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. Sushilov is a humble and unassuming man who attaches himself to the wealthy Aleksandr and willingly acts as his servant in exchange for a pittance. The prisoners look down on Sushilov because it is widely known that he “changed places” with another inmate; that is, he switched sentences with another inmate. However, he drove a poor bargain and gained only a red shirt and a silver coin in exchange for a much heavier sentence. The poor man is selfless and kind, but the prisoners pity him and do not exploit his simple nature. Aley Akim is a simple, naive man who is rather unversed in the ways of the world. He helps Aleksandr navigate the early days of his imprisonment but is little help otherwise. Akim feels very strongly about the importance of honesty, so much so that he turned himself in to the police. Aristov

No existe para mí mejor Dostoievski que el autobiográfico. Fue, es y será "el mejor conocedor del alma humana de todos los tiempos", como decía Zweig; pero para llegar a esa profundidad, le fue necesario empezar con la suya propia y “La Casa de los Muertos” es un libro en el que el Dostoievski hombre se camufla en el personaje ficticio de Alexander Petrovich para narrar sus penurias en la prisión de Siberia. This experience allowed him to describe with great authenticity the conditions of prison life and the characters of the convicts. Life in prison is particularly hard for Aleksandr Petrovich, since he is a "gentleman" and suffers the malice of the other prisoners, nearly all of whom belong to the peasantry. 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”. I will never stop being attracted to all camp and prison books. The House of the Dead is a prototype for books that endlessly fascinate me like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For me, there is an endless fascination in observing the consistency of the enduring human spirit in the face of extreme suffering, brutality and degradation, which gives motivation for tolerating one's own hardship.Ali a beautiful-souled young Tatar, imprisoned with his two older brothers. He has a gentle and innocent yet strong and stoical nature, and is much beloved by Alexander Petrovich and many of the others. "How this young man preserved his tender heart, his native honesty, his frank cordiality without getting perverted and corrupted during his period of hard labour, is quite inexplicable." This felt to me like a brother version of Solzhenitsyn’s 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich', but with less of the bleak, fully clear, almost documentary-style narrative. To be fair, the book moves around genres really well, shifting fluidly between fiction, philosophical meditation, and memoir. I was expecting something more hard-hitting, and emotionally draining from the reader's perspective, that would long live in the memory, but it fell short of this. There are however, for Dostoyevsky fans plenty of lovely philosophical musings, where the narrator ponders the nature of freedom and the importance of hope, the inequality of punishments for the same crime, the gap between appearance and reality, the nature of free will, and other heavy themes.

Las distintas experiencias vividas en el presidio son contadas en forma frontal, visceral por momentos, pero nunca de añoranza a los viejos tiempos ni de arrepentimiento. For 6 months I did not go to them: laziness, thoughtlessness, fear. The books would change me somehow, I knew, and I wasn't too prepared to let go of whatever they may ask me to let go of. No, not unless the sentries of my rational mind were welcoming and unsuspicious.

Open Library

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. One of the most harrowingly universal books Dostoevsky ever wrote. . . . It's cause for no small celebration that the extraordinary series of translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky has now seized on Notes from The House of the Dead." -- The Buffalo News However, he is also astonished at the convicts' abilities to commit murders without the slightest change in conscience. It was a stark contrast to his own heightened sensitivity. During this time in prison he began experiencing the epileptic seizures that would plague him for the rest of his life.