Notes from a Dead House

Goryanchikov, a gentleman, Siberia, ten years, a wife-murder on the paper. Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House is the camp as a world: peasant convicts, malice, ingenuity, a spiritual thaw that ends in release. Adelphi ebook, semi-autobiographical. Not a thriller. Humanity under a sentence, energy that the prison cannot quite kill. Russian hard labour as a book of faces. The narrator learning to see the men who hate his class. A dead house that still works, sings, and waits.