Memoirs from the House of the Dead

In this almost documentary account of his own experience of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor, the degradation, in relentless detail - even down to the intricate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters. The steam-bath scene itself, where the livid branded bodies seem to burn in the fires of Hell, is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Trugenev to passages from Dante's 'Inferno.'