Overview

Translations in Travels from Dostoevsky's Siberia, gathered from archives and appearing in English for the first time, offer a fresh look at Dostoevsky's House of the Dead from the perspective of his fellow inmates and Siberians who were imprisoned, tortured, and exiled by the regime of Nicholas I. Drawing on archival resources and illustrations, introductory essays immerse the reader in the experience of the political prisoners who must navigate the criminal environment of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse by negotiating with inmates and authorities alike. These eyewitness accounts introduce the reader to Dostoevsky's unfortunates—condemned to share his experience of Russia's carceral system with its interrogations, denunciations, and hostile spaces—whose psychoses become the writer's obsession in his celebrated crime novels.

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9781644690215

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In Travels from Dostoevsky's Siberia, Elizabeth Blake performs the invaluable service of making available in English translation the fascinating memoirs of Josef Boguslawski and Rufin Piotrowski, who were each sentenced for seditious activities to Siberian katorga and left accounts of their travels and travails. At the same time, Blake presents these memoirs as a supplement to 'Dostoevsky's impressions of the Dead House with diverse depictions of the penal system in the empire of Nicholas I and its myriad means of torment, ' but also valuable for their vivid descriptions of Western Siberia as seen through the 'Western eyes' of these Polish prisoners. ... Taken together, the documents provide a wealth of detail and offer Anglophone readers invaluable insight into the Polish experience of exile and penal servitude in the Russian Empire. --Lynn Ellen Patyk, Dartmouth College, Russian Review

In Travels from Dostoevsky's Siberia, Elizabeth Blake performs the invaluable service of making available in English translation the fascinating memoirs of Josef Boguslawski and Rufin Piotrowski, who were each sentenced for seditious activities to Siberian katorga and left accounts of their travels and travails. At the same time, Blake presents these memoirs as a supplement to 'Dostoevsky's impressions of the Dead House with diverse depictions of the penal system in the empire of Nicholas I and its myriad means of torment,' but also valuable for their vivid descriptions of Western Siberia as seen through the 'Western eyes' of these Polish prisoners. ... Taken together, the documents provide a wealth of detail and offer Anglophone readers invaluable insight into the Polish experience of exile and penal servitude in the Russian Empire. -Lynn Ellen Patyk, Dartmouth College, Russian Review

Author Information

Elizabeth Blake is an assistant professor of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Saint Louis University and author of Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground (Northwestern 2014). Her articles on Fedor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and Polish exiles have appeared in Dostoevsky Studies, Slavic and East European Journal, Polish Review, and edited collections.

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