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Title: Notes from A Dead House
Series: —–
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Rating: 3 of 5 Battle Axes
Genre: Classic
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
Synopsis:
A fictionalized account of Dostoevsky’s [I still don’t like that spelling!] time in prison.
My Thoughts:
I went into this with Great Expectations. And if you’ve read that great story, you’ll know how I ended up feeling about this book. Very disappointed.
Part of that was due to Philosophical Musing’s Wonderful Review.
But it didn’t work for me. Dostoyevksky’s ramblings about how wonderful and human and “feeling” all the prisoners were would be like reading something by Columbus exclaiming how round the world is. Part of it was D’s exuberance over this great discovery. In that exuberance he simply tossed aside the horrible things some of these prisoners had done. I felt like he was saying “oh look, this murderer can laugh, what a wonderful human he is! Ha ha.”
I have a very strong sense of Justice so this wholesale, almost naive, overlooking of crime was beyond what I could take. I intellectually understood the point that D was trying to make, especially given his time and social level but it wasn’t enough.
Not a waste of time at all, but I simply did not enjoy this.
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