โ Scribed by Dostoevsky, Fyodor
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
"In 1849 Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for his participation in a utopian socialist discussion group. The account he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, was the first book to reveal life inside the Russian penal system. The book not only brought him fame but also founded the tradition of Russian prison writing. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead) is filled with vivid details of brutal punishments, shocking conditions, feuds and betrayals, and the psychological effects of the loss of freedom, but it also describes moments of comedy and acts of kindness. There are grotesque bathhouse and hospital scenes that seem to have come straight from Dante's Inferno, alongside daring escape attempts, doomed acts of defiance, and a theatrical Christmas celebration that draws the entire community together in a temporary suspension of their grim reality. To get past government censors, Dostoevsky made his narrator a common-law criminal rather than a political prisoner, but the perspective is unmistakably his own. His incarceration was a transformative experience that nourished all his later works, particularly Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky's narrator discovers that even among the most debased criminals there are strong and beautiful souls. His story reveals the prison as a tragedy both for the inmates and for Russia; it is, finally, a profound meditation on freedom: "The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being""--
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
From the acclaimed translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky comes a new translation of the first great prison memoir: Fyodor Dostoevsky's fictionalized account of his life-changing penal servitude in Siberia. In 1849 Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short novel Notes from Underground is considered the world's first existentialist novel. It is presented as the memoirs of an unnamed narrator, a retired civil servant living in St Petersburg, whose rambling stories and insights are a deep existentialist attack on emerging Weste
I am a sick person. I am a spiteful person. An unattractive person, too . . . In the depths of a cellar in St. Petersburg, a civil servant spews forth a passionate and furious note on the ills of society. The underground man's manifesto reveals his erratic, self-contradictory and even sadistic natu
### Review Praise for previous translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, winners of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize *The Brothers Karamazov*One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevskys original. *New York Times Book Review* It may well be that Dostoevskys [world], with all
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short novel Notes from Underground is considered the world's first existentialist novel. It is presented as the memoirs of an unnamed narrator, a retired civil servant living in St Petersburg, whose rambling stories and insights are a deep existentialist attack on emerging Weste
I am a sick person. I am a spiteful person. An unattractive person, too . . . In the depths of a cellar in St. Petersburg, a civil servant spews forth a passionate and furious note on the ills of society. The underground man's manifesto reveals his erratic, self-contradictory and even sadistic natu