These eyewitness accounts, gathered from archives and appearing in English for the first time, introduce the reader to Dostoevsky's unfortunates from the Dead House¿¿condemned to share with him Russia's carceral system of confinement, interrogations, denunciations, and hostile spaces¿¿whose psychoses become the writer's obsession in his celebrated crime novels.

Elizabeth Blake is an assistant professor of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Saint Louis University and author of Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground (Northwestern 2014). Her articles on Fedor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and Polish exiles have appeared in Dostoevsky Studies, Slavic and East European Journal, Polish Review, and edited collections.