I do not think Petroff can have ended well, he was marked for a violent end; and if he is not yet dead, that only means that the opportunity has not yet presented itself. Nosotros somos hombres destrozados, triturados, deshechos; no tenemos entrañas. Por eso gritamos de noche."

Aleksandr is a former convict whose posthumous narration of his experience in a Siberian forced labor camp reveals startling insight into the nature of incarceration. A nobleman who has fallen from grace for the murder of his wife, Aleksandr is a complex and well-educated man. His observations are true to life and faithfully describe the inmates as they were. Aleksandr is a deeply philosophical man, and he spends much of his time incarcerated musing on the rhythms and patterns of prison life, trying to decode the social dynamics which inform the relationships of prisoners to each other, to guards, and to their circumstances. A master of psychological portraiture. . . . A testament to the power of the human will, the way it can marshal patience and imagination and hope.”— The New Criterion The ten years Alexander spent in prison helped him reflect on the true meaning of life and the important values of life. His perception of life and liberty alters, and he leaves the life of the "living dead" a wise man eager to begin his new life. "Freedom, new life, resurrection from the dead...What a glorious moment!" The store was large and largely empty. Two men were gossiping in the middle of the room across an unbalanced wooden table, which, helped by either one’s dangling feet, made a rhythmic thud-thud. It stopped abruptly: the thud-thud, and the the gossiping too, and they looked up surprised to find a visitor. I caught their amazed disoriented gaze, but, to avoid any verbal distractions, I looked towards a shelf on my immediate right. I was at once stunned.

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In 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for participating in a socialist discussion group. The novel he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, not only brought him fame, but also founded the tradition of Russian prison writing. Notes from a Dead House(sometimes translated as The House of the Dead) depicts brutal punishments, feuds, betrayals, and the psychological effects of confinement, but it also reveals the moments of comedy and acts of kindness that Dostoevsky witnessed among his fellow prisoners. Aley is an admirable character. Unlike most other prisoners, Aley does not deserve his imprisonment, as he did not wish to break the law, although he was compelled to by devotion to his family. An attractive young man, Aley is warm and charismatic, and he and Aleksandr soon become fast friends. Akim Akimovich Petrov, an externally quiet and polite man who befriends Alexander Petrovich and often seeks his company, apparently for edification on matters of knowledge. Alexander Petrovich finds it hard to reconcile Petrov's sincere friendship and unfailing courtesy with the ever-present potential (attributed to him by all the other prisoners, including Alexander Petrovich) for the most extreme violence. In this sense, Petrov is thought to be the most dangerous and determined man in the prison. The devil wore out three pair of boot soles before he got us heaped together!” they said of themselves; and therefore gossip, intrigue, old wives’ slander, envy, squabbles, and spite were always in the foreground of this hellish life. No old wife could be so much an old wife as some of these murderers. I repeat, there were strong men among them, characters who all their lives were accustomed to crushing and domineering, hardened, fearless. These men were somehow involuntarily respected; they, for their part, though often very jealous of their reputation, generally tried not to be a burden to anyone, did not get into empty quarrels, behaved with extraordinary dignity, were reasonable and almost always obedient with the authorities—not on principle, not out of a sense of duty, but just so, as if by some sort of contract, a sense of mutual advantage. However, they were also treated with caution. I remember how one of these prisoners, a fearless and resolute man, known to the authorities for his brutal inclinations, was summoned once to be punished for some offense. It was a summer day, during off-hours. The officer who was most immediately and directly in charge of the prison came in person to the guardhouse, located just by our gates, to be present at the punishment. This major was a sort of fatal being for the prisoners; he reduced them to trembling before him. He was insanely strict, he “hurled himself at people,” as the convicts used to say. What they feared most in him was his penetrating, lynx-like gaze, from which nothing could be concealed. He somehow saw without looking. When he entered the prison, he already knew what was going on at the other end. The prisoners called him “Eight-eyes.” His system was wrong. He only made the already embittered men more bitter by his furious, malicious acts, and if it had not been for the commandant over him, a noble and reasonable man, who occasionally tempered his savage escapades, his administration would have caused much harm. I do not understand how he could have ended happily; he retired alive and well, though he was, incidentally, brought to trial. The man writing the diary is quiet, distant but sharp observer of prison life. Convicts are often described in a sentence, or paragraph, still containing, in the most condensed form, the essence of their being and the tragedy of their life. Out of his more typical writing, Dostoevsky does not go further into the psychological breakdown of one character, exposing the underlying philosophies and instincts that are the driving forces of the individual, as whole life stories often narrated only in a vignette, described only as factual, without imposing his own keen observation or meaning to it. There is a sense of exhaustion in the narrator in the squalor he finds himself in. He does not have the vigor to examine life - only to document it. In the end, he is in the House of dead, immersed in apathy, where Dostoevskian qualities fade, even in Dostoevsky himself, in which, I, paradoxically, found glimpses of hope and relief. There is dejection in face of the intricacy of life embodied in the prison system, where the narrator both gives up and resists elucidation. Sometimes life becomes so heavy it is impossible to interpret in a coherent manner and all we can do is step away and quietly observe it.

A very large focus of Fyodor’s narrative is his examination of the Russian character. It is unclear if any of the other prisoners described are based on actual convicts that Dostoyevsky knew during his incarceration. However, he provides a very interesting account of the attitudes and behaviors of several characters who have adapted to life of punishment and isolation. Prison Life in Siberia. It is a phrase synonymous with misery and suffering. Below zero temperatures. Hard labor. Isolation. Physical punishment. It is everything that reminds me of how fortunate I am to be reading Dostoyevsky’s semi-autobiographical work instead of actually living it. It paints an image of prison life that is a hundred times more primitive than many of the lazy country club prisons of today’s western world. Just how bad was it in 19th century Siberia? My curiosity found this novel irresistible. I just had to find out what this lifestyle was in a bygone time in a country that has had a very troubled and complicated past. I was ready to enter the House of the Dead. The book is a loosely-knit collection of facts, events and philosophical discussion organised by "theme" rather than as a continuous story. Dostoevsky himself spent four years in exile in such a camp following his conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle. One of literature’s definitive prison memoirs is given new immediacy in this sturdy translation by the team of Pevear and Volokhonsky (Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, 2007, etc.). The original narrator is responsible for recovering the papers of the once-incarcerated Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov. After encountering the former convict while he lived in a rural Siberian village teaching private lessons on foreign languages, the nameless narrator seeks to interview Aleksandr. The narrator is deeply curious with a relatively poor sense of personal and social boundaries, and he hounds Aleksandr, who refuses to socialize with him.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1862). Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Pevear, Richard; Volokhonsky, Larissa. Vintage Books (published 2016). ISBN 978-0-307-94987-5. La primera parte culmina con dos capítulos que otorgan cierto alivio a tanto sufrimiento y crudeza y que tratan dos temas comunes a cualquier ser humano, por un lado la Navidad y por el otro, la posibilidad de algunos presidiarios de formar parte de una obra de teatro, lo cual es una manera de liberar tensiones a través de un personaje en acto y es en cierto modo, una reconexión con la literatura. Dostoevsky did five years of hard labour in a Siberian prison for being in the wrong room at the wrong time. When he was released in 1854 he had to serve time in the Siberian army and he was still banned from publishing anything. This memoir of his time in the joint finally came out in 1861 and it was a big hit. It was the first book to reveal all the horrors of life inside. Dosto said to his brother In 1927–1928, Leoš Janáček wrote an operatic version of the novel, with the title From the House of the Dead. It was his last opera. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2023-07-31 12:30:30 Associated-names Pevear, Richard, 1943- translator; Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator Autocrop_version 0.0.15_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0008 Boxid IA41046410 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Though the novel has no readily identifiable plot in the conventional sense, events and descriptions are carefully organized around the narrator's gradual insight into the true nature of the prison-camp and the other prisoners. It is primarily in this sense that the novel is autobiographical: Dostoevsky wrote later, in A Writer's Diary and elsewhere, about the transformation he underwent during his imprisonment, as he slowly overcame his preconceptions and his repulsion, attaining a new understanding of the intense humanity and moral qualities of those around him. [4] Narration [ edit ] Aristov an exceptionally corrupt and perverted nobleman who acts as a spy and informer. Repelled by his depravity, Alexander Petrovich refuses to enter in to relations with him. He is a man utterly submitted to corporeality and the basest impulses, with a conscience guided only by cold calculation. Alexander Petrovich says of him that "if he wanted a drink of brandy, and could only have got it by killing some one, he would not have hesitated one moment if it was pretty certain the crime would not come out." Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruelest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.”

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From the acclaimed translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky comes a new translation of the first great prison memoir: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of his life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1915). The House of the Dead. Translated by Constance Garnett. William Heinemann. p.6. ISBN 9780434204069. The House of the Dead ( Russian: Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvovo doma) is a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1860–2 [1] in the journal Vremya [2] by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It has also been published in English under the titles Notes from the House of the Dead, Memoirs from the House of the Dead and Notes from a Dead House, which are more literal translations of the Russian title. Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

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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. He concludes that the existence of the prison, with its absurd practices and savage corporal punishments is a tragic fact, both for the prisoners and for Russia. One can measure Dostoevsky only to Dostoevsky. Even when he falls short, he is still brilliant beyond comprehension. The appearance of any new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is always an event in a literary season. . . . [A] powerful new translation." — Open Letters Monthly