However, he is also astonished at the convicts' abilities to commit murders without the slightest change in conscience. Dostoevsky details how prison life deprives prisoners of privacy and dignity, forcing them into filthy and confined conditions.

Man is Wolf to Man 2 Janus Bardach plain 2021-12-17T19:18:29+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 1998 Janus Bardach 64. Gradually Goryanchikov overcomes his revulsion at his situation and his fellow convicts, undergoing a spiritual awakening that culminates with his release from the camp. His incarceration was a transformative experience that nourished all his later works, particularly Crime and Punishment. Luka has murdered six people, occasionally brags of it, and wishes to be feared for it, but in fact no-one in the prison is the least bit afraid of him. He concludes that the existence of the prison, with its absurd practices and savage corporal punishments, is a tragic fact, both for the prisoners and for Russia.Rothenburg or the History of The Man Reforged" 2 Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko plain 2021-12-17T19:16:53+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 1935 Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko 63. The rest of the novel is presented by Dostoevsky as first-person notes from Goryanchikov’s time in prison. The first chapter, entitled "Ten years a convict", is an introduction written by an unnamed acquaintance of Goryanchikov. Many of the characters in the novel were based on real-life people that Dostoevsky met while in prison.

Dostoevsky unflinchingly describes the dehumanization of prison, such as the way fetters were not even lifted from the dying, but also conveys how the flame of humanity survives even under such conditions, allowing cleverness and compassion to endure. In the criminal himself, prison and the most intense forced labor develop only hatred, a thirst for forbidden pleasures, and a terrible light-mindedness" (15). He grew up in an apartment attached to the Marinsky Hospital in Moscow, where his father worked as a doctor for charity cases (Šajkovic, 47-48). He is conscientious, precise, excitable and argumentative, and assumes the role of a moral remonstrator with the other convicts, who, while afraid of him, also laugh at him and consider him a bit mad. He is described by Alexander Petrovich as "a spiteful, ill-regulated man, terrible above all things, because he possessed almost absolute power over two hundred human beings.Most of the book’s action revolves around the convicts’ attempts to make room for some color and change in their days: card games, knife fights, thefts, drinking sprees, escape attempts, holiday celebrations, a play. Alexander Petrovich finds it hard to reconcile Petrov's sincere friendship and unfailing courtesy with the ever-present potential (attributed to him by all the other prisoners, including Alexander Petrovich) for the most extreme violence. In short, the right of corporal punishment, granted to one man over another, is one of the plagues of society, one of the most powerful means of annihilating in it any germ, any attempt at civility, and full grounds for its inevitable and ineluctable corruption” (197).

The Bet" 2 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov plain 2021-12-17T19:22:27+00:00 Swarthmore Russian 037 1889 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov 55.The young men arrested in 1849 over the course of the Petrashevsky Affair, so named after the owner of the house where their meetings took place, seem to have resembled the disorganized anarchists that fill Dostoyevsky’s later novel Demons: a gaggle of clueless innocents and a smaller circle of more committed, driven dissidents. philosophy; they drank tea, discussed Fourier's theories, read literary works, protested against serfdom, and so on” (Mirsky, 60). The narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, has been sentenced to deportation to Siberia and ten years of hard labour for murdering his wife. Dostoevsky describes Goryanchikov’s time in prison in detail throughout his novel and focuses primarily on observations that he makes during his first months in a hard labor camp in Siberia. No prison writing is professional, but nor is any of it exactly recreational; it comes, by definition, from environments where “any self-willed display of personality … is considered a crime.