Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21595 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Synopsis
As a young man, Dostoyevsky spent four years in prison for suspected subversive activities. After that horrifying experience, he wrote this book - the fictional memoir of a condemned murderer. Haunting and remarkable, it was considered by Tolstoy to be Dostoyevsky's very best.

Customer Reviews

How horrible that time was,I have not the strength to say
At the beginning of 1850, Dostoyevsky began a four year penal servitude term in a remote Siberian prison for his part in a political conspiracy. He describes the conditions and his fellow convicts in meticulous detail under the guise of narrator , Alexandr Petrovich Goryanchikov . The detached and controlled tone in which he does this offers an insight into the core of the criminal mind slowly turning the crisis of his internment into a re-discovery of his own personality.
Not for the faint-hearted, these pages depict the struggle of one man to understand his fellow convicts, and impart an accurate image of the claustrophobic, relentlessly lonely
coffin which was a ten year stretch in a freezing, filthy hell.
Not quite as striking as Crime & Punishment or melodramatic as The Idiot, but infinitely rewarding, nonetheless.

Honest account of a terrible experience
The House of the Dead is not so much a novel, rather more a documentary account of the years Dostoyevsky spent in a prison camp as sentence for his involvement in a political conspiracy. The narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich, is little more than a front for the author; a few seeming inconsistencies in his story make the book seem even more like autobiography. But this is a direct and and interesting study of the brutal prison regime, of the narrator's slow recovery from despair at his predicament, and of the characters of his fellow convicts, some of whom he eventually concludes, "were quite remarkable". This is the first book by Dostoyevsky I've read and has left me looking forward to more.

TRANSCENDING THE BARS
Fydor Dostoyevsky when a 27 year old author working on Netochka Nezvanova was arrested for belonging to a young socialist group. He was tried and condemned to death, but at the last moment he was reprieved and his sentence was commuted to prison in Siberia. He spent five years in the penal settlement at Omsk before being transferred to the military. It was via this book, isolated amongst the convict community analysing minutely events and thoughts and meditation of past life that transformed the writer without question into the genius he is regarded as. He captures their corpse like pallor and enigmatic mannerisms, evoking the life that was and the punishment at hand for others eternity. The scolding clarity of the whip, the 1000 lashes so severe that a capacity to remain conscious is too much for many, perhaps luckily. Splinters of the rods broken into their backs by a licentious lieutenant. The lips tremble so greatly that many prisoners bite them till they bleed. The rods excite the nervous system beyond measure. All this Dostoyevsky endured in soul "for as I move among these recollections of a dreadful past the old suffering revives and all but strangles me". Among this palisade of forced association lies a sickening reality cured by an aspiring spirit that for a few ascended into darkness. Our narrator by virtue is not one of these and at last the shackles are released, free to join the living, to become an equal, a writer of extrodinary gifts, resurrected.