Memoirs from the House of the Dead

In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Siberia, 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.

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Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jessie Coulson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 08/01/2008
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.50h x 5.00w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780199540518
ISBN10: 0199540519
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Classics