Notes from A Dead House

In 1849 Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp. The account he wrote afterward, loosely fictionalized and framed by an editor who acquires the papers of an exiled nobleman, was the first book to reveal life inside the Russian penal system. It is filled with vivid details of brutal punishments, shocking conditions, feuds and betrayals, but also moments of comedy and acts of kindness. The narrator discovers that even among the most debased criminals there are strong and beautiful souls. A monumental meditation on freedom, in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.