It might be an accurate translation – I don’t know because I can’t read Russian – but certain words just seemed out of place with the rest of the text. Some of the words chosen by the translator just struck me as odd and when I looked in the copyright section at the front of the book, I realised this translation was from 1956 (updated in 1965) which makes a lot of sense. One thing I noticed was how old-fashioned this translation seemed. Everything is connected together through common themes and I really liked the format that Dostoevsky used. Instead, it focuses on the stories of each prisoner and the events and the discussions that the narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, experiences during his time in prison.

It isn’t necessarily episodic, and I feel like each section did fit together in a coherent fashion, but there isn’t a traditional ‘plot’ in this novel. It’s clearly a memoir of Dostoevsky’s own time in exile in Siberia but it’s framed as a loose collection of facts.

I found myself gripped by Dostoevsky’s detailed description of prison life and the various characters he brought to life in this story. The House of the Dead was bleak and dark, full of descriptions of murder and philosophical thoughts about prison and ‘appropriate’ punishment, but it was also morbidly fascinating. I don’t really know what to say about this book. Terror and resignation – the rampages of a psychopath, the brief serene interlude of Christmas Day – are evoked by Dostoevsky, writing several years after his release, with a strikingly uncharacteristic detachment. The intricate 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. Summary: In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. Genre: Semi-autobiographical / Philosophical Fiction / Classics Title: Memoirs from the House of the Dead

Jessie coulson crime and punishment