Novel · 1860–62
Notes from the House of the Dead
Записки из Мёртвого дома
A semi-fictional portrait of a Siberian prison camp, drawn from his own years in Omsk.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881 · Russia As an Amazon Associate, The Put’ earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.
The narrator, a nobleman convicted of murdering his wife, is sent to a Siberian prison camp and writes down what he sees: the daily routines, the punishments, the strange mix of tenderness and cruelty among convicts of every background. The book is a novel in form, but it is built directly from Dostoevsky's own four years of hard labour in Omsk.
Published in instalments from 1860, it was among the first works to show Russian readers what life in the camps was really like. The Omsk years left their mark on everything he wrote afterwards.
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