“The Peasant Marey” as an Unofficial Epilogue to The House of the Dead Danqi Lin College

“The Peasant Marey”, although written fifteen years after the publication of The House of the Dead, is a short story developed by Fyodor Dostoevsky from the same autobiographical experience: his imprisonment in Siberia. The story has an unnamed narrator, whose style and point-of-view resemble that of Goryanchikov, Dostoevsky’s fictional surrogate in The House of the Dead. The narrator starts the story with a scene from the novel, in which a prisoner named Gazin is beaten violently for his intoxicated aggressiveness (The House of the Dead 1003). Then, he abruptly brings up a childhood reminiscence of being saved by his father’s serf from an imaginary wolf, which leads him to have a sort of “unconscious awakening” unstated in the original novel (Kanzer 83).

Although dubious, it is worth arguing that “The Peasant Marey”, with its inserted “new insight”, is qualified as an unofficial epilogue of The House of the Dead, because it brings up thoughts and sensations that are not in the original fiction but need to be further expressed. An epilogue is, according to Collins Dictionary, “a closing section added to a novel, play, etc., providing further comment, interpretation, or information.” In The House of the Dead, the innate...