Yes, I finished it. It's not a long story, given that it's just a typical day from one prisoner's perspective. It was a good book, but also didn't have a lot to sink your teeth into. In this sense, even if it was written a 100 years earlier, The Dead House gives a more in-depth look into Russian/Soviet prison camps. Anyway, turns out prison camps are miserable places, where you have to scheme to get enough (and still too little) food and clothes and pretty much everything else you need. Russian winters are cold, and prison personnel cruel and prone to make arbitrary decisions. Yeah. Though I have to say, how this got published in Soviet Russia is a bit of a mystery to me, since it's pretty critical of the state.

I do intend to read more on Gulags, but I'll save that for another time.