Customer Reviews

Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Worlds Classics)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) wrote "From the House of the Dead" in 1860. It is a fictionalized account of the four years (1850-54) he spent in a penal colony in distant Siberia. Dostoyevsky had been sentenced due to his involvement in a plot to assasinate the Tsar. Following his imprisonment he served in the Russian army; returned to European Russia writing such classics as "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment."
"From the House of the Dead" is a lesser known but still classic account of the torment of the prisoner's life in a totalitarian state.
We learn the horror of labor in the subzero work camp; the stories of several of the prisoners; animals who lived in the area and the freezing isolation and pain of countless days of misery. Dostoyevsky was a young intellectual forced to live, eat and sleep with men who came from a peasant background of cruelty, coarseness and brutality. Many of the camp's officials were sadistic and cruel in their treatment of the wretches whose lives they ruled with an iron fist.
Dostoyevsky is able to look through the keyhole of the human soul in all its multifaceted complexity. His descriptions of the bleak landscape is journalistic in its detail.
I have always loved Dostoyevsky's major novels. This was a new one for me and I am glad I read it. I consider it imperative perusing for anyone who wants to know what kind of man Dostoevsky was. In the last lines of the book he reports the main character's release from prison with the promise of a return to urban life in a resurrection of the spirit.
The book is not to be read with haste; it is to be savored with the many insights into life in the far north which are to be pondered to be appreciated. Long before the "Gulag Archipeligo" hit the bestseller list this great novel had told the sad and suffering tale of men trapped like mice in a mousetrip of pain.

I can't say that I enjoyed reading this book. It's not the sort of book that you enjoy. I can only say that I'm very glad that I read it. I found it to be both disturbing and compelling.

I can only agree with the other reviewers. This is not a book for everyone. It's not the sort of book that you read for entertainment, for something to do, for the sake of it. But if you want to be challenged and you want to be made to think, you will gain a lot by reading this book.

I wanted to say that the edition published by Oxford Press called "Memoirs from the House of the Dead" is translated by Jessie Coulson. I have no idea who Coulson was but he is an underrated Dostoevsky translator. I have read this and his "Crime and Punishment" (which is the Norton Critical edition) and I think he was much better than most of the transltors like Garnett, Ginzburg, McDuff and the rest. There are many traslations of this book available and I think this one gets left off bookstore shelves without reason. It is a very passionate translation.

While at times heavy on description, this novel still presents a dark and disturbing view of life in a Siberian prison. Based on Dostoevsky's own experiences (although the truth of which is sometimes called into question), the book serves as partly a documentary and partly a fictional story. Claustrophobic, psychologically trying, and disturbingly emotional, this novel is definitely not for everyone. But for those willing to dive it, it will be ultimately worthwhile.

"Memoirs from the House of the Dead" is the story of Alexander Petrovich, a convict, and it is based on the author's own experiences in 19th century Siberia. Warning: This book was meant to be gloomy, and so it certainly is. The novel is not for those who are looking for entertainment; it is depressing, and, at least in my fancy, the scenery seemed to be grey-tinted at all times... Dialogue is almost non-existent, which makes the book a bit of a difficult read, slow-pacing, sometimes even monotonous.

However, the story does make you think, and Dostoyevsky's books can never be bad - I gave this one only three stars because I am comparing it to his other works and because I think it lacks that certain 'something' that can make even the gloomiest stories curiously captivating - such as "Crime and Punishment," one of Dostoyevsky's best works, which is far from cheerful! "The House of the Dead" is worth reading, but I would not recommend it to someone to whom Dostoyevsky is a fresh acquaintance.

I became interested in Dostoevsky and read most of his works. He wrote approximately 15 novels, and one can buy about 10 of his primary works in English on amazon. This is a solid 5 star effort by Dostoevsky but it is not to be compared to his great works such as Brothers Karamazov. It is a good book, but for Dostoevsky it is among the least compelling of his writings, but not the slowest read from him. Some will have trouble maintaining interest in the book for all 350 pages, but for those willing to make it to page 300, the last 50 pages are the reward.

To clear up some confusion, this is not a dark novel set in a freezing wasteland of Russia as is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - written by by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. That 1962 novel was set in a Soviet labor camp in the winter. The present books has a few darker sections, but overall it is a far lighter novel. It is set in a prison in a remote Russian village which is described as "snug" in the introduction, not as "desolate."

The main thrust of the novel is about the many characters in the prison, or stories about people. These are real criminals such as thieves and murderers and only a few are political prisoners. Unlike Solzhenitsyn's grinding tale where the inmates faced unrelenting daily presssures and long hours working on construction projects in a freezing winter, here in Dostoevsky's prison there is an underground economy of sorts, with vodka and humor, albeit sometimes dark humor, and even a theatre and an orchestra run by the inmates. Prison animals are not people but their pets including dogs and horses. The book is about the prisoners' personalities and their stories, and about their crimes that landed them in prison and their lives in prison. Many inmates were former soldiers or common criminals. The Penguin Classics version has an approriate description on the book jacket: " his (Alexsandr Goryanchikov) strange family of boastful, ughly, cruel convicts." They brag about their crimes before prison and their ability to take 100 lashes or more, and how they killed their victims, or prison administrators since, etc.

Most readers associate Dostoevsky with his famous novel Crime and Punishment and stop reading his works at that point. But he is a much more complex and interesting writer. Virginia Woolf has a nice comment on him which I quote from her Common Reader - see below. The "soul" gets less of a workout here in the present work.

Woolf: "Indeed, it is the soul that is the chief character in Russian fiction. Delicate and subtle in Chekov, subject to an infinite number of humours and distempers, it is of greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky; it is liable to violent diseases and raging fevers, but still the predominant concern. Perhaps that is why it needs so great an effort on the part of an English reader to read The Brothers Karamazov or The Possessed a second time. The "soul" is alien to him. It is even antipathetic. It has little sense of humour and no sense of comedy. It is formless. It has slight connection with the intellect. It is confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable, it seems, of submitting to the control of logic or the discipline of poetry. The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture."

His four years in a prison in Omsk opened widely the eyes of Dostoevsky on `real' life: `I yet could not distinctly see much of what lay under my nose.'
He was brutally confronted with the complexity of man, of facts (crimes) and of murky motives.
One can find here in a nutshell the main themes and characters of his later masterpieces.
In prison he was forced to live herded with a

Fascinating gallery of controversial human personalities
The Idiot (Aley), the eternal servant, the eternal child, the eternal ill, the eternal vagabond, the eternal executioner, the vain, the leader, the hanger-on, the solitary, the dreamer, the desperate, the completely indifferent, the informer, the alcoholic, the beast, the jester, the clown, the cold killer, the absolutely corrupt, the depraved, the passionate flogger, the feigned mad, people with a mission, people with disinterested compassion, the dying.

Man
For Dostoevsky, man `is his worst enemy, a creature of habit to a monstrous degree, a creature who can get used to anything.'
`Every man, however low he may have fallen, requires, if only instinctively and unconsciously, that respect be given to his dignity as a human being. He possesses a mournful desire for an abrupt display of personality, appearing suddenly and developing into fury, the eclipse of reason, the convulsion of madness.'
`It is difficult to conceive to what extent human nature can be perverted. The executioner's nature is found in embryo in almost every man.'

Facts (crimes)
`It was difficult to form even the most elementary idea of some crime, there was so much that was strange in their execution. Some murders derive from the most astonishing causes.'

Unforgettable scenes
There is the magical theatre scene, showing plainly that art is essentially the transmission of pure emotions into the spectator (the reader); the hellish bath scene; the boisterous Christmas party; the shocking death by consumption (`He must have had a mother too!'); the ice cold killing (`like a calf') of a wife by her husband; the sickening cure of the wounds inflicted by flogging (`the adroit plucking out of from the wounds of splinters from broken rods.'

This `documentary' novel is, by any standard, one of the best, profoundest, most shocking, most provocative and most shattering dissections of man.
Dostoevsky wrote one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all times. A must read.

"A whaling ship was my Harvard and my Yale!" That's what Herman Melville declared, approximately, through his mouthpeice Ishmael in his supreme novel-of-information Moby Dick. I'm fairly sure no critic has ever linked Melville and Dostoevsky - more specifically, Moby Dick and The House of the Dead - and I'd never have made the connection if I hadn't just re-read the former. Dostoevsky, nevertheless, celebrates much the same net learning experience; his four actual years in prison labor camps in western Siberia were the Harvard and Yale of his craft as a writer and of his "spiritual" regeneration. He says it specifically at the beginning of the penultimate chapter of House (An Escape), if you want to check. By that time in the book, his literary narrative mask has completely slipped and he surely is speaking for himself.

Both Moby Dick and House of the Dead are survivor's tales. Both are told by first-person narrators, although Dostoevsky's surrogate narrator, Aleksandr Goryanchikov, is not fully consistent as a literary device. Both are extremely discursive and parenthetical, spending far more words on description of other inmates/crewmates than on themselves. Just as Moby Dick is as much an account of the whaling industry as a tale of adventure, House of the Dead is a journalistic description of the Tsarist prison facilities, both of their management and of their sociology. Readers looking for a story are likely to be under-stimulated by both books. Most important, both books reveal crises in the lives of their authors -- personal epiphanies almost concealed by the plethora of externalities -- but the two authors travel in opposite directions. Moby Dick is, on one level, a confrontation with loss of belief, a parabola from complacent faith to existential skepticism. Dostoevsky's parabola curves from naive individualism, expressed as political radicalism, to a "resurrection" and redemption based on religious mysticism. How odd that the two books were written within roughly a decade of each other!

I started to read The House of the Dead with a different comparison in mind. I'd just finished Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and I expected to find some interesting similarities and/or contrasts between these two books about Russian imprisonments. 'Ivan' and 'House' do depict equivalent misery and viciousness in the Tsarist and the Stalinist labor-camp prisons in Siberia. 'House" is no a literary phosphorescent flare of the blue flame intensity of 'Ivan', so it might pass unnoticed that conditions hadn't changed much from 1850 to 1940. In fact, Dostoevsky distracts his readers from the horrors of his prison by including large swathes of humor, depictions of jollier times and of the little evasions and corruptions of the system that make prison almost tolerable. Dostoevsky undoubtably offers the more realistic and rounded portrait; reading the House of the Dead exposes the deliberate unreality of A Day in the Life. Solzhenitsyn's Day cannot be extrapolated into Dostoevsky's years; 365 of Ivan's "days" in a row would be inconceivable. No one could survive them realistically. There's a summer even in Siberia.

Dostoevsky explicitly places his ego-surrogate in the House of the DEAD, from which his release constitutes a resurrection. Solzhenitsyn's Ivan is metaphorically in Hell, the frozen Hell of ancient northern myths. And now, having read these two books close together, I feel very strongly that Ivan Denisovich is intended as more than a portrait of an individual. Instead, he's a metaphor also, a synecdoche of the common folk of Russia imprisoned in the absurd inefficiency and misery of their Stalinist Hell. All the more amazing, isn't it, that Nikita K authorized the publication of 'Day'! Somebody in his office wasn't a very deep reader. 'A Day in the Life' is also a survivor's tale, but definitely not a resurrection myth. There's no further destination after Ivan's Hell; survival is perpetual defiance at best.

"The House of the Dead" isn't a great literary accomplishent. It can hardly be called a novel -- more a thinly disguised memoir -- but it's fascinating to read as a piece of sociology and it certainly opens the reader's comprehension of Dostoevsky's later masterpieces.

Distinguishing works of fiction from works of non-fiction often is not a simple and straightforward exercise. Case in point: Dostoevsky's MEMOIRS FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD. Dostoevsky, of course, is known as one of the world's foremost novelists, and HOUSE OF THE DEAD is commonly shelved with his great novels in "Fiction" sections. But it is much more fact than fiction, much more memoir than novel. At bottom, it is Dostoevsky's very lightly fictionalized account of his own four years as a prisoner in Omsk, Siberia. Indeed, I suspect that some of today's "memoirs" published and sold as "non-fiction" are far more fanciful than HOUSE OF THE DEAD.

Dostoevsky was sentenced to prison for doing nothing more incendiary than belonging to a liberal intellectual group that discussed Western philosophy and literature. In the wake of the European Revolutions of 1848, Tsar Nicholas I unleashed a repressive and reactionary program that swept up the rather innocuous Petrashevsky Circle, including Dostoevsky. After being given a phony death sentence and lined up to be shot for the psychological shock effect, Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia, where he then spent four years in prison and five more years in the Siberian Regiment of the Russian Army. Not surprisingly, that experience proved to be critical in his life and in his development as a writer. And, no doubt, it was during that period that Dostoevsky gained much of his understanding of the extremes of human thought and behavior and of the sorts of social misfits and outcasts found in his later novels.

HOUSE OF THE DEAD was published in serial form in 1861 and 1862. It is presented as a manuscript that was found in the papers of one Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, who had spent ten years in the prison in Omsk. But scholars have determined that many of the people and events described in the work were actual people and events from Dostoevsky's own four-year imprisonment. Hence, HOUSE OF THE DEAD can be thought of as a work of journalism, providing the Russian people with a grim and realistic picture of a Siberian prison. Its publication was permitted only because the Russian government had decided to loosen censorship in connection with a general policy of Westernization.

It includes vivid descriptions of the prisoners' work routines; their generally filthy conditions, ameliorated slightly by periodic trips to the crowded town's bath; the ten-pound fetters they wore at all times, from prison in-take to release; punishment by being forced to run the gauntlet or being flogged with as many as 2,000 slashes from a birch whip; in-house theatrical presentations; incidents of "changing places", in which, as a result of bartering, a richer prisoner would exchange identities (and sentences) with a much poorer one; the in-prison trade in vodka and occasional benders; and the hospital facilities where Dostoevsky sometimes went just to get away from the regular prison barracks. Interspersed throughout are the sorts of philosophizing and psychologizing that became trademarks of Dostoevsky's fiction. An example:

"Some who came to the prison had burst all bounds, broken through every restraint, when they were free, so that in the end their very crimes were committed, as it were, not of their own volition but as though they did not know why they acted so, as though they were delirious or possessed; the cause was often vanity, raised to the highest pitch."

The book tends to be wordy and slightly repetitive (it could easily have been condensed by at least a fourth without much loss), but there are many passages of powerful, mesmerizing writing. On occasion I was reminded of the writing of Nikolai Gogol - which, in turn, brings to mind Dostoevsky's comment that "we all [i.e., all Russian writers] came from Gogol's overcoat."

Two points of trivia: (1) More than 60 years after Dostoevsky's time there, Paul Wittgenstein (brother of Ludwig Wittgenstein) was imprisoned in Omsk as a POW of World War I, after having been shot, captured, and his right arm amputated; it was in Omsk that he began to train the muscles of his left arm and hand to do the sorts of things that enabled him, once he eventually was freed in a prisoner exchange, to resume a career as a concert pianist, albeit a one-armed one. (2) The last opera of Leos Jánacek was "From the House of the Dead", based on Jánacek's own adaptation of Dostoevsky's book.

The reader may enjoy this little book of Dostoevsky's (Edwards translation), which reveals the author's insight into the human condition without imposing the labyrinthine structure of many Russian novels of the time. It is a digest of the 10 year term of Alexander Petrovitch Goriantchikoff in Siberian prison, recounting just the memorable first and last transition years. It is also seen as the story of Dostoevsky's own imprisonment, but he distances the fictive version by placing it in the far past and replacing his voice with an anonymous narrator who finds and posthumously publishes Alexander's memoir.

Alexander Petrovitch tells the story of his fellow inmates, but not his own. They come from disparate backgrounds, are charged with widely varying crimes, but their punishment is limited to only a few categories--10 years, 20 years, life at hard labor. The few noblemen (Alexander Petrovitch is one) are estranged from the general population and suffer more as a result. The peasant finds agreeable companions and suffers less. Is each punished equitably? Can they be? `But why think about things that are insoluble?'

Their punitive labor is hard because of the psychological stress of useless, repetitive tasks such as digging and refilling the same trench. Unlike Sisyphus, they would break under this load unless they could recover their humanity at night by working for their own benefit on their own trade--cobbler, carpenter, jeweler, lender. Still, some did break and would commit a new crime that extended or hardened their sentence but that also interrupted an unrelieved monotony that had become unbearable. If people do act only in their own self interest, it is sometimes difficult to predict what that interest is.

With his term over, `Liberty! New life! Resurrection from the dead!' But Alexander Petrovitch, aged 35, could not adapt to life after prison and died shortly after release. Did this augmented punishment fit his crime? We learn from the narrator that Alexander's young wife, shortly after their marriage, was assassinated by her husband. She might have the solution. And after The House of the Dead, the reader may go on to search for other life solutions in Dostoevsky's more renowned, and lengthier, novels.