An epic work of Russian history from a major new talent.
Daniel Beer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Renovating Russia- The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930, 2008.
Excellent... an expansive work that neatly manages to combine a
broad history of the Romanovs' Gulag with heart-rending tales of
the plights of individual prisoners
*Literary Review*
A splendid example of academic scholarship for a public audience.
Yet even though he is an impressively calm and sober narrator, the
injustices and atrocities pile up on every page.
*The Sunday Times*
An absolutely fascinating book, rich in fact and anecdote.
*The Times*
In many ways Siberia truly was a House of the Dead - as Daniel
Beer, who borrows the title of Fyodor Dostoevsky's prison novel for
his masterful new study, recounts in horrific and gripping detail.
Because of its far greater scale and brutality, the Soviet gulag
has eclipsed the memory of the Tsarist penal system in the popular
imagination. Beer redresses that imbalance by bringing the voices
of the million-plus victims of katorga vividly to life.
*Spectator*
Although Beer's subject is grim, his writing is not. Grace notes of
metaphor elevate The House of the Dead above standard histories; it
is also ground-breaking and moving
*The Telegraph*
If the scale of the Siberian penal exile inspires a sense of
dreadful awe, then the detail is tragic, heart-breaking and marked
with individual horror. The vast, Steppe-like sweep of Daniel
Beer's work is impressive, sustaining a narrative that ranges from
1801 to 1917, and involves more than one million exiled souls into
an area that is one and a half times bigger than the continent of
Europe ... An extraordinary, powerful and important story
*Herald*
[This] masterly new history of the tsarist exile system... makes a
compelling case for placing Siberia right at the centre of
19th-century Russian-and, indeed, European-history. But for
students of Soviet and even post-Soviet Russia it holds lessons,
too. Many of the country's modern pathologies can be traced back to
this grand tsarist experiment-to its tensions, its traumas and its
abject failures.
*Economist*
Daniel Beer's The House of the Dead is a detailed, rich and
powerful account of the inhumane system of imprisonment and exile
in Tsarist Siberia that shows how little changed between Tsarism
and Stalinism. Both were built on the bones of ordinary
Russians
*Irish Examiner*
An eye-opening, haunting work that delineates how a vast imperial
penal system crumbled from its rotten core
*Kirkus Reviews*
Impeccably researched, beautifully written
*Guardian*
Masterful, gripping and deeply researched. It's filled with
astonishing, vivid and heartbreaking stories of crime and
punishment, of redemption, love and terrifying violence. It has an
amazing cast of despots, murderers, whores and heroes, and takes
place in godforsaken mines, Arctic villages and beautiful taiga.
It's a wonderful read.
*BBC History Magazine*
The wretched existence of those banished to Russia's freezing
expanses east of the Urals is vividly described in this excellent
study... if you want to read the most remarkable recent study of
Siberian exile under the Tsars, [read] Beer
*History Today*
Daniel Beer's The House of the Dead: Siberian exile under the Tsars
(Allen Lane) is both a gripping read and an extraordinary feat of
scholarly analysis, delivered with the scope and empathy of a
novelist - appositely, as both Dostoevsky and Chekhov are part of
Siberia's story. The microhistories as well as the grand narrative
illuminate a terrible swathe of Russian (and Polish) history.
*TLS*
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