The House of the Dead

'Here was the house of the living dead, a life like none other upon earth'<p>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 <i>The House of the Dead</i>, 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 <i>The House of the Dead</i> 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.</p><p>This edition includes notes and an introduction discussing the circumstances of Dostoyevsky's imprisonment, the origins of the novel in his prison writings, and the character of Aleksandr Petrovich.</p>