The House of the Dead (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Author), David McDuff (Author)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Classics | Publication Date: January 7, 1986

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.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Russian (translation)

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (January 7, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140444564
• ISBN-13: 978-0140444568
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.9 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #222,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dostoyevsky is rarely more personal, April 2, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The House of the Dead (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

House of the Dead is not a general account of imprisonment and system of law of Russia, ala Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, but is a much more personal account of the author's own experiences. There is no attempt to overplay or dramatize personal suffering, though there was probably ample reason for the author to do so. Instead, the author focuses more on his fellow inmates: their personalities, their culture, their way of life and way of thinking. The effect is immeasurable, and makes the House of the Dead one of the most potent, moving pieces of literature ever written. The convicts that Dostoyevsky describes seem to come alive -- their descriptions are so complete and realistic that its almost as if they're reading the book with you. This method of describing imprisonment defies conventiality, but Dostoyevsky pulls it off easily. By knowing the convicts, you feel for them, you understand them, and you walk away knowing and loving humanity just a bit more.

A great aspect of the book is that you can pick it up at almost any spot, so long as you know the general plot. I can't tell you how many times I've picked the book up and flipped straight to the first chapter describing the hospital, and read simply that alone. When Dostoyevsky tells of the dead convict, little more than a husk or a shell of a man who couldn't even stand the weight of his clothes or his wooden crucifix, being dragged off routinely with his heavy fetters still on, one can hardly help but grimace. And when another convict yells, inexplicably, "He had a mother too!" you start to sympathize for these convicts: the filthiest, most degenerate human beings you can imagine.

Its a story of love for humanity, of resurrection from despair, and of a man's final reconciliation with his own life.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good story, but not Dostoevsky at his best, June 8, 2000

By 

"mikeu3" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The House of the Dead (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead is an account of life in a Siberian prison, drawing heavily from its author's own imprisonment for sedition. The narrator is nominally serving time for murdering his wife out of jealousy, but Dostoevsky makes very little effort to maintain the artifice that the narrator is anyone other than himself, as the narrator even refers to himself as a political prisoner on a couple of occasions. The novel consists mainly of a series of anecdotes relating such things as the staging of a prison play, the memories of some convicts of the crimes that landed them in prison, and the attempted escape of two of the prisoners, all interspersed among observations of more day-to-day affairs like prison food and corporal punishment.

A number of the stories are very interesting, and overall Dostoevsky paints an impressive picture of prison life as a whole. Though it's clear that his experience in prison was a brutal one, the reader never feels as though Dostoevsky is overplaying the prisoners' suffering, which makes it seem all the more authentic. However, I'd have to say this sort of narrative doesn't really play into Dostoevsky's overall strength as an author. Dostoevsky's best works generally have a strong and coherent (though in some cases somewhat melodramatic) plot that develops more or less linearly throughout the novel; The House of the Dead, on the other hand, is hardly more than a series of related roughly-15-page short stories and so inevitably lacks the suspense of much of Dostoevsky's other work. For the same reason, none of the characters get especially well developed--the reader is left with a lot of interesting character sketches, none of which get fleshed out.

As such, it's sort of unfair to compare The House of the Dead with many of Dostoevsky's best known works, since the format doesn't allow Dostoevsky to show some of the strengths he shows elsewhere. Taken in isolation, though, it's a fine account of life in the Siberian prisons of the mid-19th century, and it mixes the elements of a documentary with those of a novel well enough to ultimately be a very interesting and enjoyable work.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An incredible book that must be read., December 19, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The House of the Dead (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This book examines to what extent a man will go to keep his humanity. Among feters and prison walls, a different sort of society emerges. How is a caged man different from a caged animal? Does a prison truely change a man for the better? This is a great book.