Book cover for Memoirs from the House of the Dead
Description
In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The inticate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to passages from Dante's Inferno. Terror and resignation - the rampages of a pyschopath, the brief serence interlude of Christmas Day - are evoked by Dostoevsky, writing several years after his release, with a strikingly uncharacteristic detachment. For this reason, House of the Dead is certainly the least Dostoevskian of his works, yet, paradoxically, it ranks among his great masterpieces.
Publisher Oxford University Press Incorporated
ISBN10 0199540519
ISBN13 9780199540518
Number of Pages 400
File Size DL-216MB
Shelf Number KM725
Grade Range
Ages 18 - 99
Format Audio Plus Download, EPub Download