| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
xvi, 311 pages ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references. |
| Contents |
Part One. Introduction -- I. The dead house -- II-IV. First impressions -- V-VI. The first month -- VII. New acquaintances. Petrov -- VIII. Resolute men. Luchka -- IX. Isai Fomich. The bathouse. Baklushin's story -- X. Christmas -- XI. The performance. -- Part Two. I. The hospital -- II-III. Continuation -- IV. Akulka's husband -- V. Summertime -- VI. Prison animals -- Vii. The grievance -- VIII. Comrads -- IX. The escape -- X. Leaving prison -- Appendix: The peasant Marey -- Notes. |
| Summary |
Master translation of a neglected Russian classic into English. Long before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago came Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead, a compelling account of the horrific conditions in Siberian labor camps. The characters and situations that Dostoevsky encountered in prison were so violent and extraordinary that they changed his psyche profoundly. Through that experience, he later said, he was resurrected into a new spiritual condition. |
|
"In 1849 Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for his participation in a utopian socialist discussion group. The account he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, was the first book to reveal life inside the Russian penal system. The book not only brought him fame but also founded the tradition of Russian prison writing. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead) is filled with vivid details of brutal punishments, shocking conditions, feuds and betrayals, and the psychological effects of the loss of freedom, but it also describes moments of comedy and acts of kindness. There are grotesque bathhouse and hospital scenes that seem to have come straight from Dante's Inferno, alongside daring escape attempts, doomed acts of defiance, and a theatrical Christmas celebration that draws the entire community together in a temporary suspension of their grim reality. To get past government censors, Dostoevsky made his narrator a common-law criminal rather than a political prisoner, but the perspective is unmistakably his own. His incarceration was a transformative experience that nourished all his later works, particularly Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky's narrator discovers that even among the most debased criminals there are strong and beautiful souls. His story reveals the prison as a tragedy both for the inmates and for Russia; it is, finally, a profound meditation on freedom: "The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being""-- provided by publisher. |
| Language |
Translated from the Russian. |
| Subject |
Prisoners -- Russia (Federation) -- Siberia -- Fiction.
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Prisons -- Russia (Federation) -- Siberia -- Fiction.
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Exiles -- Russia (Federation) -- Siberia -- Fiction.
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Prisoners' writings, Russian -- Fiction.
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Exiles. (OCoLC)fst00918139
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Prisoners. (OCoLC)fst01077103
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Prisoners' writings, Russian. (OCoLC)fst01077304
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Prisons. (OCoLC)fst01077326
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Russia (Federation) -- Siberia.
(OCoLC)fst01243666
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| Genre/Form |
Fiction. (OCoLC)fst01423787
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| Added Author |
Pevear, Richard, 1943- translator.
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|
Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator.
|
| Added Title |
Zapiski iz mertvogo doma. English (Pevear and Volokhonsky)
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| ISBN |
9780307959591 (hardcover) |
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0307959597 (hardcover) |
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9780307949875 (pbk.) |
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0307949877 (pbk.) |
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9780307959607 (ebook) |
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