The House of the Dead (Dover Thrift Editions)

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Luka has murdered six people, occasionally brags of it, and wishes to be feared for it, but in fact no-one in the prison is the least bit afraid of him. For Alexander Petrovich he represents a particular type:

And here now I am, reading, having read. Something indeed did happen. Something unidentifiable. But what exactly did the book do? So that my intellect does not become restless, I will give it a word to chew over and flaunt. Not the same word Leo Tolstoy used for this work: edifying; not the same word that settled on my mind for Dostoyevsky’s influence on an aspiring writer: uncorrupting; but: purging. The book purged me, emptied me, humbled me; cleaned me of the grime I had gathered over time. A very large focus of Fyodor’s narrative is his examination of the Russian character. It is unclear if any of the other prisoners described are based on actual convicts that Dostoyevsky knew during his incarceration. However, he provides a very interesting account of the attitudes and behaviors of several characters who have adapted to life of punishment and isolation. The House of the Dead is fragmented diary of a man convicted to the Siberian prison camp in Czarists Russia after murdering his wife. Often regarded as semi-autobiografical and closely connected to Dostoevsky's prison time that deeply changed him and irreversibly influenced his writing. Nosotros somos hombres destrozados, triturados, deshechos; no tenemos entrañas. Por eso gritamos de noche." Much of the writing is about the psychological tension of imprisonment by others, in a state where the personal agency is stripped of you, where in a sense, you get used to being shiftless.

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Dostoevsky gets more in his usual depth in describing the rise of tyranny in one’s psyche, the intoxication it offers, the profound drug that is hard to resist, and the indefinite power to hurt another human being and have complete power over them, most accurately manifested in the prison system of corporal punishment, which was by far a most striking chapter for me in depicting how physical violence changes the core of the psychological structure. The Major, the violent-tempered, tyrannical governor of the prison. He is described by Alexander Petrovich as "a spiteful, ill-regulated man, terrible above all things, because he possessed almost absolute power over two hundred human beings." Referred to by the prisoners as "the man with the eight eyes" due to his apparent omniscience, he is universally despised and feared. Las distintas experiencias vividas en el presidio son contadas en forma frontal, visceral por momentos, pero nunca de añoranza a los viejos tiempos ni de arrepentimiento. But in the spirit of his legacy, Dostoevsky does not give up hope in the remains of good in every person, no matter the degree of corruption or abasement, which makes his writing profoundly sanguine even in the depths of dreariness.

The House of the Dead has been, along with Resident Evil, credited with popularizing zombie video games as well as re-popularizing the zombie in mainstream popular culture from the late 1990s onwards, leading to renewed interest in zombie films during the 2000s. In 1927–1928, Leoš Janáček wrote an operatic version of the novel, with the title From the House of the Dead. It was his last opera. When once he has passed the fatal line, he is himself astonished to find that nothing sacred exists for him. He breaks through all laws, defies all powers, and gives himself boundless license... From time to time, the murderer will amuse himself by recalling his audacity, his lawlessness when he was in a state of despair. He likes at these moments to have some silly fellow before whom he can brag... "That is the sort of man I am," he says. Well, there is one thin framing device used for the book, it’s supposed to be the memoir of a fictional character who got ten years for murdering his wife. But that was included to avoid trouble with the official Russian censor. Contemporary readers took the book as “more or less a faithful account” of Dosto’s own experience. After prison he thought the peasants themselves, their intense spiritual realities and their stoicism, were the solution. He slept and ate and lived each miserable moment with them for five years, his prejudices melted away, and this was how it changed him.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. También es realmente crudo el modo en que nos cuenta la forma en la que los prisioneros eran azotados en sus espaldas y esto se relacionaba directamente a la gravedad de las penas que cumplían. Estos eran castigados con varazos que iban de los 500 hasta los 2000 azotes y se hacían en tandas, dado que era normal que el prisionero se desmayara luego de infligirles semejante un castigo tan violento en s Pretty much right out of the gate, Dostoyevsky shows what makes him a great writer in the second chapter of the book. This is the first chapter in which we get to see the prison and of course his writing makes it possible for us to experience the grimness of the prison as the protagonist Petrovitch does. However, he also gives us snapshot stories which are rarely more than a paragraph, in which he tells the story about his fellow inmates. One example is this story about a man who loses his wife to another man while in prison. According to Kim Newman in the book Nightmare Movies (2011), the " zombie revival began in the Far East" during the late 1990s, largely inspired by the Japanese zombie games Resident Evil and The House of the Dead. The success of these two 1996 zombie games inspired a wave of Asian zombie films, such as Bio Zombie (1998) and Versus (2000), for example. [19] The zombie revival which began in the Far East eventually went global following the worldwide success of Japanese zombie games such as Resident Evil and The House of the Dead. Their success led to a wave of Western zombie films during the 2000s, such as 28 Days Later (2002) and Shaun of the Dead (2004), for example. [19] In 2013, George Romero said it was the video games Resident Evil and House of the Dead "more than anything else" that popularised his zombie concept in mainstream popular culture. [20] [21]