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Prison

'Clennam rose softly, opened and closed the door without a sound, and passed from the prison, carrying the quiet with him into the turbulent streets.' Introspective and dreamy, Arthur Clennam returns to England from many years abroad to find a people gripped in their self-made social and mental prisons. Against a background of government incompetence and financial scandal, he searches for the key to the affairs of the Dorrit family, prisoners for debt in the Marshalsea. He discovers through the seamstress Amy Dorrit the fulfilment of which he dreams, but only after he learns to understand his own heart. Revelation and redemption haunt Dickens's portrayal of human relations as fundamentally distorted by class and money. The swindling financier Merdle, the bureaucratic nightmare of the Circumlocution Office, and a teeming cast of characters display the inadequacy of secular morality in the face of contemporary social and political confusion. Mixing humour and pathos, irony and satire, Dickens's eleventh novel reveals a master of fiction in top form. This new edition, based on the definitive Clarendon text, includes all of Phiz's original illustrations and a wide-ranging introduction highlighting Dickens's move to more personal and spiritual concerns. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The House of the Dead

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Accused of political subversion as a young man, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor at a Siberian prison camp — a horrifying experience from which he developed this astounding semi-autobiographical memoir of a man condemned to ten years of servitude for murdering his wife.
As with a number of the author's other works, this profoundly influential novel brilliantly explores his characters' thoughts while probing the depths of the human soul. Describing in relentless detail the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, Dostoyevsky's character never loses faith in human qualities and the goodness of man.
A haunting and remarkable work filled with wonder and resignation, The House of the Dead ranks among the Russian novelist's greatest masterpieces. Of this powerful autobiographical novel, Tolstoy wrote, "I know no better book in all modern literature."

Notes from a Dead House

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.”

Notes from the House of the Dead

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Master translation of a neglected Russian classic into English

Long before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago came Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead, a compelling account of the horrific conditions in Siberian labor camps. First published in 1861, this novel, based on Dostoevsky's own experience as a political prisoner, is a forerunner of his famous novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

The characters and situations that Dostoevsky encountered in prison were so violent and extraordinary that they changed his psyche profoundly. Through that experience, he later said, he was resurrected into a new spiritual condition -- one in which he would create some of the greatest novels ever written.

Including an illuminating introduction by James Scanlan on Dostoevsky's prison years, this totally new translation by Boris Jakim captures Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical narrative -- at times coarse, at times intensely emotional, at times philosophical -- in rich American English.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Oscar Wilde

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor as punishment for having engaged in homosexual acts. While serving out his sentence at Reading Gaol in Berkshire, Wilde witnessed the execution by hanging of a young soldier who had murdered his wife by slashing her throat. Profoundly shaken by the execution and the crime that preceded it, Wilde composed this elegiac poem centered on the haunting refrain, "Yet each man kills the thing he loves."

Ballad of Reading Gaol

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright, poet and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, and a plentitude of aphorisms, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The Importance of Being Earnest.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems

Oscar Wilde

This poem - originally published anonymously, written after Wilde's two year's hard labour in Reading prison - is the tale of a man who has been sentenced to hang for the murder of the woman he loved. The Ballad of Reading Gaol follows the inmate through his final three weeks, as he stares at the sky and silently drinks his beer ration. Heart-wrenching and eye-opening, the ballad also expresses perfectly Wilde's belief that humanity is made up only of offenders, each of us deserving a greater charity for the severity of our crimes.

The House of the Dead: or, Prison Life in Siberia

Fyodor Dostoyevsky