The House of the Dead

Summary

Accused of political subversion as a young man, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labour at a Siberian prison camp — a horrifying experience from which he developed this astounding semi-autobiographical memoir of a man condemned to ten years of servitude for murdering his wife.

A haunting and remarkable work filled with wonder and resignation, The House of the Dead ranks among the Russian novelist's greatest masterpieces. Of this powerful autobiographical novel, Tolstoy wrote, "I know no better book in all modern literature".

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart and his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction. He is commonly regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived, penning works including four long novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. His ideas profoundly shaped literary modernism, existentialism, and various schools of psychology, theology, and literary criticism. His works are often called prophetic because he accurately predicted how Russia’s revolutionaries would behave if they came to power. In his time, he was also renowned for his activity as a journalist.