Two hundred and fifty convicts share the stockade at Omsk. Five are noblemen, and not one of the five is ever allowed to forget it. Alexander Petrovitch Goryanchikov has ten years of hard labour ahead of him for the murder of his wife. He arrives expecting to be hated, and he is hated. What he does not expect is to end by admiring the men who hate him: thieves and parricides who stage a Christmas play, nurse a wounded eagle, and quarrel with the precision of duellists.

Written out of Dostoevsky’s four years in a Siberian camp, The House of the Dead is the book Tolstoy thought the finest thing in Russian prose, and the ancestor of every prison book written since.