The House of the Dead

"A whaling ship was my Harvard and my Yale!" That's what Herman Melville declared, approximately, through his mouthpeice Ishmael in his supreme novel-of-information Moby Dick. I'm fairly sure no critic has ever linked Melville and Dostoevsky - more specifically, Moby Dick and The House of the Dead - and I'd never have made the connection if I hadn't just re-read the former. Dostoevsky, nevertheless, celebrates much the same net learning experience; his four actual years in prison labor camps in western Siberia were the Harvard and Yale of his craft as a writer and of his "spiritual" regeneration. He says it specifically at the beginning of the penultimate chapter of House (An Escape), if you want to check. By that time in the book, his literary narrative mask has completely slipped and he surely is speaking for himself. Both Moby Dick and House of the Dead are survivor's tales. Both are told by first-person narrators, although Dostoevsky's surrogate narrator, Aleksandr Goryanchikov, is not fully consistent as a literary device. Both are extremely discursive and parenthetical, spending far more words on description of other inmates/crewmates than on themselves. Just as Moby Dick is as much an account of the whaling industry as a tale of adventure, House of the Dead is a journalistic description of the Tsarist prison facilities, both of their management and of their sociology. Readers looking for a story are likely to be under-stimulated by both books. Most important, both books reveal crises in the lives of their authors -- personal epiphanies almost concealed by the plethora of externalities -- but the two authors travel in opposite directions. Moby Dick is, on one level, a confrontation with loss of belief, a parabola from complacent faith to existential skepticism. Dostoevsky's parabola curves from naive individualism, expressed as political radicalism, to a "resurrection" and redemption based on religious mysticism. How odd that the two books were written within roughly a decade of each other! I started to read The House of the Dead with a different comparison in mind. I'd just finished Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and I expected to find some interesting similarities and/or contrasts between these two books about Russian imprisonments. 'Ivan' and 'House' do depict equivalent misery and viciousness in the Tsarist and the Stalinist labor-camp prisons in Siberia. 'House" is no a literary phosphorescent flare of the blue flame intensity of 'Ivan', so it might pass unnoticed that conditions hadn't changed much from 1850 to 1940. In fact, Dostoevsky distracts his readers from the horrors of his prison by including large swathes of humor, depictions of jollier times and of the little evasions and corruptions of the system that make prison almost tolerable. Dostoevsky undoubtably offers the more realistic and rounded portrait; reading the House of the Dead exposes the deliberate unreality of A Day in the Life. Solz

I wanted to say that the edition published by Oxford Press called "Memoirs from the House of the Dead" is translated by Jessie Coulson. I have no idea who Coulson was but he is an underrated Dostoevsky translator. I have read this and his "Crime and Punishment" (which is the Norton Critical edition) and I think he was much better than most of the transltors like Garnett, Ginzburg, McDuff and the rest. There are many traslations of this book available and I think this one gets left off bookstore shelves without reason. It is a very passionate translation.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) wrote "From the House of the Dead" in 1860. It is a fictionalized account of the four years (1850-54) he spent in a penal colony in distant Siberia. Dostoyevsky had been sentenced due to his involvement in a plot to assasinate the Tsar. Following his imprisonment he served in the Russian army; returned to European Russia writing such classics as "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment." "From the House of the Dead" is a lesser known but still classic account of the torment of the prisoner's life in a totalitarian state. We learn the horror of labor in the subzero work camp; the stories of several of the prisoners; animals who lived in the area and the freezing isolation and pain of countless days of misery. Dostoyevsky was a young intellectual forced to live, eat and sleep with men who came from a peasant background of cruelty, coarseness and brutality. Many of the camp's officials were sadistic and cruel in their treatment of the wretches whose lives they ruled with an iron fist. Dostoyevsky is able to look through the keyhole of the human soul in all its multifaceted complexity. His descriptions of the bleak landscape is journalistic in its detail. I have always loved Dostoyevsky's major novels. This was a new one for me and I am glad I read it. I consider it imperative perusing for anyone who wants to know what kind of man Dostoevsky was. In the last lines of the book he reports the main character's release from prison with the promise of a return to urban life in a resurrection of the spirit. The book is not to be read with haste; it is to be savored with the many insights into life in the far north which are to be pondered to be appreciated. Long before the "Gulag Archipeligo" hit the bestseller list this great novel had told the sad and suffering tale of men trapped like mice in a mousetrip of pain.

I can't say that I enjoyed reading this book. It's not the sort of book that you enjoy. I can only say that I'm very glad that I read it. I found it to be both disturbing and compelling. I can only agree with the other reviewers. This is not a book for everyone. It's not the sort of book that you read for entertainment, for something to do, for the sake of it. But if you want to be challenged and you want to be made to think, you will gain a lot by reading this book.

This book examines to what extent a man will go to keep his humanity. Among feters and prison walls, a different sort of society emerges. How is a caged man different from a caged animal? Does a prison truely change a man for the better? This is a great book.