House Of The Dead

Rating:
Summary: Dostoyevsky's most captivating Book, Easy to Read
Review: This is one of Dostoyevsky;s best books. The theme of a russian prison camp and it's "comfortability" amazed me from the first time I read it's review, formerly I thought that penal servitude in Siberia was exrutiatingly hard work, but through Dostoyevsky's descriptions it appears that life in the prison is better than that of a peasant.

Rating:
Summary: Tsarist Gulag
Review: "The House of the Dead" is an account of the prison years of Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, told in the first person. Of course, one can almost read it as Dostoyevsky's account of his own incarceration: it certainly has a feel of authenticity in its level of detail.

For those who have read Solzhenitsyn's novels and "The Gulag Archipelago", much in "The House of the Dead" will be familiar - perhaps depressingly so in that little seems to have changed between the times the two writers were imprisoned. This is not to distract from the quality of Dostoyevsky's novel. The reader is presented with a series of impressions, sketches and reflections rather than a straightforward narrative. The central character, Goryanchikov, is not depicted in great detail. Rather, he acts as the cipher through which the other prisoners and prison life are related to the reader.

Goryanchikov describes lives and histories of the other prisoners, their treatment by the guards, living conditions and notable events. The squalor and brutality of prison life come over very strongly, as does the ability of humans to adapt to such treatment. For some, of course, prison life was infinitely preferable to their normal existence, which says a great deal about conditions in Tsarist Russia. Class, religious and national distinctions were maintained in prison: Goryanchikov is a nobleman, which creates problems for him regarding his fellow inmates.

In all, an interesting novel which succeeds in relating the horrendous conditions of prison life, the brutality of men and the will to survive.

G Rodgers

Rating:
Summary: behind the bars
Review: As you can guess from the title, this book tends to the grimmer side of life. Bsed on Dostoyevsky's personal experiences as a prisoner for some political scheme or other, one can see his genius at human observation. The impersonal style, and the grey feeling you get delivers the truly mundane and painful existence of a prison in the 19th century. Lacking are the heroic escapes, the outlaw with a heart of gold, and other typically American themes (cff the Green Mile). This book is a series of subtle observations, and truly meant for those with a psychological outlook.

Rating:
Summary: Dostoyevsky is rarely more personal
Review: Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead is an account of life in a Siberian prison, drawing heavily from its author's own imprisonment for sedition. The narrator is nominally serving time for murdering his wife out of jealousy, but Dostoevsky makes very little effort to maintain the artifice that the narrator is anyone other than himself, as the narrator even refers to himself as a political prisoner on a couple of occasions. The novel consists mainly of a series of anecdotes relating such things as the staging of a prison play, the memories of some convicts of the crimes that landed them in prison, and the attempted escape of two of the prisoners, all interspersed among observations of more day-to-day affairs like prison food and corporal punishment.

A number of the stories are very interesting, and overall Dostoevsky paints an impressive picture of prison life as a whole. Though it's clear that his experience in prison was a brutal one, the reader never feels as though Dostoevsky is overplaying the prisoners' suffering, which makes it seem all the more authentic. However, I'd have to say this sort of narrative doesn't really play into Dostoevsky's overall strength as an author. Dostoevsky's best works generally have a strong and coherent (though in some cases somewhat melodramatic) plot that develops more or less linearly throughout the novel; The House of the Dead, on the other hand, is hardly more than a series of related roughly-15-page short stories and so inevitably lacks the suspense of much of Dostoevsky's other work. For the same reason, none of the characters get especially well developed--the reader is left with a lot of interesting character sketches, none of which get fleshed out.

As such, it's sort of unfair to compare The House of the Dead with many of Dostoevsky's best known works, since the format doesn't allow Dostoevsky to show some of the strengths he shows elsewhere. Taken in isolation, though, it's a fine account of life in the Siberian prisons of the mid-19th century, and it mixes the elements of a documentary with those of a novel well enough to ultimately be a very interesting and enjoyable work.

Rating:
Summary: 3 and 1/2 Stars -- Different For Dostoyevsky
Review: Fyodor Dostoyevsky is well-known for his novels and novellas, of which some of the best ever written flowed from his pen. This book, however, is an entirely different animal. Though ostensibly a work of fiction, The House of the Dead is actually a thinly-veiled autobiographical narrative. Dostoyevsky, who endured four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison -- after getting the "silent treatment" is isolation for eight months and facing a firing squad, in a death shroud, only to have his sentence commuted to the aforementioned punishment at the last minute -- created this book as a sort of memoir of his experiences. The book's Introduction sets up a fictional character to tell the story -- it was Dostoyevsky's intent to have the notes "written by a stranger" and to have his personality completely eliminated (one suspects for reasons not entirely related to literary conduciveness) -- but we see the emperor through his clothes. Since this is not really a work of fiction, then, it is not surprising that there is absolutely no plot to speak of, no linear development, no climax, and no resolution. It is, basically, a series of anecdotes -- the more interesting things that Dostoyevsky saw while in prison. Indeed, an alternate title that I have seen for the book is much more fitting (and revealing): Notes From a Dead House.

This book certainly does not rank in the upper tier of Dostoyevsky's work: all of his long novels are acknowledged masterpieces. With that said, it should also be noted that this book is also an acknowledged classic. As a book relating the prison experience to the masses (of which there are many), it is rather fine. The book reads much like a documentary -- which, of course, is what it basically is. Unlike many other prison books, we don't see such exciting elements as dashing escapes and noble, heroic prisoners. This is the real thing. It is also remarkable how infrequently Dostoyevsky gets on his soapbox: this is not a polemic against prisons, a tome about being a "victim of society", or a tract for prison reform -- it is not even an admirable psychological portrait of an enthralled criminal. Indeed, the book, as it goes, is quite remarkable for its uniqueness. Those who like to read books of this kind -- criminologists, say -- will find much to like here and will also probably find it to be quite unique. It is also a treasure for Dostoyevsky readers, who will find much material that enlivens the author himself. Readers new to the author, however, should start with one of his great novels.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I love this book. I'm so sad that I will never be able to read this book for the first time again! I would say that there are a few technical errors in this book, but it's beauty and originality far over shadow any of that. If you are thinking of reading this, please do!

Rating:
Summary: A good, but flawed work.
Review: I've read all of Dostoyevsky's books, and I like six of his works better than this one. That isn't to say that this is a bad work, it simply shows how talented of a writer he is.

This book is a semi-autobiographical piece about the time Dostoyevesky spent in a Siberian prison. Here he relates to the dehumanizing, deadening effects of the modern prison system and invokes his philosophies of better ways of treating and rehabilitating prisoners. He sketches detailed characters, and builds largely on the dichotomy between the "common crook" and the "gentleman lawbreaker," the latter which is represented by him, and also the minority in the prison.

All in all, quite a good piece.

Rating:
Summary: Not His Finest, But Still A Good Read
Review: This book is very Dostoyevsky in some ways, yet is still a departure from his usual fare. It is properly dark and depressing in keeping with his usual style. It is a personel account of his time in a horrific Russian prison. He builds his characters well and evokes feelings in the reader, but this book will never stand up to his immortal Crime and Punishment.

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Summary: Man is a Creature that Can Get Used to Anything
Review: This work is somewhat of an anomaly among the works of Dostoyevsky. Though he presents it as the discovered memoirs of a member of the Russian nobility sentenced as a type two(for murdering his wife) prisoner to Siberia, it is in reality a loosely disguised autobiography of Dostoyevsky's own four year experience in the Czarist prison system.

Having read accounts of the Soviet era gulags before reading House of the Dead, my first impression was the relative "comfort" of life in the Siberian prison camps of the Russian old regime. This in itself says volumes, for Dostoyevsky takes pains to try and demonstrate the utter inhumanity of the prison system he knew, never realizing the depths of cruelty to which it would sink in the generations to come. To take but one example, prisoners in Dostoyevsky's experience were allowed to earn a pittance for their labor in the camps, which they could apply to small purchases, and rich prisoners could even hire their own cooks and servants and bring in their own food. Though prisoners were certainly used for labor, this was done mainly for the self-sustainment of the prison itself and the immediate community, and not, as in Soviet times, to exploit mines and forests.

Though this is an autobiography presented as a book of memoirs of another, I found it oddly impersonal. Impersonal in the sense that its narrator, Alexander Petrovich, presents his vision of prison life while little is revealed about his own sentiments or the changes the prisoner experience has on his own personality. However, the story is still rich in the detail of its main characters. It was also fascinating to read of how prison life, though it dehumanizes a human, in no way squashes our lesser instincts: our vanity for one thing. We also get a unique view on how prisoners of noble status (and Dostoevsky was a minor noble) were treated in the Russian prison system. This facet of the novel in fact is the only place where the feelings of the narrator really come into play.

The House of the Dead is not a novel. Though the characters are well developed there is no real plot. It is a varied portrait of prison life, and in fact sections of the book could be read entirely separately or out of sequence without much inconveniece. What this work is is a great portrayal of prison life in imperial Russia, and useful especially to juxtapose with 20th century accounts of imprisonment, notably in the Soviet Union but not necessarily so. You be the judge if we have advanced in our humanity or only in our capacity for cruelty.