The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In January, 1850, Dostoyevsky was sent to a remote Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy. In this fictionalized account, he recounts his soul-destroying incarceration - the daily battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, the cabbage soup swimming with cockroaches, his strange 'family' of boastful, ugly, cruel convicts.