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A nobleman named Goryanchikov serves ten years in a Siberian prison camp for killing his wife, and his notes describe the place from the inside: the shackles, the bathhouse on a feast day, the prisoners' theatre, the floggings, the eagle the convicts keep and then set free. Instead of a plot there is a crowd of characters, smugglers, murderers, Old Believers, all observed without sermon and often with surprising warmth.
Context and significance
Behind the fictional narrator stands Dostoevsky's own four years of hard labour in Omsk after his mock execution in 1849. Tolstoy rated this book among the best in Russian literature, and its question of what remains human in people the law has written off runs straight into Crime and Punishment.
About the author
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was sentenced to death in 1849 for his part in a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to hard labour in Siberia, which he described in The House of the Dead.