Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Oxford World's Classics)
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Book Summary Information
Author: Fyodor DostoevskyEditor: Ronald Hingley
Translator: Jessie Coulson
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-08-01
ISBN: 0199540519
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Oxford World's Classics)
Book Review: Gulag Travelogue
Summary: 5 Stars
"A whaling ship was my Harvard and my Yale!" That's what Herman Melville declared, approximately, through his mouthpeice Ishmael in his supreme novel-of-information Moby Dick. I'm fairly sure no critic has ever linked Melville and Dostoevsky - more specifically, Moby Dick and The House of the Dead - and I'd never have made the connection if I hadn't just re-read the former. Dostoevsky, nevertheless, celebrates much the same net learning experience; his four actual years in prison labor camps in western Siberia were the Harvard and Yale of his craft as a writer and of his "spiritual" regeneration. He says it specifically at the beginning of the penultimate chapter of House (An Escape), if you want to check. By that time in the book, his literary narrative mask has completely slipped and he surely is speaking for himself.
Both Moby Dick and House of the Dead are survivor's tales. Both are told by first-person narrators, although Dostoevsky's surrogate narrator, Aleksandr Goryanchikov, is not fully consistent as a literary device. Both are extremely discursive and parenthetical, spending far more words on description of other inmates/crewmates than on themselves. Just as Moby Dick is as much an account of the whaling industry as a tale of adventure, House of the Dead is a journalistic description of the Tsarist prison facilities, both of their management and of their sociology. Readers looking for a story are likely to be under-stimulated by both books. Most important, both books reveal crises in the lives of their authors -- personal epiphanies almost concealed by the plethora of externalities -- but the two authors travel in opposite directions. Moby Dick is, on one level, a confrontation with loss of belief, a parabola from complacent faith to existential skepticism. Dostoevsky's parabola curves from naive individualism, expressed as political radicalism, to a "resurrection" and redemption based on religious mysticism. How odd that the two books were written within roughly a decade of each other!
I started to read The House of the Dead with a different comparison in mind. I'd just finished Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and I expected to find some interesting similarities and/or contrasts between these two books about Russian imprisonments. 'Ivan' and 'House' do depict equivalent misery and viciousness in the Tsarist and the Stalinist labor-camp prisons in Siberia. 'House" is no a literary phosphorescent flare of the blue flame intensity of 'Ivan', so it might pass unnoticed that conditions hadn't changed much from 1850 to 1940. In fact, Dostoevsky distracts his readers from the horrors of his prison by including large swathes of humor, depictions of jollier times and of the little evasions and corruptions of the system that make prison almost tolerable. Dostoevsky undoubtably offers the more realistic and rounded portrait; reading the House of the Dead exposes the deliberate unreality of A Day in the Life. Solzhenitsyn's Day cannot be extrapolated into Dostoevsky's years; 365 of Ivan's "days" in a row would be inconceivable. No one could survive them realistically. There's a summer even in Siberia.
Dostoevsky explicitly places his ego-surrogate in the House of the DEAD, from which his release constitutes a resurrection. Solzhenitsyn's Ivan is metaphorically in Hell, the frozen Hell of ancient northern myths. And now, having read these two books close together, I feel very strongly that Ivan Denisovich is intended as more than a portrait of an individual. Instead, he's a metaphor also, a synecdoche of the common folk of Russia imprisoned in the absurd inefficiency and misery of their Stalinist Hell. All the more amazing, isn't it, that Nikita K authorized the publication of 'Day'! Somebody in his office wasn't a very deep reader. 'A Day in the Life' is also a survivor's tale, but definitely not a resurrection myth. There's no further destination after Ivan's Hell; survival is perpetual defiance at best.
"The House of the Dead" isn't a great literary accomplishent. It can hardly be called a novel -- more a thinly disguised memoir -- but it's fascinating to read as a piece of sociology and it certainly opens the reader's comprehension of Dostoevsky's later masterpieces.
Summary of Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Oxford World's Classics)
In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Serbia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The inticate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to passages from Dante's Inferno. Terror and resignation - the rampages of a pyschopath, the brief serence interlude of Christmas Day - are evoked by Dostoevsky, writing several years after his release, with a strikingly uncharacteristic detachment. For this reason, House of the Dead is certainly the least Dostoevskian of his works, yet, paradoxically, it ranks among his great masterpieces.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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