The House of the Dead

Description

The four years that Dostoevsky spent in a Siberian prison camp were nasty, brutish and long, the most agonizing of his life. Its documentary detail - the convicts and their fascinating stories, the wooden plank bed that they sleep on, the cabbage soup swimming with cockroaches that they eat - is made all the more vivid by the controlled, oddly impersonal tone of the narrator. He, like the others, had stepped beyond himself to commit his crime. He found his strange family of convicts boastful, ugly, vain, cruel and ludicrously obsessed with outward appearances. But it is their vitality that overtakes the house of the dead, turning the crisis of its narrator into a slow miracle: the return and reawakening of his personality.

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.