Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

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His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

Petrov, an externally quiet and polite man who befriends Alexander Petrovich and often seeks his company, apparently for edification on matters of knowledge. Under Two Dictators 3 Margarete Buber-Neumann plain 2021-12-17T19:14:30+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 1947 Margarete Buber-Neumann 49. But it makes just as much sense to read the book as a display of what writing can do to disclose—and sustain—the very kind of inwardness that labor camps are supposed to squash out.Ward 7 2 Valery Yakovlevich Tarsis plain 2021-12-17T19:13:26+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 1965 Valery Yakovlevich Tarsis 55. Other Russias 4 Victoria Valentinovna Lomasko plain 2023-05-09T14:31:05+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 2017 Victoria Valentinovna Lomasko 55. Grey is the Color of Hope 2 Irina Borisovna Ratushinskaya plain 2021-12-17T19:20:29+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 1988 Irina Borisovna Ratushinskaya 54.

Dostoyevsky didn’t complete the book until six years after his release, and across its two main parts you can feel him at once organizing his memories, artfully revising them, and struggling to get them down before they fade. He concludes that the existence of the prison, with its absurd practices and savage corporal punishments, is a tragic fact, both for the prisoners and for Russia. His 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature. A testament to the power of the human will, the way it can marshal patience and imagination and hope against the most nightmarish assaults on human dignity. Few books give such a vivid picture of the sort of setting from which many great works of prison literature emerge; at the same time, few show such concern for the possibility of prison literature in the first place.

In this extensive biography of Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank situates Dostoevsky’s works in their personal, historic, and ideological contexts. The rest of the novel is presented by Dostoevsky as first-person notes from Goryanchikov’s time in prison. However, he is also astonished at the convicts' abilities to commit murders without the slightest change in conscience. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In Russian and French Prisons 2 Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin plain 2021-12-17T19:19:47+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 1886 Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin 59.

Freedom to Breathe" 2 Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn plain 2021-12-17T19:21:02+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 1960 Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn 54. The Gulag Archipelago 6 Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn plain 2021-12-17T19:20:19+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 1967 Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn 51. He undergoes extreme corporal punishment but is unbowed and quickly recovers his strength and spirit. Luka has murdered six people, occasionally brags of it, and wishes to be feared for it, but in fact no-one in the prison is the least bit afraid of him.He claims that it is the forced nature of penal labor, rather than the physical difficulty of it, that makes it so punishing. Nikita Sergeyevich Mikhalkov plain 2021-12-17T19:08:55+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 2007 Nikita Sergeyevich Mikhalkov 55. Imagine,” Dostoyevsky wrote his brother in a long letter immediately after his release, “an old, dilapidated, wooden construction, which was supposed to have been pulled down years ago, and which was no longer fit for use. Frank suggests that the memoir-novel's popularity with those who might ordinarily be antipathetic to Dostoevsky's prose style, is due to the composed and neutral tone of its narration and the vividness of the descriptive writing: "The intense dramatism of the fiction is here replaced by a calm objectivity of presentation; there is little close analysis of interior states of mind, and there are marvelous descriptive passages that reveal Dostoevsky's ability as an observer of the external world.

The account he wrote afterward, Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead), is filled with vivid details of brutal punishments, shocking conditions, and the psychological effects of the loss of freedom and hope, but also of the feuds and betrayals, the moments of comedy, and the acts of kindness he observed. The account he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, was the first book to reveal life inside the Russian penal system. In 1932 The House of the Dead was made into a film, directed by Vasili Fyodorov and starring Nikolay Khmelyov. Could I ever have imagined how terrible and tormenting it would be that, in all the ten years of my term, not once, not for a single minute, would I be alone? It’s only after a lengthy description of his earliest encounter with the same Petrov that it occurs to him to connect the character with an earlier story: “I will note, however, that this Petrov was the same one who had wanted to kill the major when he was summoned to be punished.He also undergoes a transformation over the course of his ordeal, as he discovers that even among the most debased criminals there are strong and beautiful souls. Across these three strange, dense sentences, the narrator drifts away from his initial epiphany and toward a second one. He also recounts stories of how fellow convicts attempt to find freedom in the confines of prison life.