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| | The House of the Dead - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Penguin Group (USA) |
 | | The four years he spent there, startlingly re-created in The House of the Dead, were the most agonizing of his life. |
 | | In this fictionalized account he recounts his soul-destroying incarceration through the cool, detached tones of his narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov: the daily battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, the cabbage soup swimming with cockroaches, his strange ‘family’ of boastful, ugly, cruel convicts. |
 | | Yet The House of the Dead is far more than a work of documentary realism: it is also a powerful novel of redemption, describing one man’s spiritual and moral death and the miracle of his gradual reawakening. |
| www.penguinputnam.com /nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_0140444564,00.html (175 words) |
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