The House of the Dead
A gentleman convict sets down ten years in a Siberian stockade: the shaved heads and leg irons, the bathhouse, the Christmas theatricals, the murderers who are courteous and the petty thieves who are not. Class survives the levelling, since the peasant prisoners never forgive him his birth, and labour without purpose is identified as the cruellest punishment a state can devise. Dostoevsky served four years at Omsk after the mock execution of the Petrashevsky circle and published the account barely fictionalised.
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