The house of the dead

Between 1850 and 1854 Dostoevsky, imprisoned in the fortress of Omsk, Siberia, served a sentence for political reasons. The four years he spent there, re-created in The House of the Dead, were the most agonizing of his life. The narrating character is a former uxoricide who, after his release from prison, is beset by memories and the need to testify. His memoir thus acquires the urgency of a live reportage, a narrative of formidable expressive power built on the succession of iconic pictures of the prison abyss. Everything is present in this novel: the daily battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, the cabbage soup swimming with cockroaches, his strange `family' of boastful, ugly, cruel convicts. Yet The House of the Dead is far more than a work of documentary realism: it is also a powerful novel of redemption, describing one man's spiritual and moral death and the miracle of his gradual reawakening.