In 1849, at the age of 28, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in Siberia. Among thieves and murderers, like Russians before him and since, he survived stupefying and mindless degradation. But he never lost faith in the human qualities of his fellow inmates, and from his prison experience he emerged spiritually strengthened.

THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, presented in fictional form as the memoirs of a man condemned to 10 years of penal servitude for murdering his wife, is in essence the account of this period of Dostoevsky's life.