The House of the Dead

Summary

The House of the Dead, also translated as Notes from the House of the Dead, is Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical account of life in a Siberian prison camp, based on his own four years of penal servitude at Omsk from 1850 to 1854 after his arrest with the Petrashevsky circle. To avoid the censor, he framed it as the memoir of a fictional narrator, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a gentleman sentenced to ten years for murdering his wife, whose papers are found after his death. The book has little plot; it is a series of sketches. Goryanchikov describes his arrival, the shock of losing all privacy, the irons on his legs, the hatred of the common convicts for gentlemen prisoners, and the slow process of becoming accustomed to everything, which he calls perhaps the best definition of man. He portrays fellow prisoners with deep attention: the gentle young Tatar Aley, whom he teaches to read from the New Testament; the Old Believer who burned a church in defense of his faith; Orlov, a murderer of iron will who fears nothing; the terrifying Gazin; the comic Jewish jeweler Isay Fomitch; and many others. He describes forced labor breaking up old barges, the bathhouse on Christmas Eve like a scene from hell, the prisoners' theatricals at Christmas, which reveal their talent and joy, the hospital where men recover from floggings, and the animals kept in the camp. He reflects on the cruelty of corporal punishment and on the executioners who come to enjoy their power, and on the wasted strength of men who might have been the most gifted of the Russian people. In Part II the narrator describes a failed escape, a protest about food, and finally his release, when his fetters are struck off: freedom, a new life, resurrection from the dead. The book was a sensation in Russia; Tolstoy considered it the best work in Russian literature. Dostoevsky's prison years, in which he read only the New Testament given to him by the wives of Decembrists, shaped his faith that even the worst criminal retains the image of God and the possibility of redemption, a conviction central to Crime and Punishment and his later novels. The library uses the 1911 Everyman's Library translation.

Top Lessons

• The image of God in criminals

  Dostoevsky sees hidden goodness and gifts even in hardened men.

• Punishment and cruelty

  The narrator condemns flogging and the corrupting power of executioners.

• Endurance

  Man can get used to anything, the narrator says.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The prison hospital chapters describe treatment after floggings, disease and the attitudes of doctors toward convicts.

• Part II, Ch. 1-3

  The prison hospital and the doctors' care for flogged men.