Notes from a Dead House (Everyman's Library CLASSICS)

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The man writing the diary is quiet, distant but sharp observer of prison life. Convicts are often described in a sentence, or paragraph, still containing, in the most condensed form, the essence of their being and the tragedy of their life. Out of his more typical writing, Dostoevsky does not go further into the psychological breakdown of one character, exposing the underlying philosophies and instincts that are the driving forces of the individual, as whole life stories often narrated only in a vignette, described only as factual, without imposing his own keen observation or meaning to it. There is a sense of exhaustion in the narrator in the squalor he finds himself in. He does not have the vigor to examine life - only to document it. In the end, he is in the House of dead, immersed in apathy, where Dostoevskian qualities fade, even in Dostoevsky himself, in which, I, paradoxically, found glimpses of hope and relief. There is dejection in face of the intricacy of life embodied in the prison system, where the narrator both gives up and resists elucidation. Sometimes life becomes so heavy it is impossible to interpret in a coherent manner and all we can do is step away and quietly observe it. Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.”

One can measure Dostoevsky only to Dostoevsky. Even when he falls short, he is still brilliant beyond comprehension. Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruelest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.” The chronicle also details to some extent the nature of corporal punishment and the general conduct of the prison officers. Corporal punishment was cruel and inhumane and it was painful knowledge that at some point in our history such punishment was thought of as just. Being something of a reign of its own, certain commanding officers tended to be tyrants. But generally, according to Alexander's account, the officers were considerate of the convicts.

Petrov, an externally quiet and polite man who befriends Alexander Petrovich and often seeks his company, apparently for edification on matters of knowledge. Alexander Petrovich finds it hard to reconcile Petrov's sincere friendship and unfailing courtesy with the ever-present potential (attributed to him by all the other prisoners, including Alexander Petrovich) for the most extreme violence. In this sense, Petrov is thought to be the most dangerous and determined man in the prison. The book is a loosely-knit collection of facts, events and philosophical discussion organised by "theme" rather than as a continuous story. Dostoevsky himself spent four years in exile in such a camp following his conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle. Richard Pevear has produced acclaimed translations of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, & Bulgakov. The translation of "The Brothers Karamazov" won the 1991 PEN Book of the Month Club translation prize.

Max Nelson’s writings on film and literature have appeared in The Threepenny Review , n+1 , Film Comment , and The Boston Review , among other publications. He lives in New York. A beautiful hardcover edition of the first great prison memoir, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of his life-changing penal servitude in Siberia. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with an introduction by Richard Pevear. Our prison was at the far end of the citadel behind the ramparts. Peering through the crevices in the palisade in the hope of glimpsing something, one sees nothing but a little corner of the sky, and a high earthwork covered with the long grass of the steppe. Night and day sentries walk to and fro upon it. Then one suddenly realizes that whole years will pass during which one will see, through those same crevices in the palisade, the same sentinels pacing the same earthwork, and the same little corner of the sky, not just above the prison, but far and far away.

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Though the novel has no readily identifiable plot in the conventional sense, events and descriptions are carefully organized around the narrator's gradual insight into the true nature of the prison-camp and the other prisoners. It is primarily in this sense that the novel is autobiographical: Dostoevsky wrote later, in A Writer's Diary and elsewhere, about the transformation he underwent during his imprisonment, as he slowly overcame his preconceptions and his repulsion, attaining a new understanding of the intense humanity and moral qualities of those around him. [4] Narration [ edit ] Excellent. . . . Dostoevsky's constant preoccupation is the meaning of human freedom and the prisoners' preservation of their dignity." -- Harper's Magazine

Cabe destacar también que durante todos los días estaban sometidos a trabajos forzosos sin misericordia. El castigo era la consecuencia irreversible y recíproca que se relacionaba al crimen cometido por el prisionero. Ni él ni ningún otro hombre puede ser mismo en su vida a partir de una experiencia como esta. Incluso, Dostoievski afirma que para él (un hombre culto e intelectual) era más difícil tener que convivir (con todo lo que esto conlleva cotidianamente) con asesinos, hombres embrutecidos, salvajes y delincuentes, que estar privado de la libertad que gozaba tiempo atrás. Nevertheless the basic line of detachment, there is an underlying sense of vastness and complexities of each destiny that only brushes against the main character as he goes on in repetitive and dull camp life. The book has the atmosphere of the life of a prisoner, somewhere between dreariness and cruelty.What Dostoevsky does best is the erasure of distance between the reader and the disenfranchised, the ones that seem to be far off behind the wire and prison walls, besides the fact that in reality, we can be equally imprisoned as them, even when we are confined only by our own ideas. During the first weeks, and naturally the early part of my imprisonment, made a deep impression on my imagination. The following years on the other hand are all mixed up together, and leave but a confused recollection. Certain epochs of this life are even effaced from my memory. I have kept one general impression of it though, always the same; painful, monotonous, stifling. What I saw in experience during the first few days of imprisonment seems to me as if it had all taken place yesterday. Such was the case" Rayfield, Donald (29 Sep 2016). "The House of the Dead by Daniel Beer review – was Siberia hell on earth?". The Guardian . Retrieved 24 August 2018. dreamed of something almost impossible. This eternal restlessness, manifesting itself silently but visibly; this strange fervor and impatience of sometimes involuntarily expressed hopes, at times so unfounded that they were more like raving, and, what was most striking of all, that often dwelt in the most practical-seeming minds—all this gave the place an extraordinary appearance and character, so much so that these features may have constituted its most characteristic qualities. The original narrator is responsible for recovering the papers of the once-incarcerated Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov. After encountering the former convict while he lived in a rural Siberian village teaching private lessons on foreign languages, the nameless narrator seeks to interview Aleksandr. The narrator is deeply curious with a relatively poor sense of personal and social boundaries, and he hounds Aleksandr, who refuses to socialize with him.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1862). Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Navrozov, Lev. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House (published 1950). The Major, the violent-tempered, tyrannical governor of the prison. He is described by Alexander Petrovich as "a spiteful, ill-regulated man, terrible above all things, because he possessed almost absolute power over two hundred human beings." Referred to by the prisoners as "the man with the eight eyes" due to his apparent omniscience, he is universally despised and feared. Anything can be a prison, the mind, the body, religion, your class, your nationality, anything. Who keeps you in those mind-forged manacles? Only you.The story begins with "gentleman" Alexander's arrival at the prison which overflows with the peasant community. From the beginning, he is an outsider in every possible way. Imagine, leaving one's own country, surrendering one's liberty, and coming into a prison to serve a ten-year term of penal servitude just to face the cold and unfriendly multitude of peasants; how alone one must feel. The wide gap between the gentry and the peasants in the free world is also preserved in this confined world. 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. One of the most powerful and significant authors in all modern fiction, Fyodor Dostoevsky was the son of a harsh and domineering army surgeon who was murdered by his own serfs (slaves), an event that was extremely important in shaping Dostoevsky's view of social and economic issues. He studied to be an engineer and began work as a draftsman. However, his first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was so well received that he abandoned engineering for writing. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested for being a part of a revolutionary group that owned an illegal printing press. He was sentenced to be executed, but the sentence was changed at the last minute, and he was sent to a prison camp in Siberia instead. By the time he was released in 1854, he had become a devout believer in both Christianity and Russia - although not in its ruler, the Czar. During the 1860's, Dostoevsky's personal life was in constant turmoil as the result of financial problems, a gambling addiction, and the deaths of his wife and brother. His second marriage in 1887 provided him with a stable home life and personal contentment, and during the years that followed he produced his great novels: Crime and Punishment (1886), the story of Rodya Raskolnikov, who kills two old women in the belief that he is beyond the bounds of good and evil; The Idiots (1868), the story of an epileptic who tragically affects the lives of those around him; The Possessed (1872), the story of the effect of revolutionary thought on the members of one Russian community; A Raw Youth (1875), which focuses on the disintegration and decay of family relationships and life; and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which centers on the murder of Fyodor Karamazov and the effect the murder has on each of his four sons. These works have placed Dostoevsky in the front rank of the world's great novelists. Dostoevsky was an innovator, bringing new depth and meaning to the psychological novel and combining realism and philosophical speculation in his complex studies of the human condition. Although there is no plot at all, this is the story of an intellectual whose radical politics in support of the lower classes forced him (by accident) into unsought and unwelcome intimacy with those lower classes, in the course of which he discovered an emotional and spiritual love for those he had only previously considered to be part of an abstract political theory. Before prison he had thought that the alleviation of the suffering of the peasants was the problem. As an effete literary journalist, prison reality hit Dosto like an express train. At first he hated all the other prisoners and they hated him because he was a “nobleman”. Dostoyevsky’s heroic biographer Joseph Frank argues convincingly that the writer underwent a major conversion during his time in Omsk: he came to consider working-class Russian people less as “barbarians awaiting the light”—his own characterization of the view he’d had of the peasantry as a young revolutionary—than as representatives of spiritual light itself. Forced into close quarters with murderers, thieves, and petty criminals, Dostoyevsky came to believe, as Frank puts it, “in the moral beauty of the Russian peasantry, its infinite capacity to love and forgive those who had for so long sinned against it.”