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EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS

FICTION

THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JULIUS BRAMONT


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TRAVEL
SCIENCE
FICTION
THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY
HISTORY
CLASSICAL
FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
ESSAYS
ORATORY
POETRY & DRAMA
BIOGRAPHY
REFERENCE
ROMANCE

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LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.


A TALE WHICH HOLDETH CHILDREN FROM PLAY
& OLD MEN FROM THE CHIMNEY CORNER

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY




THE HOUSE _of the_ DEAD
_or Prison Life in Siberia_

BY FEDOR DOSTOIEFFSKY

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LONDON: PUBLISHED
by J.M. DENT & SONS LTD
AND IN NEW YORK
BY E. P. DUTTON & CO


FIRST ISSUE OF THIS EDITION       1911
REPRINTED                         1914




INTRODUCTION


"The Russian nation is a new and wonderful phenomenon in the history of
mankind. The character of the people differs to such a degree from that
of the other Europeans that their neighbours find it impossible to
diagnose them." This affirmation by Dostoieffsky, the prophetic
journalist, offers a key to the treatment in his novels of the troubles
and aspirations of his race. He wrote with a sacramental fervour whether
he was writing as a personal agent or an impersonal, novelist or
journalist. Hence his rage with the calmer men, more gracious
interpreters of the modern Sclav, who like Ivan Tourguenieff were able
to see Russia on a line with the western nations, or to consider her
maternal throes from the disengaged, safe retreat of an arm-chair exile
in Paris. Not so was _l'ame Russe_ to be given her new literature in the
eyes of M. Dostoieffsky, strained with watching, often red with tears
and anger.

Those other nations, he said--proudly looking for the symptoms of the
world-intelligence in his own--those other nations of Europe may
maintain that they have at heart a common aim and a common ideal. In
fact they are divided among themselves by a thousand interests,
territorial or other. Each pulls his own way with ever-growing
determination. It would seem that every individual nation aspires to the
discovery of the universal ideal for humanity, and is bent on attaining
that ideal by force of its own unaided strength. Hence, he argued, each
European nation is an enemy to its own welfare and that of the world in
general.

To this very disassociation he attributed, without quite understanding
the rest of us, our not understanding the Russian people, and our taxing
them with "a lack of personality." We failed to perceive their rare
synthetic power--that faculty of the Russian mind to read the
aspirations of the whole of human kind. Among his own folk, he avowed,
we would find none of the imperviousness, the intolerance, of the
average European. The Russian adapts himself with ease to the play of
contemporary thought and has no difficulty in assimilating any new idea.
He sees where it will help his fellow-creatures and where it fails to be
of value. He divines the process by which ideas, even the most
divergent, the most hostile to one another, may meet and blend.

Possibly, recognising this, M. Dostoieffsky was the more concerned not
to be too far depolarised, or say de-Russified, in his own works of
fiction. But in truth he had no need to fear any weakening of his
natural fibre and racial proclivities, or of the authentic utterance
wrung out of him by the hard and cruel thongs of experience. We see the
rigorous sincerity of his record again in the sheer autobiography
contained in the present work, _The House of the Dead_. It was in the