Fyodor Dostoevsky
The House of the Dead
1921 · 300 pages
- Author
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Edition
- A novel in two parts, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett; The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, volume V; first published 1915, fourth impression 1921
- Published
- London, William Heinemann, 1921
- Pages
- 300
- File
- DjVu, 39.5 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
The House of the Dead is Dostoevsky’s account of life in a Siberian prison, drawn from the four years of penal servitude he served in Omsk after his arrest in 1849. It appeared in instalments in 1860–62, largely in the journal Time that he edited with his brother Mikhail, and it restored his name with Russian readers after his years of exile.
To get the book past the censors, Dostoevsky presented it as the notes of a fictional nobleman, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, sentenced for murdering his wife. Through him the book describes the barracks, the work in fetters, the bath-house, the Christmas theatricals staged by the convicts, the prison hospital and the floggings, and, above all, the prisoners themselves: murderers, smugglers, Old Believers and Polish exiles, whose stories, such as “Akulka’s Husband”, are told in their own voices. Out of this experience came many of the themes of Dostoevsky’s later novels.
Tolstoy admired the book greatly. Constance Garnett’s translation came out in 1915 as the fifth volume of her series of Dostoevsky’s novels.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
Constance Garnett’s translation published by William Heinemann in London as volume V of The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The copyright page records first publication in February 1915 and a fourth impression of August 1921, printed by Richard Clay & Sons of Bungay, which is the copy scanned here; the title page is undated. Facing the title page is Heinemann’s list of Garnett’s translations of Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy, and a two-part contents list follows. The scanned copy comes from Columbia University library and carries digitisation notices; it has a text layer, in which words from the edge of the facing page sometimes appear.
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.