Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Paperback)

from janerawoof

Fascinating semi-autobiographical novel of Dostoyevsky and his years as a political prisoner in Siberia. He writes as "Alexander Petrovich" and these are "Alexander"'s thoughts and impressions of prison life under Nicholas I. Each chapter is a separate vignette, complete in itself. The convicts a...

from tigermel

House of the Dead, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is little book about life in a Siberian prison. A couple deep thoughts. Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him. Tyranny is a habit; it may develop, and it does develop at last, into a disease....

from AnthonySchmitz

Fascinating in a couple thousand ways - among them the apparent necessity of properly motivating a Siberian convict workforce. The barking of armed guards is not enough. The guards had to define the conditions of work, at least in Dostoyevsky's telling, in terms that made the prisoners want to st...

from vaellus

This book is Dostoyevsky's memoir of his years in a Siberian prison camp. He did create a fictional first-person narrator for this book, but it's so weak that the narrator can't even keep up the facade enough to remember why he was sent to the camp in the first place. This book is incoherent, mea...

from greeniezona

(This is not the version of the book I read. My edition is an Oxford Classic predating ISBNs.)Book reading in this house really slowed down here for a while, not because I wasn't reading, but because I was taking a 10 week Modern Poetry course online. I read nearly nothing else. Except this, slow...