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A review by binstonbirchill
Notes from a Dead House by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4.0
Notes from a Dead House is Dostoevsky’s prison memoir thinly disguised as a novel. I’m working my way through 9 of Dostoevsky’s works, of which this is the second that I’m coming to. As with The Double, this is a good read for what he’s attempting to achieve, he hasn’t yet attempted anything the world will stand up and notice.
This work reads much easier than The Double, no doubt a large part of that is due to the insanity of Goliadkin. Here we get a very clear portrait of life in prison in Siberia. The camp is described in detail, loneliness, the food, the beatings where prisoners are commonly sentenced to being stuck four thousand times. There’s an array of fellow inmates presented from whom Dostoevsky begins formulating his ideas of the peasantry (he was a noble before being sentenced to prison). In some ways work saves them, as does the mad scramble for money just to have the freedom to choose to squander it (or have it stolen). And for what? And who is to blame? Those are Dostoevsky’s questions. Prison seems like a waste, and does it actually benefit society? I would answer that it’s situational and there’s way too many situations where it doesn’t, even more than 150 year later.
If you want to understand how Dostoevsky came to write his future novels this is a good one to check out, more so than The Double. Serves as a good prison memoir as well. Notes from the Underground is next.
This work reads much easier than The Double, no doubt a large part of that is due to the insanity of Goliadkin. Here we get a very clear portrait of life in prison in Siberia. The camp is described in detail, loneliness, the food, the beatings where prisoners are commonly sentenced to being stuck four thousand times. There’s an array of fellow inmates presented from whom Dostoevsky begins formulating his ideas of the peasantry (he was a noble before being sentenced to prison). In some ways work saves them, as does the mad scramble for money just to have the freedom to choose to squander it (or have it stolen). And for what? And who is to blame? Those are Dostoevsky’s questions. Prison seems like a waste, and does it actually benefit society? I would answer that it’s situational and there’s way too many situations where it doesn’t, even more than 150 year later.
If you want to understand how Dostoevsky came to write his future novels this is a good one to check out, more so than The Double. Serves as a good prison memoir as well. Notes from the Underground is next.