The House of the Dead

A searing account of the time Dostoyevsky spent in a Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy

‘Here was the house of the living dead, a life like none other upon earth’

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 describes his soul-destroying incarceration through the cool, detached tones of his narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov: the daily battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, his strange ‘family’ of boastful, cruel convicts. Yet this is far more than a work of documentary realism; it is also a powerful novel of redemption, exploring one man’s spiritual death and the miracle of his reawakening.

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David McDuff