Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Dostoevsky - Oxford ed.)

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

ISBN: 9780199540518

Binding: paperback

Section: Fiction

In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. Terror and resignation -- the rampages of a psychopath, the brief serene interlude of Christmas Day -- are evoked by Dostoevsky, writing several years after his release, with a strikingly uncharacteristic detachment. For this reason, House of the Dead is certainly the least Dostoevskian of his works, yet, paradoxically, it ranks among his great masterpieces.