Product Description

In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Serbia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The inticate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to passages from Dante's Inferno. Terror and resignation - the rampages of a pyschopath, the brief serence interlude of Christmas Day - are evoked by Dostoevsky, writing several years after his release, with a strikingly uncharacteristic detachment. For this reason, House of the Dead is certainly the least Dostoevskian of his works, yet, paradoxically, it ranks among his great masterpieces.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #289727 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780199540518
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Language Notes
Text: English, Russian (translation)

About the Author
Fyodor Dostoevsky is considered one of the greatest Russian writers, whose works have had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century fiction.

Customer Reviews

Horrifying Portrait of Prison Life
While at times heavy on description, this novel still presents a dark and disturbing view of life in a Siberian prison. Based on Dostoevsky's own experiences (although the truth of which is sometimes called into question), the book serves as partly a documentary and partly a fictional story. Claustrophobic, psychologically trying, and disturbingly emotional, this novel is definitely not for everyone. But for those willing to dive it, it will be ultimately worthwhile.

a great book
I can't say that I enjoyed reading this book. It's not the sort of book that you enjoy. I can only say that I'm very glad that I read it. I found it to be both disturbing and compelling.

I can only agree with the other reviewers. This is not a book for everyone. It's not the sort of book that you read for entertainment, for something to do, for the sake of it. But if you want to be challenged and you want to be made to think, you will gain a lot by reading this book.

From Siberia with Love: A memoir of a frozen prison hell by the great psychological novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) wrote "From the House of the Dead" in 1860. It is a fictionalized account of the four years (1850-54) he spent in a penal colony in distant Siberia. Dostoyevsky had been sentenced due to his involvement in a plot to assasinate the Tsar. Following his imprisonment he served in the Russian army; returned to European Russia writing such classics as "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment."
"From the House of the Dead" is a lesser known but still classic account of the torment of the prisoner's life in a totalitarian state.
We learn the horror of labor in the subzero work camp; the stories of several of the prisoners; animals who lived in the area and the freezing isolation and pain of countless days of misery. Dostoyevsky was a young intellectual forced to live, eat and sleep with men who came from a peasant background of cruelty, coarseness and brutality. Many of the camp's officials were sadistic and cruel in their treatment of the wretches whose lives they ruled with an iron fist.
Dostoyevsky is able to look through the keyhole of the human soul in all its multifaceted complexity. His descriptions of the bleak landscape is journalistic in its detail.
I have always loved Dostoyevsky's major novels. This was a new one for me and I am glad I read it. I consider it imperative perusing for anyone who wants to know what kind of man Dostoevsky was. In the last lines of the book he reports the main character's release from prison with the promise of a return to urban life in a resurrection of the spirit.
The book is not to be read with haste; it is to be savored with the many insights into life in the far north which are to be pondered to be appreciated. Long before the "Gulag Archipeligo" hit the bestseller list this great novel had told the sad and suffering tale of men trapped like mice in a mousetrip of pain.