Can the darkest moments of life also lift our souls? Drawing on his own experience in a Siberian prison in the company of misfits, murderers and theives, Dostoevsky was inspired to write his novel Notes from a Dead House, telling his brother at the time: âBelieve me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior.â In JanĂĄÄekâs hands, Dostoevskyâs inspiration and the raw material drawn from an appalling world of incarceration find an even more powerful form of expression in his last opera, From the House of the Dead. Unfettered by conventional story-telling, JanĂĄÄek wrote his own libretto, freely weaving together a series of stories of everyday prison life and of the fates of individual convicts.
