In 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sent to a Siberian prison camp for four years due to his involvement in an organization that had been banned by the Tsar. While there, he experienced a personal transformation, and after another six years of exile, he returned to St. Petersburg and wrote the semi-autobiographical novel The House of the Dead, which he finished in 1862.
The book is structured around the reminiscences of the protagonist, Alexandr Petrovtich Goryanchikov, who is sent to a hard labor camp in Siberia for murdering his wife. Over the course of the novel, he gets to know the prison's other inhabitants, seeing the harsh brutality and the deep human decency that exists within both the guards and the convicts.
A searing, unflinching account of suffering and redemption, The House of the Dead launched the prison-memoir genre and remains one of literature's most humane portraits of life behind bars.
A ex-convict in 19th-century Russia reminisces on his experiences in a Siberian prison.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)