"Robert Louis Jackson considers Dostoevsky's powerful but much neglected Notes from the House of the Dead the seminal work of his post-Siberian period and critical to an interpretation of his art from 1861-1881. He projects this work as an artistic embodiment of a Christian poetics of insight and transfiguration. Breaking new ground, he explores the interrelated social, moral, aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical problems that absorbed Dostoevsky in his prison masterpiece and shows how these same motifs unite and shape many of his subsequent novels and short stories."--Jacket.