The House of the Dead

Four years in a Siberian prison camp, written as a novel because the censor would not have passed a memoir. Dostoevsky served that sentence for belonging to a discussion circle, and had stood before a firing squad that was called off at the last moment. Tolstoy thought it the best book in Russian prose. Fifty plates of prison halts, exiles and peasant sledges by painters including Valery Jacobi and Sergey Ivanov, spanning 1820 to 1910, give the camp a documented face.