A searing account of the time Dostoyevsky spent in a Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy ‘Here was the house of the living dead, a life like none other upon earth’ In January 1850 Dostoyevsky was sent to a remote Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy. The four years he spent there, startlingly re-created in The House of the Dead, were the most agonizing of his life. In this fictionalized account he describes his soul-destroying incarceration through the cool, detached tones of his narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov: the daily battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, his strange ‘family’ of boastful, cruel convicts. Yet this is far more than a work of documentary realism; it is also a powerful novel of redemption, exploring one man’s spiritual death and the miracle of his reawakening. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David McDuff
In January, 1850, Dostoyevsky was sent to a remote Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy. In this fictionalized account, he recounts his soul-destroying incarceration - the daily battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, the cabbage soup swimming with cockroaches, his strange 'family' of boastful, ugly, cruel convicts.
