The House of the Dead and The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an introduction by A. D. P. Briggs.

The House of the Dead is a stark account of Dostoevsky's own experience of penal servitude in Siberia. In graphic detail, he describes the suffering of the convicts, their squalor and degradation, their terror and resignation, from the rampages of a psychopath to the brief serenity of Christmas Day. Amid the horror of labour in the sub-zero work camp, we hear the stories of the prisoners and live through the freezing isolation and pain of day after day of misery. We see a young intellectual forced to live, eat, and sleep with men from a background of cruelty, coarseness, and brutality.

The Gambler is set in a spa town with its casino and international clientele. Alexey Ivanovitch is a young tutor in the household of a general. He is both observer and actor in the tempest that surrounds his impoverished employer, as he envies and mocks the airs and pretensions of his supposed superiors. Everyone is waiting for the death of Granny, the general's rich aunt, but far from dying, she turns up alive and well and makes her way to the casino...