Book description
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 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. Fyodor
Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881) studied at the Military
Engineering College in St Petersburg, and achieved officer's rank.
Arrested in 1849 and sentenced to death for his involvement in a
political coup, he was reprieved at the last moment but sentenced to
penal servitude. On his return, he fell into debt as a result of
gambling. His greatest works were all written in the last 20 years of
his life. David McDuff is a renowned Russian translateor and has written
books and articles on Russian literature.
