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(Penguin Classics)
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's harrowing, semi-autobiographical novel about the internal transformation of a man serving ten years in a remote Siberian prison.
Here was the house of the living dead, and a life like none other upon earth.
In January 1850, Fyodor 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 recounts his soul-destroying incarceration through the cool, detached tones of his narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov: the daily battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, the cabbage soup swimming with cockroaches, his strange 'family' of boastful, ugly, cruel convicts.
Yet The House of the Dead is far more than a work of documentary realism: it is also a powerful novel of redemption, describing one man's spiritual and moral death and the miracle of his gradual reawakening.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), one of nineteenth-century Russia's greatest novelists, spent four years in a convict prison in Siberia, after which he was obliged to enlist in the army. In later years his penchant for gambling sent him deeply into debt. Most of his important works were written after 1864, including Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, all available from Penguin Classics.
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