Notes from the House of the Dead, a prison novel based on Dostoevsky's own prison experience, was first published in 1861 and can be considered the incubator of his great later novels such as 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 way of looking at human nature. He himself said that, through the prison, he had been resurrected into a new spiritual condition -- one in which he would write some of the greatest novels ever written.This totally new translation from Boris Jakim captures Dostoevsky's intensely emotional and philosophical narrative in rich American English.