-
Seasonal Offer:
This title is part of our Seasonal Offers promotion.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Oxford World's Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Product 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.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
His four years in a prison in Omsk opened widely the eyes of Dostoevsky on `real' life: `I yet could not distinctly see much of what lay under my nose.'
He was brutally confronted with the complexity of man, of facts (crimes) and of murky motives.
One can find here in a nutshell the main themes and characters of his later masterpieces.
In prison he was forced to live herded with a
Fascinating gallery of controversial human personalities
The Idiot (Aley), the eternal servant, the eternal child, the eternal ill, the eternal vagabond, the eternal executioner, the vain, the leader, the hanger-on, the solitary, the dreamer, the desperate, the completely indifferent, the informer, the alcoholic, the beast, the jester, the clown, the cold killer, the absolutely corrupt, the depraved, the passionate flogger, the feigned mad, people with a mission, people with disinterested compassion, the dying.
Man
For Dostoevsky, man `is his worst enemy, a creature of habit to a monstrous degree, a creature who can get used to anything.'
`Every man, however low he may have fallen, requires, if only instinctively and unconsciously, that respect be given to his dignity as a human being. He possesses a mournful desire for an abrupt display of personality, appearing suddenly and developing into fury, the eclipse of reason, the convulsion of madness.'
`It is difficult to conceive to what extent human nature can be perverted. The executioner's nature is found in embryo in almost every man.'
Facts (crimes)
`It was difficult to form even the most elementary idea of some crime, there was so much that was strange in their execution. Some murders derive from the most astonishing causes.'
Unforgettable scenes
There is the magical theatre scene, showing plainly that art is essentially the transmission of pure emotions into the spectator (the reader); the hellish bath scene; the boisterous Christmas party; the shocking death by consumption (`He must have had a mother too!'); the ice cold killing (`like a calf') of a wife by her husband; the sickening cure of the wounds inflicted by flogging (`the adroit plucking out of from the wounds of splinters from broken rods.'
This `documentary' novel is, by any standard, one of the best, profoundest, most shocking, most provocative and most shattering dissections of man.
Dostoevsky wrote one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all times. A must read.
He was brutally confronted with the complexity of man, of facts (crimes) and of murky motives.
One can find here in a nutshell the main themes and characters of his later masterpieces.
In prison he was forced to live herded with a
Fascinating gallery of controversial human personalities
The Idiot (Aley), the eternal servant, the eternal child, the eternal ill, the eternal vagabond, the eternal executioner, the vain, the leader, the hanger-on, the solitary, the dreamer, the desperate, the completely indifferent, the informer, the alcoholic, the beast, the jester, the clown, the cold killer, the absolutely corrupt, the depraved, the passionate flogger, the feigned mad, people with a mission, people with disinterested compassion, the dying.
Man
For Dostoevsky, man `is his worst enemy, a creature of habit to a monstrous degree, a creature who can get used to anything.'
`Every man, however low he may have fallen, requires, if only instinctively and unconsciously, that respect be given to his dignity as a human being. He possesses a mournful desire for an abrupt display of personality, appearing suddenly and developing into fury, the eclipse of reason, the convulsion of madness.'
`It is difficult to conceive to what extent human nature can be perverted. The executioner's nature is found in embryo in almost every man.'
Facts (crimes)
`It was difficult to form even the most elementary idea of some crime, there was so much that was strange in their execution. Some murders derive from the most astonishing causes.'
Unforgettable scenes
There is the magical theatre scene, showing plainly that art is essentially the transmission of pure emotions into the spectator (the reader); the hellish bath scene; the boisterous Christmas party; the shocking death by consumption (`He must have had a mother too!'); the ice cold killing (`like a calf') of a wife by her husband; the sickening cure of the wounds inflicted by flogging (`the adroit plucking out of from the wounds of splinters from broken rods.'
This `documentary' novel is, by any standard, one of the best, profoundest, most shocking, most provocative and most shattering dissections of man.
Dostoevsky wrote one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all times. A must read.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Highly readable, vivid account of prison life hardships (physical and spiritual) from a Russian thinker, put away for starting a printing press. His fellow men are intelligently, sensitively, deeply assessed.... numerous revelations such as how all the inmates are somehow denying their lot.....This book is a proper Shawshank but real....accounts of prison animals, diversions, an escape attempt, rich versus poor, educated 'gentlemen' (Dostoevsky included) as outsiders but equals to the poor...all the characters of life at their basic.... condemned but dependent.
1 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Not being a big fan of B&W movies, and also tending to steer clear of classic Russian books. I made the brave effort to read this and I am so glad I did. The character and their little stories all interweaving along the rows of plank beds, the levelling of all ben before the Major provide socio history of pre-revolution Russia, the racism of an empire with a stark almost dream like recognition of the past. I now believe all the praise laid upon the head of this man from all corners. Please take a deep breath and read this book. (Buying it and leaving in the shelf next to the copy of War and Peace you got for a pound does not count.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
