dostoyevsky's own "Introduction" allows for the main fictive set-up, that what follows are taken from the discovered notebooks of a nervous reclusive schoolteacher (teaching Siberian locals the French language) and former inmate.   Like the sweetest of Dostoyevsky, there is a touch of brief self-indulgence, a tender self-portrait of the misunderstood, of a man observed to burn a candle 'til dawn at work at something, secretively writing.  The device is necessary to establish one of the main elements of the fiction here, that when you, or anyone, goes off to such a prison, your personality dies, thus setting up the redemptive possibility that it will come back to life (at least, according to David McDuff's introduction.)  But more compellingly, to my own tastes and understandings of matters, this odd character alluded to, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, is a quiet self-portrait of the man himself.  A nobleman, fallen to such a condition.  A keeper of similar hours.  A nervous type, maybe somewhat frail and thin.  A writer.  Of course, we will allow it, as it is only right to.  For four years Dostoyevsky was so imprisoned, and the material, of course, is directly and entirely his own along with his own imagination.

He disliked electric lights.  He would rise at one in the afternoon, as he lived with his small family in St. Petersburg, and the writing would start when everyone had gone to bed.  From a New York Times Travel Section piece, I remember he would sometimes roll cigarettes as he stayed up and wrote, though he, along with the doctor, would not allow himself to smoke even one of them.

In prison he found a way to write about the world and about society and its human factions.

Connecting with books, I find, is something religious, a kind of holy encounter.  There are strange magnetic pulls one picks up from the books along a shelf, as if there was indeed within them, an understandable code of some migration that needs to be made.

So why should I find myself sitting outside of a Starbucks with Kundera's Encounters and the aforementioned Dostoyevksy, along with my own attempt at a memoir couched in enough fiction to protect the privacy of the innocent, on the day that is the first day off of three after the four nights behind the bar with its own 'dead,' with its own people deprived of their personal lives through some sense of honor or committed crime or lack of normalcy and normal times.

It's been years since I read Notes from the House of the Dead.  I did not find a conscious memory of reading its introduction, even though the 'sudden flooding wind' of the equally important introduction of The Brothers Karamazov is never far from my mind.  Did I take some aspect of that rare character of that noble person living out life in Siberia earlier as some sort of cliché;  and now I find it real and valid as I struggle on my own.

He had made an early writing career out of "subject matter primarily from the dreams of individuals oppressed by a hostile social environment," as the 'translator's introduction,' by David McDuff, in my Penguin Classics version, copyright 1985, of The House of the Dead, page 10.  It goes on, next sentence, "He had concentrated on the depiction of unhealthy, morbid states of mind, fusing these with a vision of another, brighter, but unattainable sphere."  And what follows is a further development of what the earlier Dostoyevsky was up to along such lines as I would not be able to come up with as far as brilliance and insight, basic contrasts between constructed self-ideals and the reality in which they must find themselves in.  Thus, perhaps, it is not a total dismissive, to coin that which belongs to the Dostoyevskian as such.

One can sense through what he himself has experienced, that there is, at least there can be, the Dostoyevskian in life, in his own life.  Where to put one's finger upon it, in the dreamer himself and his failings to be practical, in the 'fallen nobleman,' in the situations of life, where?...

This is basically 1860 after his release in 1844 that Notes is published.  I wonder, just because maybe there is some fun to it, if the world of Chekhov is possible, with first that of the earlier of Dostoyesky.  It is one of those 'books' of actual experiences that I will always return to in my life and find, oddly enough, some truth in, though I know not what that says exactly about me or anyone else.  It is one of the books that follows me along to the coffee shop's patio, and if to prove its weight and its reality I found myself quite a bit nervous and distracted and thrown off kilter when a pretty young college senior came up to me as I sat under an umbrella's shade staring into a notebook without any effect upon it and asked if she could borrow my phone, as hers did not work.  "Mine is old, and doesn't work so well either," I explained, turning it off all the way then turning it back on to the apple logo and handing it over to her.  "I won't go far," she said.  And yet she soon walked far away enough that she did disappear behind the shrubs in front of the tea house and brownstones to the west along R Street, making me even more nervous.

And yet, somehow, even though she could have walked away, she returned, sat near me waiting to make one more call, explaining how she intended to go to law school, got up once again, apparently made her connection, and when she came to return my old iPhone, she said to me, 'you are a saint.'  And I shrugged.