Penguin Classics House Of The Dead [Paperback]

For those who have read Solzhenitsyn's novels and "The Gulag Archipelago", much in "The House of the Dead" will be familiar - perhaps depressingly so in that little seems to have changed between the times the two writers were imprisoned. This is not to distract from the quality of Dostoyevsky's novel. The reader is presented with a series of impressions, sketches and reflections rather than a straightforward narrative. The central character, Goryanchikov, is not depicted in great detail. Rather, he acts as the cipher through which the other prisoners and prison life are related to the reader.

Goryanchikov describes lives and histories of the other prisoners, their treatment by the guards, living conditions and notable events. The squalor and brutality of prison life come over very strongly, as does the ability of humans to adapt to such treatment. For some, of course, prison life was infinitely preferable to their normal existence, which says a great deal about conditions in Tsarist Russia. Class, religious and national distinctions were maintained in prison: Goryanchikov is a nobleman, which creates problems for him regarding his fellow inmates.

In all, an interesting novel which succeeds in relating the horrendous conditions of prison life, the brutality of men and the will to survive.

G Rodgers

Having read accounts of the Soviet era gulags before reading House of the Dead, my first impression was the relative "comfort" of life in the Siberian prison camps of the Russian old regime. This in itself says volumes, for Dostoyevsky takes pains to try and demonstrate the utter inhumanity of the prison system he knew, never realizing the depths of cruelty to which it would sink in the generations to come. To take but one example, prisoners in Dostoyevsky's experience were allowed to earn a pittance for their labor in the camps, which they could apply to small purchases, and rich prisoners could even hire their own cooks and servants and bring in their own food. Though prisoners were certainly used for labor, this was done mainly for the self-sustainment of the prison itself and the immediate community, and not, as in Soviet times, to exploit mines and forests.

Though this is an autobiography presented as a book of memoirs of another, I found it oddly impersonal. Impersonal in the sense that its narrator, Alexander Petrovich, presents his vision of prison life while little is revealed about his own sentiments or the changes the prisoner experience has on his own personality. However, the story is still rich in the detail of its main characters. It was also fascinating to read of how prison life, though it dehumanizes a human, in no way squashes our lesser instincts: our vanity for one thing. We also get a unique view on how prisoners of noble status (and Dostoevsky was a minor noble) were treated in the Russian prison system. This facet of the novel in fact is the only place where the feelings of the narrator really come into play.

The House of the Dead is not a novel. Though the characters are well developed there is no real plot. It is a varied portrait of prison life, and in fact sections of the book could be read entirely separately or out of sequence without much inconveniece. What this work is is a great portrayal of prison life in imperial Russia, and useful especially to juxtapose with 20th century accounts of imprisonment, notably in the Soviet Union but not necessarily so. You be the judge if we have advanced in our humanity or only in our capacity for cruelty.