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Title details for The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Available

The House of the Dead

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David McDuff
ebook
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'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 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.

This edition includes notes and an introduction discussing the circumstances of Dostoyevsky's imprisonment, the origins of the novel in his prison writings, and the character of Aleksandr Petrovich.
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Publisher: Penguin Group US

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781101160480
  • Release date: January 7, 1986

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781101160480
  • File size: 406 KB
  • Release date: January 7, 1986

Formats

OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Classic Literature Fiction

Languages

English

'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 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.

This edition includes notes and an introduction discussing the circumstances of Dostoyevsky's imprisonment, the origins of the novel in his prison writings, and the character of Aleksandr Petrovich.
Expand title description text
Classic Literature Fiction