'There is a divine spark in every being!' It was under this humanist motto that Leos Janecek composed his final opera, Z mrtveho domu (From the House of the Dead), for whose libretto he drew on Dostoyevsky's 1862 work The House of the Dead. In 1928, Janacek composed one of his most powerful and moving scores with the same dispassionate drama with which Dostoyevsky described his own time in a prison camp in Siberia, but also with a deeply human empathy and refined psychological insight. The Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski shows the reality of this virtually hopeless world where, in spite of everything, the hope of freedom and of a decent human existence still occasionally blossoms.
