The House of the Dead & Poor Folk

Poor Folk was the story that brought Dostoyevsky to fame, and reading it here you can see why. It is an extremely powerful and moving story. From the very beginning the story is dripping with emotion, and their pain and destitution are almost palpable to the reader. The letters passed between Makar and Varvara are filled with so many differing emotions and the longing that is so evidently present forces the reader to become involved in the story. Once that happens you find yourself rooting for these characters. You will find yourself sharing in their pain and rejoicing in every triumph no matter how fleeting they are. I am a pretty stoic individual. I don't wear my emotions on my sleeves, but with Poor Folk there were a few times where as I read I felt that lump in my throat and felt my eyes come close to filling up. There have been very few books that have ever affected me this strongly. It was simply powerful. The House of the Dead is another important Dostoyevsky work. What Dostoyevsky seems to do better than anyone else is to cut open all the veneer that covers and hides human beings. His writing is like a surgeon's knife that opens up the body and exposes what is inside. He shows readers the inner workings of the human mind like no other writer I have ever come across, and this is something he does very well here. I think one of the reasons this story needs to be read is to get a better understanding of Dostoyevsky himself. Even though this story is fiction, it still sheds light on his experience and gives the reader some greater insight into the man. Both of these stories are extremely important, and they are so well written that they are enjoyable reads as well. They don't require as much from the reader like some of his other works like The Brothers, but at the same time these books are just as rewarding. This book is the book that I would recommend to someone who hasn't read Dostoyevsky but is looking to. They are powerful works that are sure to make brand new fans, while at the same time they are not as involved and difficult as some of his longer works. Of course I don't have to recommend this book to any fan of Dostoyevsky because if you are a fan then you have gorged yourself on everything of his you can find.

"A whaling ship was my Harvard and my Yale!" That's what Herman Melville declared, approximately, through his mouthpeice Ishmael in his supreme novel-of-information Moby Dick. I'm fairly sure no critic has ever linked Melville and Dostoevsky - more specifically, Moby Dick and The House of the Dead - and I'd never have made the connection if I hadn't just re-read the former. Dostoevsky, nevertheless, celebrates much the same net learning experience; his four actual years in prison labor camps in western Siberia were the Harvard and Yale of his craft as a writer and of his "spiritual" regeneration. He says it specifically at the beginning of the penultimate chapter of House (An Escape), if you want to check. By that time in the book, his literary narrative mask has completely slipped and he surely is speaking for himself. Both Moby Dick and House of the Dead are survivor's tales. Both are told by first-person narrators, although Dostoevsky's surrogate narrator, Aleksandr Goryanchikov, is not fully consistent as a literary device. Both are extremely discursive and parenthetical, spending far more words on description of other inmates/crewmates than on themselves. Just as Moby Dick is as much an account of the whaling industry as a tale of adventure, House of the Dead is a journalistic description of the Tsarist prison facilities, both of their management and of their sociology. Readers looking for a story are likely to be under-stimulated by both books. Most important, both books reveal crises in the lives of their authors -- personal epiphanies almost concealed by the plethora of externalities -- but the two authors travel in opposite directions. Moby Dick is, on one level, a confrontation with loss of belief, a parabola from complacent faith to existential skepticism. Dostoevsky's parabola curves from naive individualism, expressed as political radicalism, to a "resurrection" and redemption based on religious mysticism. How odd that the two books were written within roughly a decade of each other! I started to read The House of the Dead with a different comparison in mind. I'd just finished Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and I expected to find some interesting similarities and/or contrasts between these two books about Russian imprisonments. 'Ivan' and 'House' do depict equivalent misery and viciousness in the Tsarist and the Stalinist labor-camp prisons in Siberia. 'House" is no a literary phosphorescent flare of the blue flame intensity of 'Ivan', so it might pass unnoticed that conditions hadn't changed much from 1850 to 1940. In fact, Dostoevsky distracts his readers from the horrors of his prison by including large swathes of humor, depictions of jollier times and of the little evasions and corruptions of the system that make prison almost tolerable. Dostoevsky undoubtably offers the more realistic and rounded portrait; reading the House of the Dead exposes the deliberate unreality of A Day in the Life. Solz