Fyodor Dostoyevskys The House Of The Dead

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow on Nov. 11, 1825. As his father was a former military surgeon, Dostoyevsky grew up in the noble class.

He entered the military engineering school at St. Petersburg at age 16.

Shortly after graduating, he resigned his commission and devoted all his time to writing. However, he soon became caught up in the movement for political and social reform during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I. He began to participate in weekly discussions about the ideas of French utopian Socialists. This

Petrashevsky Circle was arrested in April 1849. After a long investigation,

Dostoyevsky, along with 20 other members of the Circle, were condemned to be shot. Literally moments before his execution was to occur, his sentence was commuted to four years hard labor in Omsk, Siberia. He accepted his punishment and began to regard many of the simple convicts as extraordinary people.

During his sentence, he became devoted to Orthodox Christianity.

The House of the Dead was initially published in Russia, 1860. Upon initial examination of the work, it appears to be a stream of consciousness account of Dostoyevsky's four years in a Siberian prison camp. But, upon further review, it seems to be more an account of Dostoyevsky's personality and attitudes through these years. In his first year in prison, Dostoyevsky “found myself hating these fellow-sufferers of mine.” (305) His first day in prison, several convicts approached him, a member of the noble class and no doubt very wealthy in the convicts' eyes, and asked him for money four times each; and each refusal seemed to bring more convicts. He quickly grew to spite these people, for they thought him to be an idiot, unable to remember that the very same convict had approached him for money not fifteen minutes earlier. (67-8)

But, Dostoyevsky makes a startling realization at the end of this first year, a discovery which allows him to drastically alter his personality: “...the convicts lived here not as if this were their home, but as some wayside inn, en route somewhere.” (303) this concept is followed by Dostoyevsky's realization that he wanted, unlike many other convicts in the camp, to live as he did before his imprisonment. He believed that “Physical, no less moral strength is required for penal servitude if one is to survive all the materiel deprivations of that accursed existence. And I wanted to go on living after I had left prison....” (277). The remaining twenty pages are anti-climatic; they simply deal with the change of a Major stationed at the prison and Dostoyevsky's