Notes from a Dead House (Everyman's Library CLASSICS)

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One of the most harrowingly universal books Dostoevsky ever wrote. . . . It’s cause for no small celebration that the extraordinary series of translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky has now seized on Notes from The House of the Dead.”— The Buffalo News

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. Aristov an exceptionally corrupt and perverted nobleman who acts as a spy and informer. Repelled by his depravity, Alexander Petrovich refuses to enter in to relations with him. He is a man utterly submitted to corporeality and the basest impulses, with a conscience guided only by cold calculation. Alexander Petrovich says of him that "if he wanted a drink of brandy, and could only have got it by killing some one, he would not have hesitated one moment if it was pretty certain the crime would not come out." Fyodor Dostoevsky (1862). Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Pevear, Richard; Volokhonsky, Larissa. Vintage Books (published 2016). ISBN 978-0-307-94987-5. Petrov, an externally quiet and polite man who befriends Alexander Petrovich and often seeks his company, apparently for edification on matters of knowledge. Alexander Petrovich finds it hard to reconcile Petrov's sincere friendship and unfailing courtesy with the ever-present potential (attributed to him by all the other prisoners, including Alexander Petrovich) for the most extreme violence. In this sense, Petrov is thought to be the most dangerous and determined man in the prison.

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. Gradually Goryanchikov overcomes his revulsion at his situation and his fellow convicts, undergoing a spiritual re-awakening that culminates with his release from the camp.

The appearance of any new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is always an event in a literary season. . . . [A] powerful new translation." -- Open Letters Monthly The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1860–2 in the journal Vremya by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1862). Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Navrozov, Lev. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House (published 1950).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. 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.

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. Fedor Dostoyeffsky (1862). Buried Alive: or, Ten Years Penal Servitude in Siberia. Translated by von Thilo, Marie. London: Longman's, Green, and Co. (published 1881). Fyodor Dostoevsky (1862). Memoirs from the House of the Dead. Translated by Coulson, Jessie. Oxford University Press, Oxford World's Classics (published 1983). ISBN 9780199540518. In 1849 Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for his participation in a utopian socialist discussion group. 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. The book not only brought him fame but also founded the tradition of Russian prison writing.

My Book Notes

Aleksandr is a former convict whose posthumous narration of his experience in a Siberian forced labor camp reveals startling insight into the nature of incarceration. A nobleman who has fallen from grace for the murder of his wife, Aleksandr is a complex and well-educated man. His observations are true to life and faithfully describe the inmates as they were. Aleksandr is a deeply philosophical man, and he spends much of his time incarcerated musing on the rhythms and patterns of prison life, trying to decode the social dynamics which inform the relationships of prisoners to each other, to guards, and to their circumstances.

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.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. The appearance of any new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is always an event in a literary season. . . . [A] powerful new translation.”— Open Letters Monthly