(House of the Dead) Buried Alive, or Ten Years of Penal Servitude in Siberia

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

1881. New York. Henry Holt and Company. 4to, (195 x 138 mm). Bound in publisher's olive-green cloth pictorially stamped in black and gilt. Very good with a slight lean, toning and scratch to spine, small wear to ends and corners, front cover bright, light soiling to rear cover, brown coated endpapers with a bit of edge wear, split to inner hinges remaining sound, pencil notations to preliminary blanks, occasional foxing with a couple small stains to text.

First American edition of one of Dostoevsky’s most universally-recognized works, The House of the Dead (also known as Notes from the Dead House). The novel is a fictionalized account of his imprisonment in a Siberian labor camp. After his mock execution in December 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years imprisonment at Omsk in western Siberia. Drawing from his experience, the novel portrays the lives of convicts in a Siberian prison camp through a loosely-knit collection of descriptions, events and philosophical discussions, organized around themes and characters rather than plot. 

 

The first appearance of any of the text in print was in Ruskii Mir #67, September 1860. The complete work was published as a serial novel in Vremya (Время)—the review that Dostoevsky edited and published alongside his brother Mikhail—between 1860 and 1862. The first edition in book form appeared in Russian in 1862. 

 

This is the first American edition, published just after the British first edition in English, both using Marie von Thilo's translation, thus making it the first and only English translation of Dostoevsky’s works to be published in his lifetime.

1881

$3,000.00