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-cr
eated in "The House of the Dead", were the most agonizing of his life. In this f
ictionalized account, he recounts his soul-destroying incarceration through the
cool, detached tones of his narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov: the dail
y battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, the cabbage soup swimming with coc
kroaches, his strange 'family' of boastful, ugly, cruel convicts.
Yet "The Ho
use of the Dead" is far more than a work of documentary realism: it is also a po
werful novel of redemption, describing one man's spiritual and moral death and t
he miracle of his gradual reawakening.
