The House of the Dead

Fictionalized memoir of a man serving as ten-year prison sentence for murdering his wife. Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a secret group of radical utopians, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian labor camp -- a terrible mental, spiritual, and physical ordeal that inspired him to write The House of the Dead. Told from the point of view of a fictitious narrator -- a convict serving a ten year sentence for murdering his wife -- The House of the Dead describes in vivid detail the horrors that Dostoevsky himself witnessed while in prison: the brutality of the guards who relished cruelty for its own sake; the evil of criminals who enjoy murdering children; and the existence of decent souls amid filth and degradation. Written in 1861, following Dostoevsky's own four-year prison internment, depicts the prison coffin with considerable immediacy.