The House of the Dead /The Gambler

Dostoevsky's fascination for mental breakdown and violence (20 murders in his four main novels) was based on his own life, and these two unmistakably autobiographical works bear this out.The House of the Dead is fiction, but based on his four years in a Siberian prison. An educated upper-class man is condemned to live among criminals and brutal guards, with arbitrary punishments, lousy food, disgusting living conditions, hard toil and many floggings. Somehow he avoids bitterness and recrimination