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    The House of the Dead
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    The House of the Dead
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    The House of the Dead
    Ebook439 pages9 hours

    The House of the Dead

    By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Accused of political subversion as a young man, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor at a Siberian prison camp — a horrifying experience from which he developed this astounding semi-autobiographical memoir of a man condemned to ten years of servitude for murdering his wife.
    As with a number of the author's other works, this profoundly influential novel brilliantly explores his characters' thoughts while probing the depths of the human soul. Describing in relentless detail the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, Dostoyevsky's character never loses faith in human qualities and the goodness of man.
    A haunting and remarkable work filled with wonder and resignation, The House of the Dead ranks among the Russian novelist's greatest masterpieces. Of this powerful autobiographical novel, Tolstoy wrote, "I know no better book in all modern literature."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMar 5, 2012
    ISBN9780486115214
    Author

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. He died in 1881 having written some of the most celebrated works in the history of literature, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov.

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    Reviews for The House of the Dead

    4/5

    318 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A little slow to get started but then totally gripping
    • 4/5
      (This is not the version of the book I read. My edition is an Oxford Classic predating ISBNs.)

      Book reading in this house really slowed down here for a while, not because I wasn't reading, but because I was taking a 10 week Modern Poetry course online. I read nearly nothing else. Except this, slowly. Motivated by what I felt was an underperformance on a bunch of those "How Many of These Classics Have You Read?" memes going around Facebook, I tossed this into my bag for my homecoming trip. While Memoirs wasn't on any of those lists, any Dostoyevsky should raise my book nerd cred, right?

      As it turns out, Memoirs is a strange sort of book. It's more of a series of character studies and recollections than anything with a forward-driving narrative, which contributed to the slowness with which I finished it. Whenever I was reading it, I enjoyed it, remarked on its insightfulness, pondered its ramifications for humanity in general and not just those living in a Siberian prison. But whenever I had to put it down, it was easy to leave it there -- especially during my overextended weeks of my ModPo class.

      This book is remarkable both for the clarity of Dostoyevsky's descriptions and also for the amazing chasm between how prisoners are treated in this book and how they are treated now in the U.S. Not that I think modern prisoners should be flogged... But still. Everything must change.
    • 3/5
      I was disappointed by this work.Any book on the inner workings of a 19th century Siberian labor camp will have appeal both for its compelling subject matter, and historical value. To that extent, I enjoyed this work, as it provides a wonderful insight into a prison system now long since past.However, the author's writing style is tedious at best. The book amounts to a simple narrative of various inmates and their experiences within the camp- no real effort is made to establish flow or any compelling story lines.
    • 4/5
      House of the Dead, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is little book about life in a Siberian prison. A couple deep thoughts. Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him. Tyranny is a habit; it may develop, and it does develop at last, into a disease.It has such beautiful writing about such an awful subject. The basic story is that an older man dies and his friend comes across a manuscript. This manuscript is the story of the man's ten year stint in prison in Siberia. We are talking serious hard labor 1850's prison. Dozens of men sleeping on the floor, bugs, constantly wearing chains, inedible food. It is supposedly autobiographical. The prisoners survive awful conditions and beatings, yet some seem to still have optimism for the future. The only thing i have read that even seemed close was part of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King. Just haven't read much prison lit. I haven't read anything by Dostoyevsky before and his style is so poetic it is breathtaking.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating semi-autobiographical novel of Dostoyevsky and his years as a political prisoner in Siberia. He writes as "Alexander Petrovich" and these are "Alexander"'s thoughts and impressions of prison life under Nicholas I. Each chapter is a separate vignette, complete in itself. The convicts are given sharp psychological portraits. We see their interaction with each other and the prison authorities. We get a taste of the daily routine, Christmas and Easter celebrations, such as they are, the prison animals, an escape, protesting with a complaint, and finally, after years as a convict, freedom at last for the narrator. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      So I finally got through, more or less, after dropping it once around halfway through. Woof. Given how much I loved Karamazov, C&P, and Notes from Underground, I didn't expect to feel how I felt about this one. I knew it was a prison memoir of sorts, but what I didn't account for was that it takes the form of a series of rambling impressions with the system with little or no plot between episodes. But given that the individual stories are not isolated enough, the book doesn't have even the strength of a good book of short stories. It really does show that this was one of Dostoevsky's first works, that's for sure. It's really a two star book, but i'll add an extra star for some choice quotes, which i'll type up here:
      "Tyranny is a habit; it is endowed with development, and develops finally into an illness. I stand upon this, that the best of men can, from habit, become coarse and stupified to the point of brutality. Blood and power intoxicate: coarseness and depravity develop; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible and finally, sweet to the mind and feelings... Power is seductive. A society that looks indifferently upon such a phenomenon is itself infected at its foundation." and,
      "To acknowledge one's guilt and ancestral sin is little, very little; it is necessary to break with them completely. And that cannot be done so quickly." (p. 197)
      Although he meant the above in the context of executioners and corporal punishment, the second quote speaks to me especially regarding the perception and acknowledgement of white privilege as well as decolonization. Interesting that a book from 1862 about the Siberian forced labour system can speak to me so powerfully about that.

      There's also a delightfully delightful sequence about his dogs. So there's that.

      Old hiatus review:
      Putting this on hiatus for a moment. The first ~150 pages are good - it's very interesting to learn about the russian/siberian prison system, but there is virtually no plot to keep me engaged. I'll come back to it later because Dostoevsky is a good writer but there are more interesting things right now.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating in a couple thousand ways — among them the apparent necessity of properly motivating a Siberian convict workforce. The barking of armed guards is not enough. The guards had to define the conditions of work, at least in Dostoyevsky's telling, in terms that made the prisoners want to stop lounging in the grass, smoking their pipes and trading insults. Once given sufficient reason to set to the task, they went at it with alacrity. Who knew that workplace psychology applied?
    • 5/5
      I first read this in University. It really opened up my world on the Russian writers. My professor (DONSKOV), explained to us how this was partly autobiographical. Dostoevsky was in prison and writing notes in his bible. Great visual writhing.
    • 4/5
      This book is Dostoyevsky's memoir of his years in a Siberian prison camp. He did create a fictional first-person narrator for this book, but it's so weak that the narrator can't even keep up the facade enough to remember why he was sent to the camp in the first place. This book is incoherent, meandering and disjointed but nonetheless interesting and reveals great love for humanity. It reads like a collection of sketches and short stories woven together loosely by the complete experience. This was Leo Tolstoy's favorite Dostoyevsky book.