Notes from a Dead House (Everyman’s Library Classics Series)

This is a beautiful beribboned volume from Everyman’s Library in keeping with their respect for great literature. Even the page paper is a sensual delight. In the foreword, the translators continue the respectful presentation; even without speaking a word of Russian, I trust them to be true to the original writing of Dostoevsky.

Like Victor Hugo, contemporaneous with Dostoevsky, these authors witnessed uprisings by the downtrodden and sympathized with their plight. Both authors were exiled for five years for their writing in political opposition to their ruling governments. Dostoevsky so enraged the Tsar, that the Tsar personally arranged that the writer is condemned to death and orchestrated the sham execution which he could commute at the very last minute to a transfer to Siberia. Imagine, if you will, one of the most beautiful and sensitive natures of our culture sent to a house of hardened criminals where hard work was the only reprieve from their mutual locked chamber of deprivation. Even in such a place, such was his nature, that the writer found beauty and humanity in the most desperate of men. As oppressed as he was, the writer found the characters for many of his most famous novels; the cruelness of crime and the injustice sometimes found in punishment.