conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled The House of the Dead about Ontario, Canada with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Literary?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is a writer and translator living in Ontario, Canada.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a plot for a book titled The House of the Dead?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The House of the Dead (novel): The narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, has been sentenced to penalty deportation to Siberia and ten years of hard labour for murdering his wife.\nLife in prison is particularly hard for Aleksandr Petrovich, since he is a "gentleman" and suffers the malice of the other prisoners, nearly all of whom belong to the peasantry.\nGradually Goryanchikov overcomes his revulsion at his situation and his fellow convicts, undergoing a spiritual re-awakening that culminates with his release from the camp.\nIt is a work of great humanity; Dostoyevsky portrays the inmates of the prison with sympathy for their plight, and also expresses admiration for their energy, ingenuity and talent.\nHe concludes that the existence of the prison, with its absurd practices and savage corporal punishments is a tragic fact, both for the prisoners and for Russia.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: \nLife in prison is particularly hard for Aleksandr Petrovich, since he is a "gentleman" and suffers the malice of the other prisoners, nearly all of whom belong to the peasantry.\nGradually Goryanchikov overcomes his revulsion at his situation and his fellow convicts, undergoing a spiritual re-awakening that culminates with his release from the camp.\nIt is a work of great humanity; Dostoyevsky portrays the inmates of the prison with sympathy for their plight, and also expresses admiration for their energy, ingenuity and talent.\nHe concludes that the existence of the prison, with its absurd practices and savage corporal punishments is a tragic fact, both for the prisoners and for Russia.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a plot for a book titled The House of the Dead?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The House of the Dead (novel): The narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, has been sentenced to penalty deportation to Siberia and ten years of hard labour for murdering his wife.\nLife in prison is particularly hard for Aleksandr Petrovich, since he is a "gentleman" and suffers the malice of the other prisoners, nearly all of whom belong to the peasantry.\nGradually Goryanchikov overcomes his revulsion at his situation and his fellow convicts, undergoing a spiritual re-awakening that culminates with his release from the camp.\nIt is a work of great humanity; Dostoyevsky portrays the inmates of the prison with sympathy for their plight, and also expresses admiration for their energy, ingenuity and talent.\nHe concludes that the existence of the prison, with its absurd practices and savage corporal punishments is a tragic fact, both for the prisoners and for Russia.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: \nHe concludes that the existence of the prison, with its absurd practices and savage corporal punishments is a tragic fact, both for the prisoners and for Russia.\nLife in prison is particularly hard for Aleksandr Petrovich, since he is a "gentleman" and suffers the malice of the other prisoners, nearly all of whom belong to the peasantry.\nGradually Goryanchikov overcomes his revulsion at his situation and his fellow convicts, undergoing a spiritual re-awakening that culminates with his release from the camp.\nIt is a work of great humanity; Dostoyevsky portrays the inmates of the prison with sympathy for their plight, and also expresses admiration for their energy, ingenuity and talent.The House of the Dead (novel): The narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, has been sentenced to penalty deportation to Siberia and ten years of hard labour for murdering his wife.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first four paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The House of the Dead
  En route to Kara in a deportation convoy in September 1881, she was reported to be "the main instigator of disturbances in Krasnoyarsk," where she "provoked her guards" and "swore at the convoy commander." She led her fellow politicals on a hunger strike that won them some concessions before their party was broken up into smaller groups and taken to Irkutsk under heavily armed guard. Having arrived in the Irkutsk prison, Kovalskaya turned her mind to escape and, on 16 February 1882, together with fellow revolutionary Sofia Bogomolets, she quite simply walked out of the jail. The two women had fashioned dummies lying in their beds to fool the evening watch and then Kovalskaya had disguised herself as a female warder and led Bogomolets through the prison gates. A manhunt ensued and the two women were arrested ten days later with an accomplice in a house in Irkutsk. Kovalskaya was finally delivered to the women's prison in Kara in the early spring of 1882.
  Kovalskaya led several hunger strikes in protest at conditions there. Unruly and a bad example to other prisoners, in 1884 she was returned to Irkutsk, where she staged another escape. Leaving bundles beneath her bedding to fool her guards into believing she was asleep, she acquired a guard's uniform with the apparent connivance of one of the warders. Early in the morning of 2 September 1884, the guards manning the entrance to the Irkutsk prison opened the gates to allow a group of five prisoners accompanied by a warder to leave on a work detail. They realized too late that the warder was none other than Kovalskaya. The fugitive "disappeared without trace after her escape despite thorough searches of the town and surrounding exile settlements," which suggested to the Irkutsk procurator that the escape "was well-prepared in advance."
  In the wake of Alexander II's assassination in 1881, all those who had already been administratively sentenced to Siberia without formal charges ever having been brought were forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the new tsar, Alexander III. Many refused. In May 1879, the novelist and revolutionary Vladimir Korolenko had been exiled administratively to the town of Vyatka in European Russia as "politically extremely unreliable and harmful for public tranquillity." When, in June 1881, he was invited to take the oath "to be a loyal subject of the sovereign emperor," he declined. The minister of the interior, Nikolai Ignatyev, decided that, "in view of the hostile attitudes Korolenko has revealed and of his earlier harmful activities, it is necessary to exile him to residence in Eastern Siberia under close police supervision." Korolenko arrived in Yakutsk, more than 8,000 kilometres east of Moscow, in November of that year. In the absence of any funds of his own, he was awarded a monthly allowance of a miserly six roubles.
  Some fared far worse. George Kennan made the acquaintance in 1888 of a couple, Ivan and Aleksandra Chernyavsky, who had been administratively exiled to Siberia ten years earlier. It had been shortly after the birth of their child in Tobolsk province in 1881 that they were instructed to take the oath of allegiance. They refused and, having once again betrayed their treasonous instincts, were sent further eastwards, first to Krasnoyarsk and then, following a second refusal, to Irkutsk. By then, winter had set in and they were travelling in an open carriage across hundreds of kilometres of frozen taiga. Aleksandra struggled to keep her baby warm during the journey, but when she removed its wrappings in the last waystation before Irkutsk, she found that it had died of cold. She was beside herself with the shock of this discovery, weeping and singing nursery rhymes to the dead infant. Kennan reported their case to horrified readers in the United States and Europe: "In the courtyard of the Irkutsk forwarding prison, in a temperature of thirty degrees below zero, Chernyavsky stood for half an hour waiting for his party to be formally received, with his wife raving in a delirium beside him and his dead child in his arms."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: By the end of the nineteenth century, the emerging consensus was that, if the empire were to unleash its slumbering colonial energies beyond the Urals, Siberia had to be liberated from the burden of supporting Russia's criminals. The government needed to abolish the exile system.
  By the turn of the twentieth century, such views had become the common consensus in educated circles. Liberals condemned the abuse of individual rights; conservatives the moral and sexual corruption of exile families. Siberian exile was, perhaps, the only social issue of the day that had managed to unite in condemnation an otherwise polarized public sphere.
  The findings that the commission submitted to the State Council a year later scarcely lived up to this soaring rhetoric, however. The resulting legislation on 10 and 12 June 1900 retained "penal labour" but no longer stipulated that it had to be accompanied by exile to Siberia. The new laws also reduced exile to settlement. Half of the some 300,000 exiles in 1900 had been sent there by their own communities' administrative verdicts, bypassing the courts. The new legislation removed these powers from merchant guilds while retaining them for village assemblies. It did, though, remove the right of peasant communities to refuse to accept the return of an exile once an initial judicial sentence had been served, a provision that had accounted for over 43,000 administrative exiles between 1882 and 1898. Village assemblies continued, nevertheless, to wield the power to exile their own members for "immoral behaviour," a flexible category that covered everything from drunkenness to violent crime and accounted for nearly 27,000 administrative exiles passing through the Exile Office between 1882 and 1898. The legislation did reduce the scope for exile to settlement for common criminals and, following a programme of prison building in European Russia in the 1880s and 90s, ordered that greater numbers of them should be incarcerated in their native regions rather than exiled.
  Muravyov's commission was quite frank about the reasons for these half-measures. The state could not strip peasants of their extra-judicial powers of banishment because it was simply unable to offer any viable substitute in their place: the inadequacy of police protection in the gigantic territories of the empire, the dispersal of the population, the vast areas covered by law enforcement and the poor state of the roads meant that "many distant areas are for long periods of time quite inaccessible, and many criminals thus escape the retribution they deserve." The state's fundamental inability to govern its own rural population adequately thus obliged it to persist with a system of punishment that it had already acknowledged in 1879 to be "harmful and lacking any juridical foundation."
  Even as the gathering revolutionary storm was drastically raising the stakes in the conflict between the state and society, the government remained wedded to a system that was almost universally condemned as both morally odious and strategically blind. For the swelling ranks of tsarism's opponents at the turn of the twentieth century, the exile system had become a festering indictment of the inhumanity of the state. The government no longer touted colonialism as a rationale for the exile system. Exile to Siberia was henceforth redefined unambiguously as a matter of punishment and containment. The numbers exiled administratively for political crimes in the 1880s and 90s numbered only several hundred; they would surge into the tens of thousands in the wake of the 1905 Revolution.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last two paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Today, a diminutive stone memorial stands beneath the House of the Political Penal Labourers in the centre of Trinity Square. Erected in 2002, it bears the inscription "To the Prisoners of the Gulag." The location is significant. Within a few years of taking up residence in their new apartment building, the former political prisoners had every reason to envy the Decembrists their years of Siberian exile.
  As state repression intensified in the 1930s, the Society of Former Political Penal Labourers, which represented a more inclusive and pluralist vision of the revolutionary past, fell foul of the increasingly shrill intolerance of ideological difference. In 1935, it was disbanded and its journal was shut down. Finally, on 11 June 1937, Teodorowicz was, like many of his colleagues, arrested. The careworn veteran of Siberia's penal settlements once again found himself locked in a prison cell, charged with plotting to overthrow the state. But this time, there would be no escape and no release. One hundred and thirty members of the society were executed during the Great Terror, and a further ninety were sent to the forced labour camps of a revolutionary regime many had struggled to bring to power. Teodorowicz, however, never reached the camps. On 20 September 1937, he was executed by firing squad.