The House of the Dead / The Gambler

nice edition

Just brilliant!, as a ex con myself, Dostoevsky's descriptive articulation of the prisoners experience(in tsarist Russia) in the house of the dead is timeless. A great insight for those who have not had the misfortune of incarceration. Highly recommend for that book alone but you get the Gambler too! Another great (and brief) story of the human condition, traversing the entirety of its spectrum from its worst to its best, something this writer and Tolstoy were masterfully skilled in.

A good read.

Romanzi brevi e racconti. La traduzione inglese (Garnett) mi costringe a leggere più attentam. Dostoevky è unico, tra i Tragici Iliade Dante Shakespeare , Non c'è una sola parola che non sia essenziale, tutto è denso e vero .Una stupefacente avventura. ...Vantaggio di traduzione inglese è che non mi accorgo delle sbavature di lingua, che invece mi sembra di avvertire spesso in quelle italiane .Considero, forse a torto, la maggior parte dei traduttori come i doppiatori utili ma insopportabilmente tutti uguali, che si sono inventati una lingua robotica artificiale fortunatamente (ancora) inesistente nel mondo reale, ovviamente mi aspetto di sentire tra non molto il doppiatese , come già il giornalistese, a pranzo e cena.. That's entropy, honey!

So far it’s been an interesting window into a world (I hope) I’ll never see. Very glad to be able to reap the benefit of the wisdom Dostoyevsky brings out of the Siberian prisons. He emphasizes how mistaken the idea is that criminals are fundamentally different from everyone else. Their hearts are scarred and laden with the burdens of their mistakes, but they are still people. The prison is overflowing with the convict’s expressions of humanity toward each other. The only one who seem perhaps beyond hope is the superintendent of the prison, for he is convinced the prisoners are fundamentally different from him, and he treats them accordingly, as subhuman.Here, Dostoyevsky calls us to have a more mature and nuanced view of humanity, something that is much needed in a day when ideologies have made nuance a rare commodity.