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Kelsey Ford: From the Stacks: J. M. Ledgard's Submergence (0 comment)
Our blog feature, "From the Stacks," features our booksellers’ favorite older books: those fortuitous used finds, underrated masterpieces, and lesser known treasures. Basically: the books that we’re the most passionate about handselling. This week, we’re featuring Kelsey F.’s pick, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard...
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Notes from a Dead House

by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
Notes from a Dead House

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ISBN13: 9780307959591
ISBN10: 0307959597
Condition: Like New


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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

Together, RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY have translated works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov, Leskov, and Pasternak. They were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina), and their translation of Dostoevsky's Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.

Synopsis

From the acclaimed translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky comes a new translation of the first great prison memoir: Fyodor Dostoevsky's fictionalized account of his life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.

In 1849 Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for his participation in a utopian socialist discussion group. The account he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, was the first book to reveal life inside the Russian penal system. The book not only brought him fame but also founded the tradition of Russian prison writing.

Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead) is filled with vivid details of brutal punishments, shocking conditions, feuds and betrayals, and the psychological effects of the loss of freedom, but it also describes moments of comedy and acts of kindness. There are grotesque bathhouse and hospital scenes that seem to have come straight from Dante's Inferno, alongside daring escape attempts, doomed acts of defiance, and a theatrical Christmas celebration that draws the entire community together in a temporary suspension of their grim reality.

To get past government censors, Dostoevsky made his narrator a common-law criminal rather than a political prisoner, but the perspective is unmistakably his own. His incarceration was a transformative experience that nourished all his later works, particularly Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky's narrator discovers that even among the most debased criminals there are strong and beautiful souls. His story reveals the prison as a tragedy both for the inmates and for Russia; it is, finally, a profound meditation on freedom: "The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being."


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jeffreyralford , May 31, 2015 (view all comments by jeffreyralford)
Pevear and Volokhonsky continue their methodical translation project of all the Russian greats. We're sort of a strange point in their career, as they've already done classics like The Brother Karamazov and War & Peace, and there's not a whole lot of major works left to check off their list. Notes from a Dead House is certainly not essential Dostoevsky: it's an early work that recounts the author's four years spent at a prison camp in Siberia in the 1850s. Russia's prisons were populated with a strange split of political prisoners and more aggressive, violent lawbreakers. Dostoevsky was the former (arrested for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle), and much of Notes from a Dead House addresses the rift between "prison nobility" like Dostoevsky and the common criminals. Dostoevsky strives to see everyone as equals, but the inherent class system of the era is an unavoidable complication. Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is clunky at times, and its probably best to trust that their decisions are in step with the original Russian: otherwise you might get stuck wondering endlessly why it was necessary to change the title from "House of the Dead" to a "Dead House", and so on. Still, a deeply illuminating read that ushers in the author's philosophical, psychological novels like Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780307959591
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
03/24/2015
Publisher:
PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
Pages:
336
Height:
1.30IN
Width:
6.40IN
Thickness:
1.50
Author:
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translator:
Richard Pevear
Translator:
Larissa Volokhonsky
Media Run Time:
B
Subject:
Literature-A to Z

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