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RECITS DE LA MAISON DES MORTS
Accused of political subversion as a young man, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor at a Siberian prison camp — a horrifying experience from which he developed this astounding semi-autobiographical memoir of a man condemned to ten years of servitude for murdering his wife.
As with a number of the author's other works, this profoundly influential novel brilliantly explores his characters' thoughts while probing the depths of the human soul. Describing in relentless detail the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, Dostoyevsky's character never loses faith in human qualities and the goodness of man.
A haunting and remarkable work filled with wonder and resignation, The House of the Dead ranks among the Russian novelist's greatest masterpieces. Of this powerful autobiographical novel, Tolstoy wrote, "I know no better book in all modern literature."
As with a number of the author's other works, this profoundly influential novel brilliantly explores his characters' thoughts while probing the depths of the human soul. Describing in relentless detail the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, Dostoyevsky's character never loses faith in human qualities and the goodness of man.
A haunting and remarkable work filled with wonder and resignation, The House of the Dead ranks among the Russian novelist's greatest masterpieces. Of this powerful autobiographical novel, Tolstoy wrote, "I know no better book in all modern literature."
448 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1862
About the author
Fyodor Dostoevsky
3,475 books75.9k followers
Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский
(Russian)
Works, such as the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), of Russian writer Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevski combine religious mysticism with profound psychological insight.
Very influential writings of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin included Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929),
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky composed short stories, essays, and journals. His literature explores humans in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century and engages with a variety of philosophies and themes. People most acclaimed his Demons(1872) .
Many literary critics rate him among the greatest authors of world literature and consider multiple books written by him to be highly influential masterpieces. They consider his Notes from Underground of the first existentialist literature. He is also well regarded as a philosopher and theologian.
(Russian: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский) (see also Fiodor Dostoïevski)
Works, such as the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), of Russian writer Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevski combine religious mysticism with profound psychological insight.
Very influential writings of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin included Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929),
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky composed short stories, essays, and journals. His literature explores humans in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century and engages with a variety of philosophies and themes. People most acclaimed his Demons(1872) .
Many literary critics rate him among the greatest authors of world literature and consider multiple books written by him to be highly influential masterpieces. They consider his Notes from Underground of the first existentialist literature. He is also well regarded as a philosopher and theologian.
(Russian: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский) (see also Fiodor Dostoïevski)
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May 20, 2024
Cancel my subscription to the resurrection… Send my credentials to the house of detention…
The House of the Dead is the chronicle of a prison camp, coming straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. The prison camp is shown as a world within the world – a hermetic community of the strictest hierarchy, living by its own severe cruel criminal laws.
And on the language side The House of the Dead is one of the lushest books by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
I am sure that this gloomy experience of incarceration eventually allowed Fyodor Dostoyevsky to penetrate the human nature right to the bottom and to peruse all the darkest nooks and crannies of human consciousness.
Even in incarceration a strong-minded man can keep one’s soul intact.
Our prison was at the far end of the citadel behind the ramparts. Peering through the crevices in the palisade in the hope of glimpsing something, one sees nothing but a little corner of the sky, and a high earthwork covered with the long grass of the steppe. Night and day sentries walk to and fro upon it. Then one suddenly realizes that whole years will pass during which one will see, through those same crevices in the palisade, the same sentinels pacing the same earthwork, and the same little corner of the sky, not just above the prison, but far and far away.
The House of the Dead is the chronicle of a prison camp, coming straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. The prison camp is shown as a world within the world – a hermetic community of the strictest hierarchy, living by its own severe cruel criminal laws.
And on the language side The House of the Dead is one of the lushest books by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The criminals most cruelly whipped, and who were celebrated as first-rate villains, enjoyed more respect and attention than a simple deserter, a mere recruit, like the one who had just been brought in. But in neither case was any particular sympathy manifested, nor were any annoying remarks made. The unhappy man was attended to in silence, above all if he was incapable of attending to himself. The assistant-surgeon knew that they were entrusting their patients to skilful and experienced hands. The usual treatment consisted in frequent application to the poor fellow’s back of a shirt or piece of linen steeped in cold water. It was also necessary to extract from his wounds the splinters of the rods which had been broken on his back. This last operation was particularly painful to the victims, and the extraordinary stoicism with which they supported their sufferings astonished me greatly.
I am sure that this gloomy experience of incarceration eventually allowed Fyodor Dostoyevsky to penetrate the human nature right to the bottom and to peruse all the darkest nooks and crannies of human consciousness.
Even in incarceration a strong-minded man can keep one’s soul intact.
December 14, 2022
“What are we here for? We are not alive though we are living and we are not in our graves though we are dead.”
One can measure Dostoevsky only to Dostoevsky. Even when he falls short, he is still brilliant beyond comprehension.
The House of the Dead is fragmented diary of a man convicted to the Siberian prison camp in Czarists Russia after murdering his wife. Often regarded as semi-autobiografical and closely connected to Dostoevsky's prison time that deeply changed him and irreversibly influenced his writing.
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.
“Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.”
One can feel that drowsiness the whole time reading the book, which for me, makes it the most difficult Dostoevsky, not due to the intellectual exhaustion, but the emotional.
Nevertheless the basic line of detachment, there is an underlying sense of vastness and complexities of each destiny that only brushes against the main character as he goes on in repetitive and dull camp life. The book has the atmosphere of the life of a prisoner, somewhere between dreariness and cruelty.
I will never stop being attracted to all camp and prison books. The House of the Dead is a prototype for books that endlessly fascinate me like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For me, there is an endless fascination in observing the consistency of the enduring human spirit in the face of extreme suffering, brutality and degradation, which gives motivation for tolerating one's own hardship.
“Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”
What Dostoevsky does best is the erasure of distance between the reader and the disenfranchised, the ones that seem to be far off behind the wire and prison walls, besides the fact that in reality, we can be equally imprisoned as them, even when we are confined only by our own ideas.
“Very often among a certain highly intelligent type of people, quite paradoxical ideas will establish themselves. But they have suffered so much in their lives for these ideas, and have paid so high a price for them that it becomes very painful, indeed almost impossible, for them to part with them.”
Much of the writing is about the psychological tension of imprisonment by others, in a state where the personal agency is stripped of you, where in a sense, you get used to being shiftless.
“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.”
Aggressive and murderous instincts, power and crime in one situation, guilt, weakness, punishment or injustice and suffering by the hands of sadists in another, is something that entails universal drama of human life, no matter what side of the wall we find ourselves on.
Dostoevsky gets more in his usual depth in describing the rise of tyranny in one’s psyche, the intoxication it offers, the profound drug that is hard to resist, and the indefinite power to hurt another human being and have complete power over them, most accurately manifested in the prison system of corporal punishment, which was by far a most striking chapter for me in depicting how physical violence changes the core of the psychological structure.
“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit which may be developed until at last it becomes a disease. I declare that the noblest nature can become so hardened and bestial that nothing distinguishes it from that of a wild animal. Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible.”
But in the spirit of his legacy, Dostoevsky does not give up hope in the remains of good in every person, no matter the degree of corruption or abasement, which makes his writing profoundly sanguine even in the depths of dreariness.
Dostoevsky is both the titan of thought and one of us, small and disfranchised, left in the grace and mercy of his own tragic destiny and he writes not to erase anguish, but to give it the most profound depth, even only in detached observing, and to give us strength to endure it.
“Here is the world to which I am condemned, in which, despite myself, I must somehow live.”
One can measure Dostoevsky only to Dostoevsky. Even when he falls short, he is still brilliant beyond comprehension.
The House of the Dead is fragmented diary of a man convicted to the Siberian prison camp in Czarists Russia after murdering his wife. Often regarded as semi-autobiografical and closely connected to Dostoevsky's prison time that deeply changed him and irreversibly influenced his writing.
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.
“Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.”
One can feel that drowsiness the whole time reading the book, which for me, makes it the most difficult Dostoevsky, not due to the intellectual exhaustion, but the emotional.
Nevertheless the basic line of detachment, there is an underlying sense of vastness and complexities of each destiny that only brushes against the main character as he goes on in repetitive and dull camp life. The book has the atmosphere of the life of a prisoner, somewhere between dreariness and cruelty.
I will never stop being attracted to all camp and prison books. The House of the Dead is a prototype for books that endlessly fascinate me like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For me, there is an endless fascination in observing the consistency of the enduring human spirit in the face of extreme suffering, brutality and degradation, which gives motivation for tolerating one's own hardship.
“Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”
What Dostoevsky does best is the erasure of distance between the reader and the disenfranchised, the ones that seem to be far off behind the wire and prison walls, besides the fact that in reality, we can be equally imprisoned as them, even when we are confined only by our own ideas.
“Very often among a certain highly intelligent type of people, quite paradoxical ideas will establish themselves. But they have suffered so much in their lives for these ideas, and have paid so high a price for them that it becomes very painful, indeed almost impossible, for them to part with them.”
Much of the writing is about the psychological tension of imprisonment by others, in a state where the personal agency is stripped of you, where in a sense, you get used to being shiftless.
“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.”
Aggressive and murderous instincts, power and crime in one situation, guilt, weakness, punishment or injustice and suffering by the hands of sadists in another, is something that entails universal drama of human life, no matter what side of the wall we find ourselves on.
Dostoevsky gets more in his usual depth in describing the rise of tyranny in one’s psyche, the intoxication it offers, the profound drug that is hard to resist, and the indefinite power to hurt another human being and have complete power over them, most accurately manifested in the prison system of corporal punishment, which was by far a most striking chapter for me in depicting how physical violence changes the core of the psychological structure.
“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit which may be developed until at last it becomes a disease. I declare that the noblest nature can become so hardened and bestial that nothing distinguishes it from that of a wild animal. Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible.”
But in the spirit of his legacy, Dostoevsky does not give up hope in the remains of good in every person, no matter the degree of corruption or abasement, which makes his writing profoundly sanguine even in the depths of dreariness.
Dostoevsky is both the titan of thought and one of us, small and disfranchised, left in the grace and mercy of his own tragic destiny and he writes not to erase anguish, but to give it the most profound depth, even only in detached observing, and to give us strength to endure it.
“Here is the world to which I am condemned, in which, despite myself, I must somehow live.”
February 12, 2016
كنت أشعر في هذه الأيام بضيق شديد فتناولت كتاب "ذكريات من منزل الأموات" فأعدت قراءته. كنت قد نسيت كثيرًا منه، فلما أعدت قراءته أيقنت أن ليس في الأدب الجديد كله كتاب واحد يفوقه، حتى ولا كُتب بوشكين
ليست النبرة هي الشيء الرائع فيه، بل وجهة النظر التي يشتمل عليها؛ إنه صادق طبيعي مسيحي، إنه كتاب يعلّم الدين
.فإذا رأيت دوستويفسكي فقل له أني أحبه
حسنًا أنا أغبط تولستوي وأحسده، على الأقل وجد من سيخبر دوستويفسكي بحبه.
في هذه الرواية، دوستويفسكي هُنا آخر
ليس كإنسان بالطبع، فما زال هو الروح التي لم أجد في إنسانيتها بعد
وما زال شعوره بألم ومعاناة كل من حوله حتى الحيوانات، لم أرِ مثيله قط!
لكن دوستويفسكي هُنا مختلف كأديب، ربما لاختلاف طابع الرواية؛ فهي هُنا لا تعدو كونها مذكرات؛ ليست رواية ببداية وعقدة ونهاية كالروايات التي قرأتها له من قبل
وليس ها هُنا شخصيات هذيانية وأحداث غريبة الأطوار كما في السابق
ربما لأن المذكرات من صميم واقعه المرير، لم يُكن هناك ثمة مساحة كي يلهو الخيال بداخلها!
فقط الألم من كان يتحرك بحرية وكِبر ها هنا
لا سيما وصفه لحظات جلد البعض بالسياط، والمرض والموت.. إلخ
صدقًا لا أعلم لم قال دوستويفسكي أن مذكراته من منزل الأموات؟
أيّ أموات؟ قرأتها وأنهيتها دون أعلم إجابة السؤال؟
أراهم يفيضون حماسة، جنون، شغف حتى وإن كان هذا الشغف للحرية المسلوبة
يعملون، أعمال (أشغال) شاقة هذا من أجل السجن
ثم يواصلون العمل ليلاً، وهذا من أجل جمع مال خاص بهم
ثم ينفقونه، ثم يعملون، ثم يواصلون العمل...
يخترعون ويبتكرون أشياء للترفيه وتمضية الوقت (تمثيل مسرحية)، ولا بأس ببعض المشاجرات (جدّية وغير جدّية) لتمضية الوقت
هؤلاء يعيشون من أجل شيء ما (الحرية) وفي انتظاره يعملون، ولا يتوقفون عن العمل..
والله إننا نحن الأموات، نحن الذين نعيش في اللاشيء، نفعل اللاشيء، في انتظار اللاشيء، الذي لن يأتي بالطبع!
هذا بالتأكيد لا يعنيّ أن حياتهم في أفضل حال، السجن في كل الأحوال يظل سجنًا!
شعور لا يعلمه إلا الله، ومن مرّ به
لم تُسلب حُريتيّ من قبل، بأيّ شكل كان
لكن مجرد تخيل مصير كهذا يُفزعني، فماذا عن من مرّ به؟
اسأل الله أن يعفينا من مصير كهذا
تُرى من سيُخبر دوستويفسكي أنني أحبه؟
تمّت
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August 21, 2024
‘Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.’
–Angela Y. Davis
It has been said you can judge the character of a society by how they judge their prisoners and poor. This quote is often misattributed to the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and though he may not have said those words exactly, the sentiment rings loud and clear in Notes from a Dead House. Published between 1860-1862, the novel—often translated as The Dead House though for the purposes of this review I’ll be using the translation from translator duo Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky—is a chilling look at the harshness of the Siberian penal colonies where the brutalities of forced labor and punishment are so awash in a monotony of the mundane stretching on for years until even brutality registers as mundane. I mean, prison is pretty shit at its most basic, but this is a whole higher tier of not awesome that literature has ensured will be remembered amongst the many punitive atrocities committed by humans against each other. A roman à clef inspired by Dostoevsky’s own four year sentence at a prison in Omsk, this unabashed and incisive account of prison was thought of as one of his greatest novels during his life and earned praise from fellow Russian author Leo Tolstoy who remarked that he ‘didn’t know a better book in all our literature.’ Which is saying a lot considering ole Leo rarely had kind words for his contemporaries. The novel is by turns gripping and horrifying, yet can be repetitive and is occasionally a slog through burdensome passages—clearly by design to affect the quotidian tedium of prison life—all the while the lack of freedom seeps into the reader to shake you to your core. These experiences of penal exile shaped Dostoevsky’s worldview which burns brightly in the stories within Dead House and make this an important and insightful novel that cuts to the heart of the human condition under tormentous states, championing the people most put out upon by society and delivering a damning indictment on the cruelties of prison.
‘Here is the world to which I am condemned, in which, despite myself, I must somehow live.’
First, I’d like to thank Luh for a great buddy read of this book which managed to make a very bleak novel quite fun. Thank you for all the discussions, many of the ideas we talked about found its way into this review in some form so I’d like to co-credit her. Oh, and a little me factoid: not only has Dostoevsky long been a favorite but was also my first tattoo:
Upon his release from the Siberian prison camps, Dostoevksy wrote to his brother saying ‘I have brought back from the camps so many folk figures, characters!...So many stories of vagabonds and brigands, stories of dark and bitter life. I could fill volumes.’ Which I guess being all “wow I got some wild stories to tell now!” is about as optimistic a take on being in prison one can have? These characters would find their way into Notes From the Dead House and inspire characters long through his career with his time spent in the labor camp, and the mock execution that preceded it, inspiring thematic ideas throughout his works. According to his biographer Joseph Frank, it was in the penal colony that Doestovksy began to see the working-class, poor and criminals less as ‘barbarians awaiting the light’ as he had once written, but as representations of God and beauty in their ‘capacity to love and forgive’ This becomes the conclusion reached by narrator Alexander Petrovitch Goryanchikov in Dead House and we see how he, a nobleman cast into prison for the murder of his wife (which Dostoevsky doesn’t find altogether too damning I guess as he refers to him as ‘a man of irreproachably moral life’ mere sentences after telling his crime) goes from attempting to categorize his fellow inmates to seeing such categorizations as beside the point in their mass suffering and society of confinement. ‘Reality resists classification,’ he writes. Bonus points to anyone who decides this could be a fun line to pull out at your next performance review!
The novel is framed as being highlights from the notebooks of a fellow inmate found after his death, a layer of narrative remove from Dostoevksy’s experiences that allows artistic freedom. As Dostoevksy biographer Alex Christofi writes:
While there is fiction at work. The book retains much of the actual dialogue of prison life he recorded in what is dubbed his Siberian Notebook: a journal he kept hidden for the four years intentionally leaving no indication of its authorship in case it was discovered. Having gained some notoriety at a young age with his novel Poor Folk and mixed reception of his short stories, the guards in the prison were wary of him writing about what he saw and talking big litera-shit about them so they and frequently beat and questioned him where he was keeping his writing. Dostoevsky would only reply ‘In my head,’ which is pretty hard.
Sketch of the mock execution face by Dostoevsky
If I may back up a moment because my ADHD took the wheel of this review structure, the situation around his imprisonment is rather key to the understanding of most of his works. As a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, Dostoevksy was one of several members denounced to the government and sentenced for execution. His crime was the reading and distribution of essays critical of Russian politics and religion, though he claimed he was reading them only for literary purposes. On the date of his execution, he was tied to a stake with other men, had their death sentences read but, right before being fired upon, an officer ran forward with a letter of reprieve from the Tzar sentencing them instead to forced labor in Siberia. The mock execution was part of the punishment like some really fucking twisted hidden camera prank show, something Dostoevsky would visit in The Idiot declaring the knowledge of impending execution to be the cruelest of torments. As Prince Myshkin says in The Idiot:
It had its effect and several of the men would have lasting mental health issues due to the trauma, though Dostoevsky wrote to his brother that ‘I am being reborn in another form,’ though the discussions from Myshkin would later reveal how much Dostoevsky still struggled to come to terms with the philosophical and spiritual resonance of that event. You know, as one probably would if someone tried to publicly execute you as a political stunt.
‘During the first weeks, and naturally the early part of my imprisonment, made a deep impression on my imagination. The following years on the other hand are all mixed up together, and leave but a confused recollection. Certain epochs of this life are even effaced from my memory. I have kept one general impression of it though, always the same; painful, monotonous, stifling. What I saw in experience during the first few days of imprisonment seems to me as if it had all taken place yesterday. Such was the case.’
The novel shows in great detail the horrific monotony and brutality witnessed in the camps. ‘Of course, prisons and the system of forced labor do not correct the criminal.’ Alexander Petrovitch writes, ‘they only punish him and ensure society against the evildoer’s further attempts on its peace and quiet.’ This idea is central to ideas of prison abolition as expressed by activists such as Mariame Kaba or Angela Y. Davis who wrote:
The who and why is key to Dead House, as the narrative observes how these are people being forced into exile and hidden from society, put in conditions so harsh they may likely not be able to ever return (and many immediately find themselves resentenced upon release).
It does not reform a person, he argues, only solidifies their hatred for society. It disappears people but not the problems that lead to them either.
‘What are we here for? We are not alive though we are living and we are not in our graves though we are dead.’
The passage of time in Siberia is both boring and brutal until even the brutality hardly registers. Haha It is show how the worst torment of prison, however, is not the violence or the hard labor, but the utter lack of freedom and meaning.
He also spends much time discussing ‘one more torment in prison life that waqs almost worst than all the others,’ which was the ‘ forced communal cohabitation.’ Criminals of all walks of life were forced into tight confinement and were forced to create a society of themselves. Our narrator, of noble lineage like Dostoevsky, is initially outcast for his parentage but comes to be trusted as we see how time erodes any differences between inmates. But it is a harsh world with harsh neighbors where stealing is common, though I enjoyed the aspect of his one friend stealing constantly ‘without any embarrassment, almost unconsciously, as if out of duty, and it was impossible to be angry with him.’ So much of everything just becomes the mundane, and even punishment or informing to the guards barely registers with anyone. It’s just how it is.
I did greatly enjoy the aspects on how their society worked such as the smuggling or trades that were kept up despite being in prison. It was viewed almost as a resistance and a way to bring life into the camps and when people were caught, punished, and their goods taken from them, they just go right back to it. ‘Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him,’ he writes and resilience is championed even in all the drudgery and bleakness. This is not to say it was comfortable and the experience had horrific lasting effects of the mental and physical health of all who endured it. They can survive but even the strongest ‘submits and suffers the cruelest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.’ There is a big lead up to a performance put on for the benefit of the prisoners and our narrator observes this rare moment of warmth in humanity that reverberates through the prison during this time. Though this is immediately followed by some of the harshest scenes which drives home the point that these were fellow humans, people down on their luck but just like anyone else, and they were dehumanized and suffering to nearly unspeakable degrees.
These are the people the literary community should always be putting our support behind. What is the good of art if it isn’t being used to uplift those in need? Dostoevsky wasn’t the only one with this stance, and later Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would write about the traumas of the gulags, Albert Camus’s Reflections on the Guillotine would condemn capital punishment and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis would help spearhead prison abolitionist movements that center addressing social ills over disappearing people. Though I always think of Victor Hugo’s statement on why Les Misérables will always be necessary when the poor are oppressed:
A powerful statement. And the same can be said of Dead House.
You might have noticed this is a rather bleak and burdensome read, but there is still a light that shines in its championing of the human spirit and plea to treat everyone with dignity and respect. That Dostoevsky was writing stories of the poor and criminals was rather progressive at the time and we can really see how his experience in Siberia lead to many of his themes and strengthened his faith. Notes From the Dead House is a powerful work that feels heavy to ready, though it is because Dostoevsky excels at instilling strong emotions in the reader and making them share the struggles of his characters. A chilling read that wasn’t my favorite by him but does have lasting value—it was later adapted as an opera by Leoš Janáček so someone with an actual attention span please check that out and let me know how it is—for its look at social issues, the human condition and as a key source of understanding for his entire oeuvre.
4/5
‘Every man, whoever he may be and however humiliated, still requires, even if instinctively, even if unconsciously, respect for his human dignity. The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner, an outcast and he knows his place before his superior; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being. And since he is in fact a human being, it follows that he must be treated like a human being.’
–Angela Y. Davis
It has been said you can judge the character of a society by how they judge their prisoners and poor. This quote is often misattributed to the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and though he may not have said those words exactly, the sentiment rings loud and clear in Notes from a Dead House. Published between 1860-1862, the novel—often translated as The Dead House though for the purposes of this review I’ll be using the translation from translator duo Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky—is a chilling look at the harshness of the Siberian penal colonies where the brutalities of forced labor and punishment are so awash in a monotony of the mundane stretching on for years until even brutality registers as mundane. I mean, prison is pretty shit at its most basic, but this is a whole higher tier of not awesome that literature has ensured will be remembered amongst the many punitive atrocities committed by humans against each other. A roman à clef inspired by Dostoevsky’s own four year sentence at a prison in Omsk, this unabashed and incisive account of prison was thought of as one of his greatest novels during his life and earned praise from fellow Russian author Leo Tolstoy who remarked that he ‘didn’t know a better book in all our literature.’ Which is saying a lot considering ole Leo rarely had kind words for his contemporaries. The novel is by turns gripping and horrifying, yet can be repetitive and is occasionally a slog through burdensome passages—clearly by design to affect the quotidian tedium of prison life—all the while the lack of freedom seeps into the reader to shake you to your core. These experiences of penal exile shaped Dostoevsky’s worldview which burns brightly in the stories within Dead House and make this an important and insightful novel that cuts to the heart of the human condition under tormentous states, championing the people most put out upon by society and delivering a damning indictment on the cruelties of prison.
‘Here is the world to which I am condemned, in which, despite myself, I must somehow live.’
First, I’d like to thank Luh for a great buddy read of this book which managed to make a very bleak novel quite fun. Thank you for all the discussions, many of the ideas we talked about found its way into this review in some form so I’d like to co-credit her. Oh, and a little me factoid: not only has Dostoevsky long been a favorite but was also my first tattoo:
Upon his release from the Siberian prison camps, Dostoevksy wrote to his brother saying ‘I have brought back from the camps so many folk figures, characters!...So many stories of vagabonds and brigands, stories of dark and bitter life. I could fill volumes.’ Which I guess being all “wow I got some wild stories to tell now!” is about as optimistic a take on being in prison one can have? These characters would find their way into Notes From the Dead House and inspire characters long through his career with his time spent in the labor camp, and the mock execution that preceded it, inspiring thematic ideas throughout his works. According to his biographer Joseph Frank, it was in the penal colony that Doestovksy began to see the working-class, poor and criminals less as ‘barbarians awaiting the light’ as he had once written, but as representations of God and beauty in their ‘capacity to love and forgive’ This becomes the conclusion reached by narrator Alexander Petrovitch Goryanchikov in Dead House and we see how he, a nobleman cast into prison for the murder of his wife (which Dostoevsky doesn’t find altogether too damning I guess as he refers to him as ‘a man of irreproachably moral life’ mere sentences after telling his crime) goes from attempting to categorize his fellow inmates to seeing such categorizations as beside the point in their mass suffering and society of confinement. ‘Reality resists classification,’ he writes. Bonus points to anyone who decides this could be a fun line to pull out at your next performance review!
The novel is framed as being highlights from the notebooks of a fellow inmate found after his death, a layer of narrative remove from Dostoevksy’s experiences that allows artistic freedom. As Dostoevksy biographer Alex Christofi writes:
‘Dead House is journalism, really, but it couldn’t be called that at the time so it’s framed as a novel. It’s part of a genre called Zapiski, which means ‘notes’ or ‘scribbles’. It’s nominally about a third person, but it’s obviously heavily influenced by his experience in prison. I don’t think you could have later writers like Solzhenitsyn without this book.’
While there is fiction at work. The book retains much of the actual dialogue of prison life he recorded in what is dubbed his Siberian Notebook: a journal he kept hidden for the four years intentionally leaving no indication of its authorship in case it was discovered. Having gained some notoriety at a young age with his novel Poor Folk and mixed reception of his short stories, the guards in the prison were wary of him writing about what he saw and talking big litera-shit about them so they and frequently beat and questioned him where he was keeping his writing. Dostoevsky would only reply ‘In my head,’ which is pretty hard.
Sketch of the mock execution face by Dostoevsky
If I may back up a moment because my ADHD took the wheel of this review structure, the situation around his imprisonment is rather key to the understanding of most of his works. As a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, Dostoevksy was one of several members denounced to the government and sentenced for execution. His crime was the reading and distribution of essays critical of Russian politics and religion, though he claimed he was reading them only for literary purposes. On the date of his execution, he was tied to a stake with other men, had their death sentences read but, right before being fired upon, an officer ran forward with a letter of reprieve from the Tzar sentencing them instead to forced labor in Siberia. The mock execution was part of the punishment like some really fucking twisted hidden camera prank show, something Dostoevsky would visit in The Idiot declaring the knowledge of impending execution to be the cruelest of torments. As Prince Myshkin says in The Idiot:
‘...the strongest pain may not be in the wounds, but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second – your soul will fly out of your body and you’ll no longer be a man, and its’ for certain – the main thing is that it’s for certain.’
It had its effect and several of the men would have lasting mental health issues due to the trauma, though Dostoevsky wrote to his brother that ‘I am being reborn in another form,’ though the discussions from Myshkin would later reveal how much Dostoevsky still struggled to come to terms with the philosophical and spiritual resonance of that event. You know, as one probably would if someone tried to publicly execute you as a political stunt.
‘During the first weeks, and naturally the early part of my imprisonment, made a deep impression on my imagination. The following years on the other hand are all mixed up together, and leave but a confused recollection. Certain epochs of this life are even effaced from my memory. I have kept one general impression of it though, always the same; painful, monotonous, stifling. What I saw in experience during the first few days of imprisonment seems to me as if it had all taken place yesterday. Such was the case.’
The novel shows in great detail the horrific monotony and brutality witnessed in the camps. ‘Of course, prisons and the system of forced labor do not correct the criminal.’ Alexander Petrovitch writes, ‘they only punish him and ensure society against the evildoer’s further attempts on its peace and quiet.’ This idea is central to ideas of prison abolition as expressed by activists such as Mariame Kaba or Angela Y. Davis who wrote:
‘Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings…Prison abolition requires that we challenge our thinking about what constitutes punishment, for whom and why.’
The who and why is key to Dead House, as the narrative observes how these are people being forced into exile and hidden from society, put in conditions so harsh they may likely not be able to ever return (and many immediately find themselves resentenced upon release).
‘In the criminal himself, prison and the most intense forced labor develop only hatred, a thirst for forbidden pleasures, and a terrible light-mindedness. But I am firmly convinced that the famous system of solitary confinement also achieves only a false, deceptive, external purpose. It sucks the living juice from a man, enervates his soul, weakens it, frightens it, and then presents this morally dried-up, half crazed mummy as an example of correction and repentance. Of course, a criminal who has risen against society hates it, and almost always considers himself right and society wrong.’
It does not reform a person, he argues, only solidifies their hatred for society. It disappears people but not the problems that lead to them either.
‘What are we here for? We are not alive though we are living and we are not in our graves though we are dead.’
The passage of time in Siberia is both boring and brutal until even the brutality hardly registers. Haha It is show how the worst torment of prison, however, is not the violence or the hard labor, but the utter lack of freedom and meaning.
‘‘if they wanted to crush, to annihilate a man totally, to punish him with the most terrible punishment, so that the most dreadful murderer would shudder at this punishment and be frightened of it beforehand, they would only need to give the labor a character of complete, total uselessness and meaninglessness.’
He also spends much time discussing ‘one more torment in prison life that waqs almost worst than all the others,’ which was the ‘ forced communal cohabitation.’ Criminals of all walks of life were forced into tight confinement and were forced to create a society of themselves. Our narrator, of noble lineage like Dostoevsky, is initially outcast for his parentage but comes to be trusted as we see how time erodes any differences between inmates. But it is a harsh world with harsh neighbors where stealing is common, though I enjoyed the aspect of his one friend stealing constantly ‘without any embarrassment, almost unconsciously, as if out of duty, and it was impossible to be angry with him.’ So much of everything just becomes the mundane, and even punishment or informing to the guards barely registers with anyone. It’s just how it is.
I did greatly enjoy the aspects on how their society worked such as the smuggling or trades that were kept up despite being in prison. It was viewed almost as a resistance and a way to bring life into the camps and when people were caught, punished, and their goods taken from them, they just go right back to it. ‘Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him,’ he writes and resilience is championed even in all the drudgery and bleakness. This is not to say it was comfortable and the experience had horrific lasting effects of the mental and physical health of all who endured it. They can survive but even the strongest ‘submits and suffers the cruelest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.’ There is a big lead up to a performance put on for the benefit of the prisoners and our narrator observes this rare moment of warmth in humanity that reverberates through the prison during this time. Though this is immediately followed by some of the harshest scenes which drives home the point that these were fellow humans, people down on their luck but just like anyone else, and they were dehumanized and suffering to nearly unspeakable degrees.
These are the people the literary community should always be putting our support behind. What is the good of art if it isn’t being used to uplift those in need? Dostoevsky wasn’t the only one with this stance, and later Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would write about the traumas of the gulags, Albert Camus’s Reflections on the Guillotine would condemn capital punishment and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis would help spearhead prison abolitionist movements that center addressing social ills over disappearing people. Though I always think of Victor Hugo’s statement on why Les Misérables will always be necessary when the poor are oppressed:
‘So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.’
A powerful statement. And the same can be said of Dead House.
You might have noticed this is a rather bleak and burdensome read, but there is still a light that shines in its championing of the human spirit and plea to treat everyone with dignity and respect. That Dostoevsky was writing stories of the poor and criminals was rather progressive at the time and we can really see how his experience in Siberia lead to many of his themes and strengthened his faith. Notes From the Dead House is a powerful work that feels heavy to ready, though it is because Dostoevsky excels at instilling strong emotions in the reader and making them share the struggles of his characters. A chilling read that wasn’t my favorite by him but does have lasting value—it was later adapted as an opera by Leoš Janáček so someone with an actual attention span please check that out and let me know how it is—for its look at social issues, the human condition and as a key source of understanding for his entire oeuvre.
4/5
‘Every man, whoever he may be and however humiliated, still requires, even if instinctively, even if unconsciously, respect for his human dignity. The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner, an outcast and he knows his place before his superior; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being. And since he is in fact a human being, it follows that he must be treated like a human being.’
July 20, 2025
Much brighter and lighter than its theme (The Diary of a Deportee in Siberia) could suggest, this autobiographical novel struck me with its gallery of extraordinary characters and its succession of anecdotes, sometimes deeply sad and uplifting, sometimes downright funny.
I expected the ferocious description of a nightmare with sadistic guards, prisoners who kill each other, famine, and disease. However, in the end, it is an almost bland story about a repetitive daily life, which illustrates one of the main themes (and the author's great cause for concern): that humans can adapt to almost anything.
I expected the ferocious description of a nightmare with sadistic guards, prisoners who kill each other, famine, and disease. However, in the end, it is an almost bland story about a repetitive daily life, which illustrates one of the main themes (and the author's great cause for concern): that humans can adapt to almost anything.
June 10, 2014
I have been frequenting an open-air restaurant for 7 years now. Hiding on the roof of a rickety building, in one of the small tributaries of the Jaipur's busiest road, it is aptly named Cocoon. The place is shady, unknown, and visited only by international tourists living in its cheap guest-house.
Nothing unusual seemed to happen at that place and nothing unusual did happen the last time I visited it: I drank two cups of hot lemon tea, I followed short arcs sketched by listless eagles in the evening sky, I breathed in volumes of busy city smoke; but while leaving for home, as I turned on the ignition key of my bike, I caught hold of a loud, clear, distinct feeling. It was so distinct that I did not know at first what it was trying to convey; that is to say, my natural thinking process had reverted to a background noise and I could only listen with attention to the wordless outwardly buzz around my ears and inside my chest, which seemed to be growing... keener and keener. I stood motionless for a second or two, and then, a picture of a shop flashed inside the head. I turned my head to find the same shop in the ground floor of that building. 7 years and I had never once noticed that shop! From across the street, it appeared to be a wholesaler's office, with its glass partition displaying drawing and craft notebooks, paper-thin local guides to health and fitness, bedroom life, and tourism in Rajasthan. Curious, however, I trudged towards the store, my attention fixed mostly on that outwardly buzz which I wasn’t hearing – if it can be called hearing – for the first time.
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.
Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pasternak, Gibran... hard copy editions of rarest of their works, thick with time and grime, casually stacked together in a single shelf. With my mouth half open, I plugged out 10 titles, not once leafing through them, not once checking the blurb, and plopped the bulk on the owner's creaking desk.
He too was excited but he concealed it, and overcharged me. I did not cross-check the MRP nor did I request for a discount; he may have charged me even more and I would have happily emptied my wallet. Such was my state! I felt unworldly. What did it matter which books I was buying, at what price and who from? Trifles! Mere trifles. What mattered was that I see through the task, witness what I was being shown, stay ‘connected’. The buzzing humming feeling had now enlarged and transmuted into a quietude donning my whole being – not the other way round. I returned home after a short ride, but I was now proud for some reason and happy; the quietude only a memory, an object for analysis. For rationalizations. I dusted the books, and arranged them neatly on my desk, as if they were sacred idols I was going to worship every day.
For 6 months I did not go to them: laziness, thoughtlessness, fear. The books would change me somehow, I knew, and I wasn't too prepared to let go of whatever they may ask me to let go of. No, not unless the sentries of my rational mind were welcoming and unsuspicious.
And here now I am, reading, having read. Something indeed did happen. Something unidentifiable. But what exactly did the book do? So that my intellect does not become restless, I will give it a word to chew over and flaunt. Not the same word Leo Tolstoy used for this work: edifying; not the same word that settled on my mind for Dostoyevsky’s influence on an aspiring writer: uncorrupting; but: purging. The book purged me, emptied me, humbled me; cleaned me of the grime I had gathered over time.
This book is sacred.
Nothing unusual seemed to happen at that place and nothing unusual did happen the last time I visited it: I drank two cups of hot lemon tea, I followed short arcs sketched by listless eagles in the evening sky, I breathed in volumes of busy city smoke; but while leaving for home, as I turned on the ignition key of my bike, I caught hold of a loud, clear, distinct feeling. It was so distinct that I did not know at first what it was trying to convey; that is to say, my natural thinking process had reverted to a background noise and I could only listen with attention to the wordless outwardly buzz around my ears and inside my chest, which seemed to be growing... keener and keener. I stood motionless for a second or two, and then, a picture of a shop flashed inside the head. I turned my head to find the same shop in the ground floor of that building. 7 years and I had never once noticed that shop! From across the street, it appeared to be a wholesaler's office, with its glass partition displaying drawing and craft notebooks, paper-thin local guides to health and fitness, bedroom life, and tourism in Rajasthan. Curious, however, I trudged towards the store, my attention fixed mostly on that outwardly buzz which I wasn’t hearing – if it can be called hearing – for the first time.
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.
Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pasternak, Gibran... hard copy editions of rarest of their works, thick with time and grime, casually stacked together in a single shelf. With my mouth half open, I plugged out 10 titles, not once leafing through them, not once checking the blurb, and plopped the bulk on the owner's creaking desk.
He too was excited but he concealed it, and overcharged me. I did not cross-check the MRP nor did I request for a discount; he may have charged me even more and I would have happily emptied my wallet. Such was my state! I felt unworldly. What did it matter which books I was buying, at what price and who from? Trifles! Mere trifles. What mattered was that I see through the task, witness what I was being shown, stay ‘connected’. The buzzing humming feeling had now enlarged and transmuted into a quietude donning my whole being – not the other way round. I returned home after a short ride, but I was now proud for some reason and happy; the quietude only a memory, an object for analysis. For rationalizations. I dusted the books, and arranged them neatly on my desk, as if they were sacred idols I was going to worship every day.
For 6 months I did not go to them: laziness, thoughtlessness, fear. The books would change me somehow, I knew, and I wasn't too prepared to let go of whatever they may ask me to let go of. No, not unless the sentries of my rational mind were welcoming and unsuspicious.
And here now I am, reading, having read. Something indeed did happen. Something unidentifiable. But what exactly did the book do? So that my intellect does not become restless, I will give it a word to chew over and flaunt. Not the same word Leo Tolstoy used for this work: edifying; not the same word that settled on my mind for Dostoyevsky’s influence on an aspiring writer: uncorrupting; but: purging. The book purged me, emptied me, humbled me; cleaned me of the grime I had gathered over time.
This book is sacred.
December 21, 2022
"Nosotros somos hombres destrozados, triturados, deshechos; no tenemos entrañas. Por eso gritamos de noche."
No existe para mí mejor Dostoievski que el autobiográfico. Fue, es y será "el mejor conocedor del alma humana de todos los tiempos", como decía Zweig; pero para llegar a esa profundidad, le fue necesario empezar con la suya propia y “La Casa de los Muertos” es un libro en el que el Dostoievski hombre se camufla en el personaje ficticio de Alexander Petrovich para narrar sus penurias en la prisión de Siberia.
La detención de Dostoievski en 1849 junto con el grupo revolucionario utópico de Petrachevsky y el posterior del simulacro de su fusilamiento (algo que lo marcaría a fuego y que narraría magistralmente a través de las palabras del Príncipe Mishkin en "El Idiota") derivaron en su posterior reclusión en Siberia y no iba a ser el mismo Dostoievski el que atravesara el portón de salida cuatro años después.
Dice en otra parte del libro: “Así pues, había vivido sin libros, encerrado en mí mismo, planteándome cuestiones, que intentaba resolver, y cuya solución me atormentaba frecuentemente… Pero jamás podré expresar todo esto…”
Ni él ni ningún otro hombre puede ser mismo en su vida a partir de una experiencia como esta. Incluso, Dostoievski afirma que para él (un hombre culto e intelectual) era más difícil tener que convivir (con todo lo que esto conlleva cotidianamente) con asesinos, hombres embrutecidos, salvajes y delincuentes, que estar privado de la libertad que gozaba tiempo atrás.
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.
Él fue un hombre que supo aceptar y afrontar las desgracias de su vida con hombría y sin flaquezas, más que las físicas, dado que toda su vida padeció de epilepsia. De hecho, tres capítulos de la segunda parte transcurren en el hospital donde fue internado por esta enfermedad.
Otro de los aspectos que Dostoievski desarrolla en profundidad es el de las cadenas y hierros que tenían que soportar sobre el cuerpo los prisioneros, algo que cobra real dimensión cuando narra la experiencia de cuando debían bañarse todos juntos en una especie de infierno de vapor y calor intolerable.
También es realmente crudo el modo en que nos cuenta la forma en la que los prisioneros eran azotados en sus espaldas y esto se relacionaba directamente a la gravedad de las penas que cumplían. Estos eran castigados con varazos que iban de los 500 hasta los 2000 azotes y se hacían en tandas, dado que era normal que el prisionero se desmayara luego de infligirles semejante un castigo tan violento en sus espaldas. Otros, directamente no lograban sobrevivir a este suplicio.
Cabe destacar también que durante todos los días estaban sometidos a trabajos forzosos sin misericordia. El castigo era la consecuencia irreversible y recíproca que se relacionaba al crimen cometido por el prisionero.
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.
En líneas generales y más allá de que por momentos ciertos pasajes de lecturas son terribles, es un libro al que le doy cinco estrellas, dado que lo que surge de lo narrado aquí, fue clave que todo admirador de Dostoievski (y los que quieran saber sobre su vida) pueda comprender (esa es la palabra) el porqué de muchas de las acciones y vivencias que experimentarán los personajes de sus novelas partir de 1850 y también una prueba de la fortaleza moral y la entereza humana que Dostoievski tuvo que sostener para no sucumbir en la vida.
No existe para mí mejor Dostoievski que el autobiográfico. Fue, es y será "el mejor conocedor del alma humana de todos los tiempos", como decía Zweig; pero para llegar a esa profundidad, le fue necesario empezar con la suya propia y “La Casa de los Muertos” es un libro en el que el Dostoievski hombre se camufla en el personaje ficticio de Alexander Petrovich para narrar sus penurias en la prisión de Siberia.
La detención de Dostoievski en 1849 junto con el grupo revolucionario utópico de Petrachevsky y el posterior del simulacro de su fusilamiento (algo que lo marcaría a fuego y que narraría magistralmente a través de las palabras del Príncipe Mishkin en "El Idiota") derivaron en su posterior reclusión en Siberia y no iba a ser el mismo Dostoievski el que atravesara el portón de salida cuatro años después.
Dice en otra parte del libro: “Así pues, había vivido sin libros, encerrado en mí mismo, planteándome cuestiones, que intentaba resolver, y cuya solución me atormentaba frecuentemente… Pero jamás podré expresar todo esto…”
Ni él ni ningún otro hombre puede ser mismo en su vida a partir de una experiencia como esta. Incluso, Dostoievski afirma que para él (un hombre culto e intelectual) era más difícil tener que convivir (con todo lo que esto conlleva cotidianamente) con asesinos, hombres embrutecidos, salvajes y delincuentes, que estar privado de la libertad que gozaba tiempo atrás.
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.
Él fue un hombre que supo aceptar y afrontar las desgracias de su vida con hombría y sin flaquezas, más que las físicas, dado que toda su vida padeció de epilepsia. De hecho, tres capítulos de la segunda parte transcurren en el hospital donde fue internado por esta enfermedad.
Otro de los aspectos que Dostoievski desarrolla en profundidad es el de las cadenas y hierros que tenían que soportar sobre el cuerpo los prisioneros, algo que cobra real dimensión cuando narra la experiencia de cuando debían bañarse todos juntos en una especie de infierno de vapor y calor intolerable.
También es realmente crudo el modo en que nos cuenta la forma en la que los prisioneros eran azotados en sus espaldas y esto se relacionaba directamente a la gravedad de las penas que cumplían. Estos eran castigados con varazos que iban de los 500 hasta los 2000 azotes y se hacían en tandas, dado que era normal que el prisionero se desmayara luego de infligirles semejante un castigo tan violento en sus espaldas. Otros, directamente no lograban sobrevivir a este suplicio.
Cabe destacar también que durante todos los días estaban sometidos a trabajos forzosos sin misericordia. El castigo era la consecuencia irreversible y recíproca que se relacionaba al crimen cometido por el prisionero.
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.
En líneas generales y más allá de que por momentos ciertos pasajes de lecturas son terribles, es un libro al que le doy cinco estrellas, dado que lo que surge de lo narrado aquí, fue clave que todo admirador de Dostoievski (y los que quieran saber sobre su vida) pueda comprender (esa es la palabra) el porqué de muchas de las acciones y vivencias que experimentarán los personajes de sus novelas partir de 1850 y también una prueba de la fortaleza moral y la entereza humana que Dostoievski tuvo que sostener para no sucumbir en la vida.
March 4, 2021
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
there will be the depiction of characters unheard of previously in literature
Maybe he had in mind the prisoner he called Sirotkin. Prison homosexuality isn’t a modern invention (I know you didn’t think it was) but Dosto couldn’t address this subject directly, so he very delicately sketches one particular prisoner, Sirotkin - how handsome he is, how he looks well in a woman’s dress, how he provides (unspecified) services to other prisoners. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought – wait, what was that again?
As with all these memoirs, there is some fictionalising, shaping, rearranging, but the point of The House of the Dead was to tell the truth. So there is no plot. It’s not a novel. Many chapters are
loose assemblages of anecdotes and essayistic fragments
(Max Nelson in the Paris Review)
Well, there is one thin framing device used for the book, it’s supposed to be the memoir of a fictional character who got ten years for murdering his wife. But that was included to avoid trouble with the official Russian censor. Contemporary readers took the book as “more or less a faithful account” of Dosto’s own experience.
LIFE LESSONS FROM SIBERIA
1) The prisoners long for meaningful work, most of them have a trade. The way to destroy their spirits is to force them into work with no point.
2) Prison tries to crush the inmates into total conformity but only succeeds in making their rebellious inner lives more real.
3) Anything can be a prison, the mind, the body, religion, your class, your nationality, anything. Who keeps you in those mind-forged manacles? Only you.
THE ANGUISH AND SOLACE OF FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Although there is no plot at all, this is the story of an intellectual whose radical politics in support of the lower classes forced him (by accident) into unsought and unwelcome intimacy with those lower classes, in the course of which he discovered an emotional and spiritual love for those he had only previously considered to be part of an abstract political theory. Before prison he had thought that the alleviation of the suffering of the peasants was the problem. As an effete literary journalist, prison reality hit Dosto like an express train. At first he hated all the other prisoners and they hated him because he was a “nobleman”.
After prison he thought the peasants themselves, their intense spiritual realities and their stoicism, were the solution. He slept and ate and lived each miserable moment with them for five years, his prejudices melted away, and this was how it changed him.
Joseph Frank says in prison he finds
a new understanding of the intense humanity and particular moral quality of those he had at first regarded with loathing and dismay
THIS MAY NOT BE THE DOSTOYEVSKY BOOK FOR YOU
I must admit even given that stark horrifying nature of the world described, the narrator can be waffly, repetitious and a little annoying. You will meet a parade of extraordinary characters but you know they aren’t going to come together into any kind of drama. Just like real life, people come and go and our narrator has no idea what happened to them.
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.
Fortunately we know what happened to Dostoyevsky. Four years after this he wrote Crime and Punishment.
there will be the depiction of characters unheard of previously in literature
Maybe he had in mind the prisoner he called Sirotkin. Prison homosexuality isn’t a modern invention (I know you didn’t think it was) but Dosto couldn’t address this subject directly, so he very delicately sketches one particular prisoner, Sirotkin - how handsome he is, how he looks well in a woman’s dress, how he provides (unspecified) services to other prisoners. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought – wait, what was that again?
As with all these memoirs, there is some fictionalising, shaping, rearranging, but the point of The House of the Dead was to tell the truth. So there is no plot. It’s not a novel. Many chapters are
loose assemblages of anecdotes and essayistic fragments
(Max Nelson in the Paris Review)
Well, there is one thin framing device used for the book, it’s supposed to be the memoir of a fictional character who got ten years for murdering his wife. But that was included to avoid trouble with the official Russian censor. Contemporary readers took the book as “more or less a faithful account” of Dosto’s own experience.
LIFE LESSONS FROM SIBERIA
1) The prisoners long for meaningful work, most of them have a trade. The way to destroy their spirits is to force them into work with no point.
2) Prison tries to crush the inmates into total conformity but only succeeds in making their rebellious inner lives more real.
3) Anything can be a prison, the mind, the body, religion, your class, your nationality, anything. Who keeps you in those mind-forged manacles? Only you.
THE ANGUISH AND SOLACE OF FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Although there is no plot at all, this is the story of an intellectual whose radical politics in support of the lower classes forced him (by accident) into unsought and unwelcome intimacy with those lower classes, in the course of which he discovered an emotional and spiritual love for those he had only previously considered to be part of an abstract political theory. Before prison he had thought that the alleviation of the suffering of the peasants was the problem. As an effete literary journalist, prison reality hit Dosto like an express train. At first he hated all the other prisoners and they hated him because he was a “nobleman”.
After prison he thought the peasants themselves, their intense spiritual realities and their stoicism, were the solution. He slept and ate and lived each miserable moment with them for five years, his prejudices melted away, and this was how it changed him.
Joseph Frank says in prison he finds
a new understanding of the intense humanity and particular moral quality of those he had at first regarded with loathing and dismay
THIS MAY NOT BE THE DOSTOYEVSKY BOOK FOR YOU
I must admit even given that stark horrifying nature of the world described, the narrator can be waffly, repetitious and a little annoying. You will meet a parade of extraordinary characters but you know they aren’t going to come together into any kind of drama. Just like real life, people come and go and our narrator has no idea what happened to them.
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.
Fortunately we know what happened to Dostoyevsky. Four years after this he wrote Crime and Punishment.
September 4, 2018
"During the first weeks, and naturally the early part of my imprisonment, made a deep impression on my imagination. The following years on the other hand are all mixed up together, and leave but a confused recollection. Certain epochs of this life are even effaced from my memory. I have kept one general impression of it though, always the same; painful, monotonous, stifling. What I saw in experience during the first few days of imprisonment seems to me as if it had all taken place yesterday. Such was the case"
These words arrive quite early on, and set the scene for Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary, heartened, semi-fictional account of the internment he endured in a Siberian prison camp after being sentenced to four years of hard labour for his involvement in a revolutionary conspiracy. Dostoyevsky completed this work six years after his release, and across its two main sections you can feel him organising his memories, vividly revising them, and struggling to get them down before they fade. Under the circumstances, he did a remarkable job, after all, I am sure he would rather have written about something else, but his experiences are that important, he simply had to get it down on paper. Few books give such a vivid picture of the sort of setting from which many great works of prison literature emerge, the power of certain writing done from prison has to do with the way it alternatively staves off and gives rein to restlessness, fervour, and desperation. Dostoyevsky’s narrator insists even the most docile prisoners sometimes need an anguished, convulsive recklessly hopeful display of personality.
Most of the book’s action revolves around the convicts attempts to make room for some colour and change in their days, but this is obviously limited, card games, knife fights, thefts, drinking sprees, escape attempts, holiday celebrations, a play, anything to stop madness setting setting in. But the most dramatic such attempt in the novel is the shape of the narrative itself. Alexander Petrovich is a bit of a sloppy storyteller. He keeps filling in background information belatedly, as many of the novel’s chapters are really loose assemblages of anecdotes and essayistic fragments. In a way, 'The House of the Dead is constantly at odds with its subject matter; wherever the narrative calls for a dreary roll call of routine tasks and daily humiliations, the book darts off, digresses or swerves to the side. Which makes me ask the question, why didn't Dostoyevsky just write an out and out autobiographical account of his experience?
This felt to me like a brother version of Solzhenitsyn’s 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich', but with less of the bleak, fully clear, almost documentary-style narrative. To be fair, the book moves around genres really well, shifting fluidly between fiction, philosophical meditation, and memoir. I was expecting something more hard-hitting, and emotionally draining from the reader's perspective, that would long live in the memory, but it fell short of this. There are however, for Dostoyevsky fans plenty of lovely philosophical musings, where the narrator ponders the nature of freedom and the importance of hope, the inequality of punishments for the same crime, the gap between appearance and reality, the nature of free will, and other heavy themes.
To me, it was like standing just outside the prison gates getting a glimpse, rather than truly feeling the blood, sweat, and tears from within. Very well written (it's Dostoyevsky after all), just not entirely what I had hoped for.
These words arrive quite early on, and set the scene for Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary, heartened, semi-fictional account of the internment he endured in a Siberian prison camp after being sentenced to four years of hard labour for his involvement in a revolutionary conspiracy. Dostoyevsky completed this work six years after his release, and across its two main sections you can feel him organising his memories, vividly revising them, and struggling to get them down before they fade. Under the circumstances, he did a remarkable job, after all, I am sure he would rather have written about something else, but his experiences are that important, he simply had to get it down on paper. Few books give such a vivid picture of the sort of setting from which many great works of prison literature emerge, the power of certain writing done from prison has to do with the way it alternatively staves off and gives rein to restlessness, fervour, and desperation. Dostoyevsky’s narrator insists even the most docile prisoners sometimes need an anguished, convulsive recklessly hopeful display of personality.
Most of the book’s action revolves around the convicts attempts to make room for some colour and change in their days, but this is obviously limited, card games, knife fights, thefts, drinking sprees, escape attempts, holiday celebrations, a play, anything to stop madness setting setting in. But the most dramatic such attempt in the novel is the shape of the narrative itself. Alexander Petrovich is a bit of a sloppy storyteller. He keeps filling in background information belatedly, as many of the novel’s chapters are really loose assemblages of anecdotes and essayistic fragments. In a way, 'The House of the Dead is constantly at odds with its subject matter; wherever the narrative calls for a dreary roll call of routine tasks and daily humiliations, the book darts off, digresses or swerves to the side. Which makes me ask the question, why didn't Dostoyevsky just write an out and out autobiographical account of his experience?
This felt to me like a brother version of Solzhenitsyn’s 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich', but with less of the bleak, fully clear, almost documentary-style narrative. To be fair, the book moves around genres really well, shifting fluidly between fiction, philosophical meditation, and memoir. I was expecting something more hard-hitting, and emotionally draining from the reader's perspective, that would long live in the memory, but it fell short of this. There are however, for Dostoyevsky fans plenty of lovely philosophical musings, where the narrator ponders the nature of freedom and the importance of hope, the inequality of punishments for the same crime, the gap between appearance and reality, the nature of free will, and other heavy themes.
To me, it was like standing just outside the prison gates getting a glimpse, rather than truly feeling the blood, sweat, and tears from within. Very well written (it's Dostoyevsky after all), just not entirely what I had hoped for.
May 3, 2023
Deși nu-mi place cartea (din pricini obscure), mă întreb de ce n-am transcris pînă acum măcar acest pasaj pe care nu mai e nevoie să-l comentez:
„Într-o zi mi-a trecut prin minte ideea că dacă s-ar urmări strivirea completă a personalităţii omului, distrugerea lui totală, pedepsirea lui cu pedeapsa cea mai cruntă, de care pînă şi ucigaşul cel mai înverşunat să se cutremure, îngrozindu-se numai la gîndul că ar putea să se abată asupra lui, ar fi de ajuns ca acesta să fie pus la o muncă cu desăvîrşire inutilă şi absurdă”.
Mă gîndesc că nu e obligatoriu să fii trimis în Siberia pentru a îndeplini o muncă de acest tip, inutilă și lipsită de sens. Poți, de exemplu, să te apuci de scris...
„Într-o zi mi-a trecut prin minte ideea că dacă s-ar urmări strivirea completă a personalităţii omului, distrugerea lui totală, pedepsirea lui cu pedeapsa cea mai cruntă, de care pînă şi ucigaşul cel mai înverşunat să se cutremure, îngrozindu-se numai la gîndul că ar putea să se abată asupra lui, ar fi de ajuns ca acesta să fie pus la o muncă cu desăvîrşire inutilă şi absurdă”.
Mă gîndesc că nu e obligatoriu să fii trimis în Siberia pentru a îndeplini o muncă de acest tip, inutilă și lipsită de sens. Poți, de exemplu, să te apuci de scris...
May 22, 2024
"Here there is a world's apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own dress, its own manners and customs, and here is the house of the living dead - life as nowhere else and a people apart." And the story of this living dead is what Dostoevsky brings to us readers. Based loosely on his own prison experience, this semi-autobiographical novel chronicles the ten-year prison life of Alexander Petrovich in a Siberian prison.
The story begins with "gentleman" Alexander's arrival at the prison which overflows with the peasant community. From the beginning, he is an outsider in every possible way. Imagine, leaving one's own country, surrendering one's liberty, and coming into a prison to serve a ten-year term of penal servitude just to face the cold and unfriendly multitude of peasants; how alone one must feel. The wide gap between the gentry and the peasants in the free world is also preserved in this confined world.
Alexander's mental suffering is acute, for the surrounding is too harsh for his gentlemanly breeding and his intelligence. But he has no choice except to endure the suffering for ten long years amidst a handful of gentlemen and a multitude of peasants. He has to prepare himself mentally to acquiesce to this new life. It is by no means easy. Alexander details his first year in prison which is the hardest of all years. The loathing of the surroundings, his agony at having to live daily in stifling condition, at his distress at the unfriendliness of the fellow convicts leave him ill. It is a painful and melancholy account. With time, he reconciles with his condemned life and earns a few friendly acquaintances.
Alexander's observation of the convicted peasants helps him to acquire a good understanding of them. The prejudice he entertained against them, being a man of the gentry, slowly evaporates as he learns to appreciate their simplicity and good-naturedness. His study of their characters brings to the chronicle a true account of the thoughts and conduct of the peasant class.
The chronicle also details to some extent the nature of corporal punishment and the general conduct of the prison officers. Corporal punishment was cruel and inhumane and it was painful knowledge that at some point in our history such punishment was thought of as just. Being something of a reign of its own, certain commanding officers tended to be tyrants. But generally, according to Alexander's account, the officers were considerate of the convicts.
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!"
Reading this melancholy account of Alexander Petrovich made me realize that we too are globally undergoing a similar situation due to the pandemic. We don't live in a "house of dead" of course, but our free movement is restricted. Liberty is curtailed to some extent. Perhaps, it is time for us to reflect on the important things of our lives as Alexander did and to bask in the glory the new resurrected life will bring when the freedom is fully restored to us.
The story begins with "gentleman" Alexander's arrival at the prison which overflows with the peasant community. From the beginning, he is an outsider in every possible way. Imagine, leaving one's own country, surrendering one's liberty, and coming into a prison to serve a ten-year term of penal servitude just to face the cold and unfriendly multitude of peasants; how alone one must feel. The wide gap between the gentry and the peasants in the free world is also preserved in this confined world.
Alexander's mental suffering is acute, for the surrounding is too harsh for his gentlemanly breeding and his intelligence. But he has no choice except to endure the suffering for ten long years amidst a handful of gentlemen and a multitude of peasants. He has to prepare himself mentally to acquiesce to this new life. It is by no means easy. Alexander details his first year in prison which is the hardest of all years. The loathing of the surroundings, his agony at having to live daily in stifling condition, at his distress at the unfriendliness of the fellow convicts leave him ill. It is a painful and melancholy account. With time, he reconciles with his condemned life and earns a few friendly acquaintances.
Alexander's observation of the convicted peasants helps him to acquire a good understanding of them. The prejudice he entertained against them, being a man of the gentry, slowly evaporates as he learns to appreciate their simplicity and good-naturedness. His study of their characters brings to the chronicle a true account of the thoughts and conduct of the peasant class.
The chronicle also details to some extent the nature of corporal punishment and the general conduct of the prison officers. Corporal punishment was cruel and inhumane and it was painful knowledge that at some point in our history such punishment was thought of as just. Being something of a reign of its own, certain commanding officers tended to be tyrants. But generally, according to Alexander's account, the officers were considerate of the convicts.
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!"
Reading this melancholy account of Alexander Petrovich made me realize that we too are globally undergoing a similar situation due to the pandemic. We don't live in a "house of dead" of course, but our free movement is restricted. Liberty is curtailed to some extent. Perhaps, it is time for us to reflect on the important things of our lives as Alexander did and to bask in the glory the new resurrected life will bring when the freedom is fully restored to us.
October 16, 2021
خاطرات خانهی مردگان، خاطرات یک زندانی محکوم به چندین سال حبس است که زندان را به خانهی مردگان تشبیه کرده و از روزگار سختی که در آن دوران گذرانده، می
نویسد. خیلی کتاب دردناکی بود...
نویسد. خیلی کتاب دردناکی بود...
February 13, 2022
به نام او
یادداشتهایی از خانه مردگان یا خاطرات خانه مردگان یا خاطرات خانه اموات یکی از رمانهای فیودور داستایفسکی که آن را در دوران میانی نویسندگی خود نوشته است. داستایفسکی این کتاب را پس از چهار سال گذراندن دوران تبعید در اردوگاههای اجباری کار سیبری نوشته است و این رمان به نوعی بیانگر مشاهدات خود نویسنده از این اردوگاهست، خیلی از منتقدان این اثر را بهترین رمان داستایفسکی میدانند و تاثیرگذاری رمان در زمان انتشارش به حدی بوده که تزار نیکلای اول پس از خواندن کتاب متاثر شده و گریه کرده است.
به نظر من هم این کتاب یکی از بهترین کتابهای این نویسنده بزرگ روس است. یادداشتهایی از خانه مردگان به نوعی خشت اول ساختمان و نظام فکری داستایفسکی است. و پس از این کتاب است که او رمانهای بزرگش را در مورد جنایات و مکافاتهای این جنایات مینویسد و رنج بشر را به بهترین (بدترین؟!) شکل در پیشرویش قرار میدهد
این کتاب دو ترجمه خوب دارد یکی از مرحوم دکتر محمدجعفر محجوب که برای پیش از انقلاب است که الان توسط نشرآمون و انتشارات علمی و فرهنگی منتشر میشود و دیگری ترجمه خانم سعیده رامز که توسط نشر نو منتشر میشود.
یادداشتهایی از خانه مردگان یا خاطرات خانه مردگان یا خاطرات خانه اموات یکی از رمانهای فیودور داستایفسکی که آن را در دوران میانی نویسندگی خود نوشته است. داستایفسکی این کتاب را پس از چهار سال گذراندن دوران تبعید در اردوگاههای اجباری کار سیبری نوشته است و این رمان به نوعی بیانگر مشاهدات خود نویسنده از این اردوگاهست، خیلی از منتقدان این اثر را بهترین رمان داستایفسکی میدانند و تاثیرگذاری رمان در زمان انتشارش به حدی بوده که تزار نیکلای اول پس از خواندن کتاب متاثر شده و گریه کرده است.
به نظر من هم این کتاب یکی از بهترین کتابهای این نویسنده بزرگ روس است. یادداشتهایی از خانه مردگان به نوعی خشت اول ساختمان و نظام فکری داستایفسکی است. و پس از این کتاب است که او رمانهای بزرگش را در مورد جنایات و مکافاتهای این جنایات مینویسد و رنج بشر را به بهترین (بدترین؟!) شکل در پیشرویش قرار میدهد
این کتاب دو ترجمه خوب دارد یکی از مرحوم دکتر محمدجعفر محجوب که برای پیش از انقلاب است که الان توسط نشرآمون و انتشارات علمی و فرهنگی منتشر میشود و دیگری ترجمه خانم سعیده رامز که توسط نشر نو منتشر میشود.
November 28, 2015
"What I have said of servitude, I again say of imprisonment, we are all prisoners. What is our life but a prison? We are all imprisoned in an island. The world itself to some men is a prison, our narrow seas as so many ditches, and when they have compassed the globe of the earth, they would fain go see what is done in the moon."
- Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy: S2.3.4
Not top-half Dostoevsky, but a must read still. This book (and Dostoevsky's four years in Siberia) are an obvious rough draft to his later GREAT novels (Crime & Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, etc). Even without the early draft qualities of this novel, 'Notes from a Dead House' is a critical novel. This novel IS the godfather of all prison memoir/novels. Orange might be the new black, but the Big D was there first. Actually, it is probably worth a few minutes exploring the similarities between OITNB and 'Notes from a Dead House'. Both explore how prison impacts those who are sent there, the way people survive, the things that drive people mad inside, the things that are core about being human within an environment meant to limit the very essence of humanness, how punishment is relative, etc, and ad nauseam.
I think the brilliance of prison writing is the way it can be used as a microcosm of life. We are all trapped by something. Nihil enim refert, rerum sis servus an hominum (“It matters little whether we are enslaved by men or things.”). We are all controlled by something, tortured by someone, addicted to vice, sin, or our own fears. Exploring the idea of prison and prisoners can open us up to not just the difficulties we all face, but the way(s) we can survive life's fetters, our body's constraints, the darkness of this mortal coil. Dostoevsky give us hints. Dreams, hope, faith, purpose and relationships all allowed him to survive his four years in Siberia. Those same characteristics increase the odds that not only will we survive our incarceration on this Earth, but we might even grow fond of it and find beauty and love in the process.
- Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy: S2.3.4
Not top-half Dostoevsky, but a must read still. This book (and Dostoevsky's four years in Siberia) are an obvious rough draft to his later GREAT novels (Crime & Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, etc). Even without the early draft qualities of this novel, 'Notes from a Dead House' is a critical novel. This novel IS the godfather of all prison memoir/novels. Orange might be the new black, but the Big D was there first. Actually, it is probably worth a few minutes exploring the similarities between OITNB and 'Notes from a Dead House'. Both explore how prison impacts those who are sent there, the way people survive, the things that drive people mad inside, the things that are core about being human within an environment meant to limit the very essence of humanness, how punishment is relative, etc, and ad nauseam.
I think the brilliance of prison writing is the way it can be used as a microcosm of life. We are all trapped by something. Nihil enim refert, rerum sis servus an hominum (“It matters little whether we are enslaved by men or things.”). We are all controlled by something, tortured by someone, addicted to vice, sin, or our own fears. Exploring the idea of prison and prisoners can open us up to not just the difficulties we all face, but the way(s) we can survive life's fetters, our body's constraints, the darkness of this mortal coil. Dostoevsky give us hints. Dreams, hope, faith, purpose and relationships all allowed him to survive his four years in Siberia. Those same characteristics increase the odds that not only will we survive our incarceration on this Earth, but we might even grow fond of it and find beauty and love in the process.
April 11, 2020
در کتاب خاطرات خانه مردگان ، داستایوفسکی بزرگ از رنج برای خواننده می گوید ، رنجی که به خاطر جرم نکرده و هم به خاطر در محیط نامناسب بودن متحمل می شود .
شاید هم بتوان گفت استاد در این اثر هم خاطرات خود را از زبان دیگر زندانیان می گوید و هم با روانشناسی نسبتا دقیقی ، شناختی از روحیه تبه کاران قرن نوزدهم روسیه نشان می دهد . مجرمینی که به جرم های مختلف در آن زندان هستند ولی همه با هم در نداشتن احساس پشیمانی مشترک هستند .
او در حالات چند تن از این مجرمین هم دقیق می شود ، مثلا گازین کسی ایست که همواره در سرتاسر کتاب از او می ترسد و هر جا گازین وارد می شود احساس ترس را در نویسنده می توان یافت .
یا آکیمیچ ، افسر سابق که با همان خصوصیات افسری خود یعنی نظم و انظباط و قانون ومقررات به محیط وحشی زندان آمده یا پتروف عجیب که همیشه به دنبال چیزی ایست و معلوم نیست که به آن می رسد یا نه .
او همین طور از تضاد طبقاتی در جامعه زندانیان می گوید ، از این که نجیب زاده های لهستانی فقط با گروه خود معاشرت می کردند یا مثلا نجیب زاده داستان او همواره از طرف طبقه فرو دست تحقیر می شود و آنها او را از خود نمی دانند .
داستایوفسکی در میان این جامعه تبه کار و خطرناک دنبال انسانیت می گردد و آنرا هم پیدا می کند ؛ به همین گونه تعریف بسیار نابی هم از انسان ارائه می کند :
انسان عبارتست از موجودی که به همه چیز عادت می کند.”
شاید خاطرات خانه مردگان را از جهاتی بتوان با کتاب یک روز ایوان دنیسوویچ اثر الکساندر سولژنیتسین مقایسه کرد . به نظر من رنجی که در کتاب سولژنیتسین به تصویر کشیده شده ، شکنجه های محیط اردوگاه ، نوع غذا ، کیفیت کار ، رفتار نگهبانان همگی و همگی دهها مرتبه از خاطرات خانه مردگان سخت تر و مخوف تر هستند . شاید با مقایسه این دو زندان یکی در زمان تزار آلکساندر اول و دیگری در زمان استالین ، اندکی بتوان به تفاوت یک رژیم دیکتاتوری معمولی با یک دیکتاتوری دارای ایدئولوژی پی برد .
شاید هم بتوان گفت استاد در این اثر هم خاطرات خود را از زبان دیگر زندانیان می گوید و هم با روانشناسی نسبتا دقیقی ، شناختی از روحیه تبه کاران قرن نوزدهم روسیه نشان می دهد . مجرمینی که به جرم های مختلف در آن زندان هستند ولی همه با هم در نداشتن احساس پشیمانی مشترک هستند .
او در حالات چند تن از این مجرمین هم دقیق می شود ، مثلا گازین کسی ایست که همواره در سرتاسر کتاب از او می ترسد و هر جا گازین وارد می شود احساس ترس را در نویسنده می توان یافت .
یا آکیمیچ ، افسر سابق که با همان خصوصیات افسری خود یعنی نظم و انظباط و قانون ومقررات به محیط وحشی زندان آمده یا پتروف عجیب که همیشه به دنبال چیزی ایست و معلوم نیست که به آن می رسد یا نه .
او همین طور از تضاد طبقاتی در جامعه زندانیان می گوید ، از این که نجیب زاده های لهستانی فقط با گروه خود معاشرت می کردند یا مثلا نجیب زاده داستان او همواره از طرف طبقه فرو دست تحقیر می شود و آنها او را از خود نمی دانند .
داستایوفسکی در میان این جامعه تبه کار و خطرناک دنبال انسانیت می گردد و آنرا هم پیدا می کند ؛ به همین گونه تعریف بسیار نابی هم از انسان ارائه می کند :
انسان عبارتست از موجودی که به همه چیز عادت می کند.”
شاید خاطرات خانه مردگان را از جهاتی بتوان با کتاب یک روز ایوان دنیسوویچ اثر الکساندر سولژنیتسین مقایسه کرد . به نظر من رنجی که در کتاب سولژنیتسین به تصویر کشیده شده ، شکنجه های محیط اردوگاه ، نوع غذا ، کیفیت کار ، رفتار نگهبانان همگی و همگی دهها مرتبه از خاطرات خانه مردگان سخت تر و مخوف تر هستند . شاید با مقایسه این دو زندان یکی در زمان تزار آلکساندر اول و دیگری در زمان استالین ، اندکی بتوان به تفاوت یک رژیم دیکتاتوری معمولی با یک دیکتاتوری دارای ایدئولوژی پی برد .
October 7, 2025
When Dostoyevsky speaks,I just listen.I listen with all the attention I am capable of.It’s involuntary,I simply cannot help it. No other author ever had that kind of power over me.
Who can make a book about prison life,with no plot or no twists or turns so interesting??Only Dostoyevsky.I absorbed everything like a hungry child. He has never disappointed me,and I am 200% sure he never will!.
This guy is “Pure genius”!!!
Who can make a book about prison life,with no plot or no twists or turns so interesting??Only Dostoyevsky.I absorbed everything like a hungry child. He has never disappointed me,and I am 200% sure he never will!.
This guy is “Pure genius”!!!
November 4, 2012
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.
In 1849, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was accused of reading and distributing several banned works of literature and subsequently sentenced to prison by the Russian government to four years hard labor in Siberia followed by mandatory military service. During this time the writer experienced unendurable hardship. His experience of this period inspired him to write a work of fiction that brought this previously unknown world to light. After his release from prison he penned a work that would become the first work that would describe in vivid detail the horrors of his four excruciatingly long years in the awful Siberian prison.
Dostoyevsky portrays a very realistic and expressive account of his earliest impressions of entering prison life. He introduces the fictional narrator of Alexander Petrovitch, who classifies himself as a “gentleman of the noble class” of Russians much like Dostoyevsky himself. The author touches upon many different aspects of life in the prison. He describes the work schedule, the food, the living conditions, the punishment, the sick hospital all with distinct detail.
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.
Overall, Dostoyevsky has written one of his most personal and realistic works that is definitely worth reading. It is among some of his shorter works and gets passed up for his four elephants, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Demons. However, this work should not be ignored. It has excellent writing and is recommended for anyone interested in this unusual and primitive world.
In 1849, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was accused of reading and distributing several banned works of literature and subsequently sentenced to prison by the Russian government to four years hard labor in Siberia followed by mandatory military service. During this time the writer experienced unendurable hardship. His experience of this period inspired him to write a work of fiction that brought this previously unknown world to light. After his release from prison he penned a work that would become the first work that would describe in vivid detail the horrors of his four excruciatingly long years in the awful Siberian prison.
Dostoyevsky portrays a very realistic and expressive account of his earliest impressions of entering prison life. He introduces the fictional narrator of Alexander Petrovitch, who classifies himself as a “gentleman of the noble class” of Russians much like Dostoyevsky himself. The author touches upon many different aspects of life in the prison. He describes the work schedule, the food, the living conditions, the punishment, the sick hospital all with distinct detail.
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.
Overall, Dostoyevsky has written one of his most personal and realistic works that is definitely worth reading. It is among some of his shorter works and gets passed up for his four elephants, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Demons. However, this work should not be ignored. It has excellent writing and is recommended for anyone interested in this unusual and primitive world.
December 13, 2020
Δημοσιεύθηκε το 1861, το House of the Dead είναι ένα
ημι-αυτοβιογραφικό έργο που βασίζεται στην εξορία
του Ντοστογιέφσκι στη Σιβηρία όπου τιμωρήθηκε με «σκληρή εργασία» αφού αρχικά καταδικάστηκε να τιμωρηθεί με θάνατο από ομάδα εκτελεστικής αυτοκρατορικής πυροδότησης για τη συμμετοχή του στον κύκλο του Πετρασέφσκι,
μια λογοτεχνική ομάδα που υιοθέτησε ιδέες σε αντίθεση με τις τσαρικές αυτοκρατορίες και τις πολιτικές δουλείας σε μεγάλο μέρος της Ρωσίας.
Ο Ντοστογιέφσκι πέρασε τέσσερα χρόνια στην εξορία μετά την κοινοποίηση της ποινής του και στη συνέχεια αναγκάστηκε να στραφεί στο στρατό μέχρι να ανακουφιστεί και να επανέλθει, λόγω κακής υγείας (πιστεύεται ότι ήταν η επιληψία που τον βασάνιζε).
Στις αναμνήσεις απο το σπίτι των πεθαμένων, των κατεργιτών, των δολοφόνων, των πολιτικών κρατουμένων, των σκληροπυρηνικών ισοβιτών, των απλών μουζίκων και γενικώς όλων των βίοψυχολογικών ειδών της ανθρώπινης ράτσας, αυτό το βαθύτατα εμπνευσμένο απο εγκεφαλικά χαοτικές και εν βρασμώ ψυχής επιρροές μυθιστόρημα εξερευνά υπέροχα και τις σκέψεις των χαρακτήρων του ενώ ερευνά τα βάθη της ανθρώπινης ψυχής.
Περιγράφοντας με απεριόριστη λεπτομέρεια τη σωματική και ψυχική ταλαιπωρία των καταδίκων, ο χαρακτήρας του Ντοστογιέφσκι δεν χάνει ποτέ την πίστη του στις ανθρώπινες ιδιότητες και την καλοσύνη του ανθρώπου.
Ένα στοιχειωμένο και αξιοθαύμαστο έργο γεμάτο θαύμα και παραίτηση στις στέπες της Σιβηρίας
Ακολουθώντας την ιστορία του Αλέξανδρου Πέτροβιτς και της εξορίας του στη Σιβηρία ως ένας αριστοκρατικά επιτηδευμένα «ευγενής». Ποτέ δεν πήρε το χρίσμα των συντρόφων ως κατάδικος που εντάσσεται σε μια ζούγκλα αποτελούμενη απο άγρια θηρία μέχρι άκακα και παντελώς εγκλιματισμένα οικόσιτα σαρκοφάγα με
ανθρώπινη μορφή.
Έζησε στα κάτεργα των ανύπαρκτων προς την κοινωνία, των νεκρών που πάλευαν να ξεθάψουν τους απελπισμένους μα ζωντανούς και χαμένους στην φθορά εαυτούς τους απο τον ίδιο τους τον τάφο που είχε άφθαρτες ψυχές μέσα σε τούβλινα φέρετρα.
Των εργαζόμενων σκληρά ανάμεσα σε ζώντες και τεθνεώτες υπό άθλιες συνθήκες, για δέκα χρόνια, όταν παραδόθηκε στις αρχές αφού δολοφόνησε τη γυναίκα του.
Όπου πηγαίνουν οι ψυχές των ζωντανών που έχουν πεθάνει.
Ο Σιβηριανός κόλπος πριν επινοηθεί το όνομα.
Ένα ταξίδι ανθρώπινων πνευμάτων που προσπαθούν να επιβιώσουν όχι εύκολα, από όλα όσα απαιτούνται για τη ζωή.
«Παντού νεκροί και πτώματα. Όλες τις ώρες και όλες τις μέρες. Βρέφη και διαλυμένα γερόντια, έφηβοι και ανέγγιχτες θυγατέρες πέφτουν ξέπνοοι σαν να κατρακυλούν από τον ουρανό. Τους σηκώνουν άρον άρον και τους τραβούν στα νεκροτομεία, τους βάζουν στα άθλια συρτάρια του ψυκτικού νεκροθαλάμου, για να τους φυτέψουν την άλλη μέρα στη νεκρούπολη της ενορίας τους. Μελλοντικός νεκρός ο καθένας μας, κυκλοφορεί ανάμεσα σε τωρινούς και αβοήθητους νεκρούς».
Λατρεύω τον Ντόστο, έχω διαβάσει τα περισσότερα έργα του, οπότε επιτρέπεται σε αυτόν τον βετεράνο της Ρωσικής λογοτεχνικής κληρονομιάς στην παγκόσμια γραμματεία να γίνω λίγο παραπάνω επικριτική. Απομακρύνεται σημαντικά από τους τύπους δομών πλοκών που χρησιμοποιεί σε άλλα μυθιστορήματα.
Ο λόγος για αυτό έχει νόημα - βασίστηκε στη δική του εμπειρία στη Σιβηρία, και πιθανότατα ήταν κάπως καθαρτικός εως καθαιρετικός για να τον καταγράψει. Είναι ενδιαφέρον αν θέλετε να μάθετε περισσότερα για τη ζωή στη φυλακή, αλλά δεν είναι πραγματικά ένα έργο μυθιστοριογραφίας με την τυπικά υπέροχη δομή της πλοκής απο την πένα του λατρεμένου συγγραφέα.
Σε πολλά σημεία γίνεται μονότονος και επαναλαμβάνει ή τονίζει ιδιαιτέρως ψυχογραφήματα παρόμοια μεταξύ τους και ανώφελους διαξιφισμούς, στιχομυθίες και φυσιογνωμικές περιγραφές των έγκλειστων και κατεστημένων -προς επανένταξη- στην χιονισμένη κόλαση των καταναγκαστικών έργων και ημερών της Σιβηρίας.
Με κούρασες λίγο αγαπημένε αλλά σ’αγαπάω ακόμα πιο πολύ.
Όσο με πληγώνει τόσο με πορώνει. 3.5 ⭐️
💙
Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
ημι-αυτοβιογραφικό έργο που βασίζεται στην εξορία
του Ντοστογιέφσκι στη Σιβηρία όπου τιμωρήθηκε με «σκληρή εργασία» αφού αρχικά καταδικάστηκε να τιμωρηθεί με θάνατο από ομάδα εκτελεστικής αυτοκρατορικής πυροδότησης για τη συμμετοχή του στον κύκλο του Πετρασέφσκι,
μια λογοτεχνική ομάδα που υιοθέτησε ιδέες σε αντίθεση με τις τσαρικές αυτοκρατορίες και τις πολιτικές δουλείας σε μεγάλο μέρος της Ρωσίας.
Ο Ντοστογιέφσκι πέρασε τέσσερα χρόνια στην εξορία μετά την κοινοποίηση της ποινής του και στη συνέχεια αναγκάστηκε να στραφεί στο στρατό μέχρι να ανακουφιστεί και να επανέλθει, λόγω κακής υγείας (πιστεύεται ότι ήταν η επιληψία που τον βασάνιζε).
Στις αναμνήσεις απο το σπίτι των πεθαμένων, των κατεργιτών, των δολοφόνων, των πολιτικών κρατουμένων, των σκληροπυρηνικών ισοβιτών, των απλών μουζίκων και γενικώς όλων των βίοψυχολογικών ειδών της ανθρώπινης ράτσας, αυτό το βαθύτατα εμπνευσμένο απο εγκεφαλικά χαοτικές και εν βρασμώ ψυχής επιρροές μυθιστόρημα εξερευνά υπέροχα και τις σκέψεις των χαρακτήρων του ενώ ερευνά τα βάθη της ανθρώπινης ψυχής.
Περιγράφοντας με απεριόριστη λεπτομέρεια τη σωματική και ψυχική ταλαιπωρία των καταδίκων, ο χαρακτήρας του Ντοστογιέφσκι δεν χάνει ποτέ την πίστη του στις ανθρώπινες ιδιότητες και την καλοσύνη του ανθρώπου.
Ένα στοιχειωμένο και αξιοθαύμαστο έργο γεμάτο θαύμα και παραίτηση στις στέπες της Σιβηρίας
Ακολουθώντας την ιστορία του Αλέξανδρου Πέτροβιτς και της εξορίας του στη Σιβηρία ως ένας αριστοκρατικά επιτηδευμένα «ευγενής». Ποτέ δεν πήρε το χρίσμα των συντρόφων ως κατάδικος που εντάσσεται σε μια ζούγκλα αποτελούμενη απο άγρια θηρία μέχρι άκακα και παντελώς εγκλιματισμένα οικόσιτα σαρκοφάγα με
ανθρώπινη μορφή.
Έζησε στα κάτεργα των ανύπαρκτων προς την κοινωνία, των νεκρών που πάλευαν να ξεθάψουν τους απελπισμένους μα ζωντανούς και χαμένους στην φθορά εαυτούς τους απο τον ίδιο τους τον τάφο που είχε άφθαρτες ψυχές μέσα σε τούβλινα φέρετρα.
Των εργαζόμενων σκληρά ανάμεσα σε ζώντες και τεθνεώτες υπό άθλιες συνθήκες, για δέκα χρόνια, όταν παραδόθηκε στις αρχές αφού δολοφόνησε τη γυναίκα του.
Όπου πηγαίνουν οι ψυχές των ζωντανών που έχουν πεθάνει.
Ο Σιβηριανός κόλπος πριν επινοηθεί το όνομα.
Ένα ταξίδι ανθρώπινων πνευμάτων που προσπαθούν να επιβιώσουν όχι εύκολα, από όλα όσα απαιτούνται για τη ζωή.
«Παντού νεκροί και πτώματα. Όλες τις ώρες και όλες τις μέρες. Βρέφη και διαλυμένα γερόντια, έφηβοι και ανέγγιχτες θυγατέρες πέφτουν ξέπνοοι σαν να κατρακυλούν από τον ουρανό. Τους σηκώνουν άρον άρον και τους τραβούν στα νεκροτομεία, τους βάζουν στα άθλια συρτάρια του ψυκτικού νεκροθαλάμου, για να τους φυτέψουν την άλλη μέρα στη νεκρούπολη της ενορίας τους. Μελλοντικός νεκρός ο καθένας μας, κυκλοφορεί ανάμεσα σε τωρινούς και αβοήθητους νεκρούς».
Λατρεύω τον Ντόστο, έχω διαβάσει τα περισσότερα έργα του, οπότε επιτρέπεται σε αυτόν τον βετεράνο της Ρωσικής λογοτεχνικής κληρονομιάς στην παγκόσμια γραμματεία να γίνω λίγο παραπάνω επικριτική. Απομακρύνεται σημαντικά από τους τύπους δομών πλοκών που χρησιμοποιεί σε άλλα μυθιστορήματα.
Ο λόγος για αυτό έχει νόημα - βασίστηκε στη δική του εμπειρία στη Σιβηρία, και πιθανότατα ήταν κάπως καθαρτικός εως καθαιρετικός για να τον καταγράψει. Είναι ενδιαφέρον αν θέλετε να μάθετε περισσότερα για τη ζωή στη φυλακή, αλλά δεν είναι πραγματικά ένα έργο μυθιστοριογραφίας με την τυπικά υπέροχη δομή της πλοκής απο την πένα του λατρεμένου συγγραφέα.
Σε πολλά σημεία γίνεται μονότονος και επαναλαμβάνει ή τονίζει ιδιαιτέρως ψυχογραφήματα παρόμοια μεταξύ τους και ανώφελους διαξιφισμούς, στιχομυθίες και φυσιογνωμικές περιγραφές των έγκλειστων και κατεστημένων -προς επανένταξη- στην χιονισμένη κόλαση των καταναγκαστικών έργων και ημερών της Σιβηρίας.
Με κούρασες λίγο αγαπημένε αλλά σ’αγαπάω ακόμα πιο πολύ.
Όσο με πληγώνει τόσο με πορώνει. 3.5 ⭐️
💙
Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
July 16, 2017
Me ha sorprendido principalmente por no ser tan traumático como esperaba. Y no es que no cuente cosas espantosas de cómo eran las prisiones y los trabajos forzados en Siberia, pero es que Dosto también es capaz de hablar de los presidiarios con cariño y reflejar momentos increíblemente entrañables.
Aún así se me ha hecho largo y denso, una lectura para tomarse con mucha calma.
Aún así se me ha hecho largo y denso, una lectura para tomarse con mucha calma.
July 2, 2021
خطر ببالي ذات يوم أنه إذا أريد إهلاك إنسان، ومعاقبته بفظاعة، وسحقه سحقًا شديدًا حد أن يرتجف أمام هذا العقاب، ويرتاع منه سلفًا حتى أعتى القتلة؛ يكفي أن تضفي على عمله صفة عدم الجدوى تمامًا، لا، بل العبثية
حقًا يا رفاق، لماذا نبقى هنا؟، ماذا نفعل هنا؟
إننا نحيا بلا حياة، أموات بلا موت.
دوستويفسكي يحدثكم.. منذ أكثر من قرن ونصف من الزمان
July 23, 2019
رواية "ذكريات من منزل الأموات" لـ #دوستويفسكي تشبه جولة ذهنية في منطق السجن، ومنطق القانون، ومنطق الجريمة.. تشعرك أنك تشرّح السيكولوجية البشرية تحت المِجهر.
September 15, 2018
نقدی بدون عنوان بندی
فیلسوفان قاره ای معتقدند که پراکسیس (یا همان ممارست)، مهمترین عامل تعالی بخش انسان است. این قولی است که پیش از این فیلسوفان یونان و پیش از آنان حکمای شرقی نیز بسیار به آن تاکید داشته اند. شاید این نکته در ابتدا بسیار پیش پا افتاده به نظر بیاید. ولی اگر ببینید چه نظریه های عجیبی از دل همین نکته پیش پا افتاده بیرون کشیده شده تعجب می کنید: اگر سروش در «بسط تجربه نبوی» ادعا می کند که پیامبر به تدریج پیامبرتر شده است؛ اگر گادامر معتقد است نبوغ تربیت میشود و اگر هایدگر میگفت شاعر راه زبان به حقیقت را به تدریج روشنتر می یابد و... همه با این نکته ساده قابل هضم است که پراکسیس یا تمرین یا ممارست یا به قول دیهیمی «ورزه»، روح را مستعد پذیرش چیزی میکند که به تمامه مخلوق خود او نیست، ولی اگر او نبود، در دنیای ما بازتاب نداشت. اگر نیوتن نبود، اگر مولوی نبود، اگر پیامبران نبودند، اگر شاعران و نویسندگان بزرگ نبودند که چیزهایی را دریافت و به جهان ما باز بتابانند، جهان ما چه بود؟
داستایوفسکی هم یکی از همین رسولان است، یکی از آینه داران. کسی که اگر نبود، برادران کارامازروف، ابله، جنایت و مکافات و البته جن زدگانی در دنیای ما وجود نداشت. ولی وقتی پیامبر پیامبرتر میشود، مگر میشود نویسنده ای نویسنده تر نشود؟ مثل روز برای من روشن شده که بین آثار اولیه داستایوفسکی با آثار متاخر او تفاوت فاحشی وجود دارد. رمانهای نیمه اول عمر حرفه ای داستایوفسکی، از بیچارگان (1846) تا همین خاطرات خانه اموات (1862) با نوعی وسواس و فاصله همراه است. داستایوفسکی شخصیت های خود را نیمه کاره رها میکند و داستان را همچون یک روزنامه نگار «گزارش» میکند. ولی نیمه دوم عمر حرفه ای او، از یادداشت های زیرزمینی (1864) تا برادران کارامازوف (1880) ناگهان گویی تصمیم میگیرد بجای گزارش، به روایت زندگی انسانها بپردازد. خود را به عنوان راوی، بجای دانای کل به عنوان ناظر ماجرا قرار دهد و گویی انگار طرح گسترده ای از کل اندیشه خود در آثار مختلفش نشان دهد: اینکه انسان محق رنج نیست، ولی رنج (نه عقل، نه لذت و نه مبارزه) او را میرهاند
خاطرات خانه اموات، همانطور که از تو��یح بالا معلوم است، روی مرز است. فرم نیمه دوم و محتوای نیمه اول را دارد. راوی ناظری شخصی است (یک زندانی که از دیگر زندانیان «فاصله» دارد) و با تجربه های شخصی خود داستایوفسکی (دوران حبس در سیبری) هم به خوبی آمیخته شده است. ایده های داستان بسیار بدیع و قابل تاملند. مثلا اینکه چرا زندانی ها با هم دعوا میکنند، چرا از هم دزدی میکنند، مثلا اینکه فرق همبستگی زندانیها با افراد آزاد در چیست، فرق کار خودانگیخته و کار اجباری در چیست، یا چرا باید قاتلین مختلف (قاتل کودک، زن، متجاوز، دزد و...) بدون توجه به ماهیت مقتول یکسان مجازات شوند، و یا مفاهیمی مثل انتقام، اتهام، مجرم، نام فروشی، نام گذاری، خودکشی و دیگرکشی و بسیاری نکات قابل توجه دیگر که همه در خاطرات خانه اموات طرح میشوند. اصلا تا به حال پرسیده اید چرا خاطرات خانه «اموات»؟
همه این مسائل کتاب حاضر را جذاب میکند، اما قلم داستایوفسکی و طرح داستان آن جذابیتی را که انتظار دارید برآورده نمیکند. بر خلاف ابله و جنایت و مکافات، طرح داستانی اثر بار جذابیت را به دوش نمیکشد. بر خلاف جن زدگان و براردان کارامازوف هم دیالوگها درخشش های جبران کننده ای ندارد. بر خلاف هر چهار اثر مذکور، شخصیت پردازیها یا صیقل خورده و درگیرکننده نیست یا به اندازه کافی به روی خواننده گشوده نمیشود. باید پذیرفت که داستایوفسکی هم به تدریج نویسنده تر شده است و آثار متاخر او به وضوح از آثار اولیه اش عمیقتر و جذابترند
جدا از این، ترجمه کتاب بسیار ضعیف بود. ترجمه مهرداد مهرین را نخوانید- ترجمه ای که بجای مجرم از مقصر، بجای نگهبان از مستحفظ و بجای هر حرف ربطی از مع ذلک استفاده میکند! همچنین نسخه کتاب صوتی آوای بوف هم بسیار ناامیدکننده و حوصله-سربر بود. باشد که تجربه شما از ترجمه دیگر این اثر تجربه بهتری از من باشد! ر
فیلسوفان قاره ای معتقدند که پراکسیس (یا همان ممارست)، مهمترین عامل تعالی بخش انسان است. این قولی است که پیش از این فیلسوفان یونان و پیش از آنان حکمای شرقی نیز بسیار به آن تاکید داشته اند. شاید این نکته در ابتدا بسیار پیش پا افتاده به نظر بیاید. ولی اگر ببینید چه نظریه های عجیبی از دل همین نکته پیش پا افتاده بیرون کشیده شده تعجب می کنید: اگر سروش در «بسط تجربه نبوی» ادعا می کند که پیامبر به تدریج پیامبرتر شده است؛ اگر گادامر معتقد است نبوغ تربیت میشود و اگر هایدگر میگفت شاعر راه زبان به حقیقت را به تدریج روشنتر می یابد و... همه با این نکته ساده قابل هضم است که پراکسیس یا تمرین یا ممارست یا به قول دیهیمی «ورزه»، روح را مستعد پذیرش چیزی میکند که به تمامه مخلوق خود او نیست، ولی اگر او نبود، در دنیای ما بازتاب نداشت. اگر نیوتن نبود، اگر مولوی نبود، اگر پیامبران نبودند، اگر شاعران و نویسندگان بزرگ نبودند که چیزهایی را دریافت و به جهان ما باز بتابانند، جهان ما چه بود؟
داستایوفسکی هم یکی از همین رسولان است، یکی از آینه داران. کسی که اگر نبود، برادران کارامازروف، ابله، جنایت و مکافات و البته جن زدگانی در دنیای ما وجود نداشت. ولی وقتی پیامبر پیامبرتر میشود، مگر میشود نویسنده ای نویسنده تر نشود؟ مثل روز برای من روشن شده که بین آثار اولیه داستایوفسکی با آثار متاخر او تفاوت فاحشی وجود دارد. رمانهای نیمه اول عمر حرفه ای داستایوفسکی، از بیچارگان (1846) تا همین خاطرات خانه اموات (1862) با نوعی وسواس و فاصله همراه است. داستایوفسکی شخصیت های خود را نیمه کاره رها میکند و داستان را همچون یک روزنامه نگار «گزارش» میکند. ولی نیمه دوم عمر حرفه ای او، از یادداشت های زیرزمینی (1864) تا برادران کارامازوف (1880) ناگهان گویی تصمیم میگیرد بجای گزارش، به روایت زندگی انسانها بپردازد. خود را به عنوان راوی، بجای دانای کل به عنوان ناظر ماجرا قرار دهد و گویی انگار طرح گسترده ای از کل اندیشه خود در آثار مختلفش نشان دهد: اینکه انسان محق رنج نیست، ولی رنج (نه عقل، نه لذت و نه مبارزه) او را میرهاند
خاطرات خانه اموات، همانطور که از تو��یح بالا معلوم است، روی مرز است. فرم نیمه دوم و محتوای نیمه اول را دارد. راوی ناظری شخصی است (یک زندانی که از دیگر زندانیان «فاصله» دارد) و با تجربه های شخصی خود داستایوفسکی (دوران حبس در سیبری) هم به خوبی آمیخته شده است. ایده های داستان بسیار بدیع و قابل تاملند. مثلا اینکه چرا زندانی ها با هم دعوا میکنند، چرا از هم دزدی میکنند، مثلا اینکه فرق همبستگی زندانیها با افراد آزاد در چیست، فرق کار خودانگیخته و کار اجباری در چیست، یا چرا باید قاتلین مختلف (قاتل کودک، زن، متجاوز، دزد و...) بدون توجه به ماهیت مقتول یکسان مجازات شوند، و یا مفاهیمی مثل انتقام، اتهام، مجرم، نام فروشی، نام گذاری، خودکشی و دیگرکشی و بسیاری نکات قابل توجه دیگر که همه در خاطرات خانه اموات طرح میشوند. اصلا تا به حال پرسیده اید چرا خاطرات خانه «اموات»؟
همه این مسائل کتاب حاضر را جذاب میکند، اما قلم داستایوفسکی و طرح داستان آن جذابیتی را که انتظار دارید برآورده نمیکند. بر خلاف ابله و جنایت و مکافات، طرح داستانی اثر بار جذابیت را به دوش نمیکشد. بر خلاف جن زدگان و براردان کارامازوف هم دیالوگها درخشش های جبران کننده ای ندارد. بر خلاف هر چهار اثر مذکور، شخصیت پردازیها یا صیقل خورده و درگیرکننده نیست یا به اندازه کافی به روی خواننده گشوده نمیشود. باید پذیرفت که داستایوفسکی هم به تدریج نویسنده تر شده است و آثار متاخر او به وضوح از آثار اولیه اش عمیقتر و جذابترند
جدا از این، ترجمه کتاب بسیار ضعیف بود. ترجمه مهرداد مهرین را نخوانید- ترجمه ای که بجای مجرم از مقصر، بجای نگهبان از مستحفظ و بجای هر حرف ربطی از مع ذلک استفاده میکند! همچنین نسخه کتاب صوتی آوای بوف هم بسیار ناامیدکننده و حوصله-سربر بود. باشد که تجربه شما از ترجمه دیگر این اثر تجربه بهتری از من باشد! ر
November 17, 2025
من عادتي أن أعيد قراءة مفضلتي من الكتب بعد أن يتسلل النسيان إلى الذاكرة، ورغم أن القراءة الثانية غالباً ما تكون أقل إبهاراً من الأولى إلا أن ذكريات من منزل الأموات وبعد القراءة الثانية لا تزال تحتفظ بعذريتها
مذكرات تنتمي إلى أدب السجون، ورغم أن هذا اللون من الكتابة قد يبعث على الإكتئاب والسوداوية إلا أن الوضع مختلف هنا
فالسجن ضاج بالحياة كما يصوره دوستويفسكي
ورغم أن هذه المشاهد قد تبدوا عاديه في السجون أو بالأحرى هي مألوفة إلا أن نظرة دوستويفسكي لها يجعل منها شيئاً استثنائياً وهذا سر عبقريتة وشقائه في نفس الوقت لأن من يملك رهافة الحس لا بد أن يتأذى وهذا ما جعل عذابه مضاعفا في السجن
دوستويفسكي الذي انشغل بتأمل السجناء ومراقبتهم وتحليل أفعالهم ورغباتهم ونزوراتهم بعين المراقب الحذق ولا أشك إنه وجد بعض السلوى في ذلك وخفف عنه بعض قسوة السجن
لا أدري كيف غير دوستويفسكي نظرتي للسجناء، فأصبحت أنظر إليهم بعين الشفقة والرحمة رغم أن فيهم القتلة والمغتصبين وقطاع الطرق،وجعلني أدرك أن الفرق بيني وبينهم قد يبدوا أقل مما أتخيل ولولا حسن حظي وسوء حظهم لجعلني بينهم ،
فمن يدري فقد لا يكون هؤلاء شرا من الآخرين الطلقاء الذين نراهم بيننا
سجناء مختلفين اختلافاً شاسعا ورغم ذلك يطلب منهم أن يتعايشوا مع بعض في حيز ضيق
أعجبني كثيراً تنوع شخصيات السجناء ، شخصيات ما كنت أظن أن لها وجود ، شخصيات رغم اجرامها إلا أنها تحتفظ كذلك بمبادئ وأخلاق، ولا أشك أن دوستويفسكي استلهم بعض هذه الشخصيات في رواياته
فصل عيد الميلاد وفصل التمثيل وفصل حيوانات السجن
فصول مؤثرة وانسانية
وأخيراً اتسائل كما تسائل دوستويفسكي
هل يعقل أن يشعر هؤلاء الرجال جميعا شعوراً واحداً بالعقوبة؟؟؟
لماذا بعضهم يذوي كما تذوي الشمعة وبعضهم لا يكاد يبالي؟؟؟؟
مذكرات تنتمي إلى أدب السجون، ورغم أن هذا اللون من الكتابة قد يبعث على الإكتئاب والسوداوية إلا أن الوضع مختلف هنا
فالسجن ضاج بالحياة كما يصوره دوستويفسكي
ورغم أن هذه المشاهد قد تبدوا عاديه في السجون أو بالأحرى هي مألوفة إلا أن نظرة دوستويفسكي لها يجعل منها شيئاً استثنائياً وهذا سر عبقريتة وشقائه في نفس الوقت لأن من يملك رهافة الحس لا بد أن يتأذى وهذا ما جعل عذابه مضاعفا في السجن
دوستويفسكي الذي انشغل بتأمل السجناء ومراقبتهم وتحليل أفعالهم ورغباتهم ونزوراتهم بعين المراقب الحذق ولا أشك إنه وجد بعض السلوى في ذلك وخفف عنه بعض قسوة السجن
لا أدري كيف غير دوستويفسكي نظرتي للسجناء، فأصبحت أنظر إليهم بعين الشفقة والرحمة رغم أن فيهم القتلة والمغتصبين وقطاع الطرق،وجعلني أدرك أن الفرق بيني وبينهم قد يبدوا أقل مما أتخيل ولولا حسن حظي وسوء حظهم لجعلني بينهم ،
فمن يدري فقد لا يكون هؤلاء شرا من الآخرين الطلقاء الذين نراهم بيننا
سجناء مختلفين اختلافاً شاسعا ورغم ذلك يطلب منهم أن يتعايشوا مع بعض في حيز ضيق
أعجبني كثيراً تنوع شخصيات السجناء ، شخصيات ما كنت أظن أن لها وجود ، شخصيات رغم اجرامها إلا أنها تحتفظ كذلك بمبادئ وأخلاق، ولا أشك أن دوستويفسكي استلهم بعض هذه الشخصيات في رواياته
فصل عيد الميلاد وفصل التمثيل وفصل حيوانات السجن
فصول مؤثرة وانسانية
وأخيراً اتسائل كما تسائل دوستويفسكي
هل يعقل أن يشعر هؤلاء الرجال جميعا شعوراً واحداً بالعقوبة؟؟؟
لماذا بعضهم يذوي كما تذوي الشمعة وبعضهم لا يكاد يبالي؟؟؟؟
October 24, 2024
A masterpiece, without a doubt. It is an autobiographical novella, a unique document that depicts prison life, customs, and the stories of real prisoners Dostoevsky encountered during his years in a penal colony. He was sent there after his death sentence, imposed for political reasons, was commuted to hard labor. The text is so vivid, and the characters so textured and recognizable, that it grips from the very first pages. Drawing on his personal experience of imprisonment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, like a Russian Dante descending into hell, explores the psychology of prisoners, the theme of suffering, and the possibility of preserving human dignity under extreme conditions. This work is not just a prison novel, but a profound exploration of human nature and the capacity to maintain inner freedom despite physical and moral trials.
August 28, 2022
خاطرات خانهی اموات همونطور که از اسمش مشخصه «داستان» نیست و خاطرات بر پایهی حقیقت ولی در نقشی داستانی هست. خاطرات واقعی نویسنده از سالهای زندانش اما از زبان شخصی غیرواقعی که ده سال به زندان محکوم شده، زندانی در سیبری. در طول این کتاب در مورد شرایط زندان و زندانی ها، نحوهی حمام کردن، نوع غذا و غذا خوردن، بیمار شدن و بیمارستان، نحوهی برخورد زندانی ها با هم، طریقهی برپا کردن جشن کریسمس، مراودات مالی و مطالبی از این قبیل توضیح داده شده و قسمت جالب در کل کتاب جملات و نگاههای روانشناسانهی نویسنده هست که مثلا آیا زندانی ها به شرایط خودشون عادت میکنن؟ آیا بعد از مدت زندان به زندگی عادی بر میگردند؟ احوال و اوضاع محکومین هنگام اجرای احکام شلاق، و روابط زندانی ها با هم و یا حتی برخورد زندانی ها با حیوانات.ه
April 14, 2021
More a series of vignettes and abject realism describing his time in a Siberian prison for four years, Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes something that weighs heavy on the heart even while the book does not describe any kind of plot or true closure.
That's okay. He writes fantastically plotted books later on and he draws from his intense despair and sharp eye in the human psyche in those later novels in amazing ways. This one, however, is still quite rich and lush with characters and details, immersing us in truly morbid circumstances without quite destroying us.
What do I mean? Well, Dostoyevsky is well aware of the nastiness of the human condition and having experienced some of the worst effects of being on the bottom of the rung, while also having such an intense desire to see the best in anything, find even the tiniest of sparks of optimism, this book is an awesome example of dichotomies.
I loved the joy of having meat on one of the three holidays that even convicts could celebrate. I loved the spectacle and the play. I loved the revels and the consequences of smuggling. I loved the way that the hospitals were used to hide and escape the otherwise horrible conditions, even when the reused hospital gowns weren't cleaned, full of lice, seeping scabs, other excretable decaying matter.
And then there were the convicts themselves. So many intrigues and floggings, intimidation, and crazy hierarchies. And of course, the crimes and the punishments. The whole place is a malicious spider sucking the vitality out of all its inhabitants.
It is pretty hardcore. Of course, there are many other modern examples, so much so that it is a genre as prison fiction, but this is still pretty unique and VERY autobiographical.
So why didn't I give it a full five stars?
Put simply, I didn't really ENJOY it as anything other than an analytical exercise.
Fans of Dostoyevsky should still focus on Crime and Punishment and especially The Brothers Karamazov.
That's okay. He writes fantastically plotted books later on and he draws from his intense despair and sharp eye in the human psyche in those later novels in amazing ways. This one, however, is still quite rich and lush with characters and details, immersing us in truly morbid circumstances without quite destroying us.
What do I mean? Well, Dostoyevsky is well aware of the nastiness of the human condition and having experienced some of the worst effects of being on the bottom of the rung, while also having such an intense desire to see the best in anything, find even the tiniest of sparks of optimism, this book is an awesome example of dichotomies.
I loved the joy of having meat on one of the three holidays that even convicts could celebrate. I loved the spectacle and the play. I loved the revels and the consequences of smuggling. I loved the way that the hospitals were used to hide and escape the otherwise horrible conditions, even when the reused hospital gowns weren't cleaned, full of lice, seeping scabs, other excretable decaying matter.
And then there were the convicts themselves. So many intrigues and floggings, intimidation, and crazy hierarchies. And of course, the crimes and the punishments. The whole place is a malicious spider sucking the vitality out of all its inhabitants.
It is pretty hardcore. Of course, there are many other modern examples, so much so that it is a genre as prison fiction, but this is still pretty unique and VERY autobiographical.
So why didn't I give it a full five stars?
Put simply, I didn't really ENJOY it as anything other than an analytical exercise.
Fans of Dostoyevsky should still focus on Crime and Punishment and especially The Brothers Karamazov.
December 14, 2023
اثری متفاوت از داستایوفسکی که میشه در ژانر خاطرهنگاری و یا مشاهدات و نان فیکشن هم قرار داد،
داستایوفسکی قبل از جنایت و مکافات ،بسیار متفاوت هست از جنایت و مکافات به بعد.
داستایوفسکی قبل از جنایت و مکافات ،بسیار متفاوت هست از جنایت و مکافات به بعد.
January 12, 2024
This account of Siberian prison life is considered to be strongly autobiographical. Here is an observation of his fellow prisoners:
Speaking generally, I may say that, with the exception of a few indefatigably cheerful fellows who were consequently regarded with contempt by everyone, they were all sullen, envious, dreadfully vain, boastful people, prone to take offence and great sticklers for good form. Not to be surprised at anything was regarded as the greatest merit.
Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for being part of a literary circle that read banned books (book banning is never pretty). After experiencing a mock execution, which he believed was to be real, his sentence was commuted to 4 years in Siberia, followed by 6 years of military service. His prison experiences are the basis for this splendid little book.
All that time, though I had hundreds of companions, I was fearfully lonely, and at last I grew fond of that loneliness.
Ostracized in prison because of his class, his upper class ordeal was supposedly more arduous — because peasants are used to hardship, and so don't mind it, or even notice, apparently.
This book is based on characters rather than plot. It is both illuminating and boring, and I found it something to be endured, rather like a prison sentence itself. Eventually it will be over, and by then, one thinks of it almost fondly.
5 stars because it is Dostoevsky, and had moments of brilliance — plus Tolstoy loved this book.
Speaking generally, I may say that, with the exception of a few indefatigably cheerful fellows who were consequently regarded with contempt by everyone, they were all sullen, envious, dreadfully vain, boastful people, prone to take offence and great sticklers for good form. Not to be surprised at anything was regarded as the greatest merit.
Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for being part of a literary circle that read banned books (book banning is never pretty). After experiencing a mock execution, which he believed was to be real, his sentence was commuted to 4 years in Siberia, followed by 6 years of military service. His prison experiences are the basis for this splendid little book.
All that time, though I had hundreds of companions, I was fearfully lonely, and at last I grew fond of that loneliness.
Ostracized in prison because of his class, his upper class ordeal was supposedly more arduous — because peasants are used to hardship, and so don't mind it, or even notice, apparently.
This book is based on characters rather than plot. It is both illuminating and boring, and I found it something to be endured, rather like a prison sentence itself. Eventually it will be over, and by then, one thinks of it almost fondly.
5 stars because it is Dostoevsky, and had moments of brilliance — plus Tolstoy loved this book.
December 30, 2014
Translator's Introduction
--The House of the Dead
Notes
Chronology
Further Reading
--The House of the Dead
Notes
Chronology
Further Reading
August 5, 2019
اگر قرار باشد دنیای داستایفسکی را با چند واژه کلیدی معرفی کنیم، بی شک یکی از آن ها رنج است و این کتاب سراسر رنج است
رنج رنج رنج ...
رنج رنج رنج ...
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