Travels from Dostoevsky’s Siberia

These eyewitness accounts, gathered from archives and appearing in English for the first time, introduce the reader to Dostoevsky's unfortunates from the Dead House––condemned to share with him Russia's carceral system of confinement, interrogations, denunciations, and hostile spaces––whose psychoses become the writer's obsession in his celebrated crime novels.

“In Travels from Dostoevsky’s Siberia, Elizabeth Blake performs the invaluable service of making available in English translation the fascinating memoirs of Jósef Bogusławski 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

“Polish resistance to Russian occupation was a recurring thorn in the tsarist empire’s Western-most side—and supplied the Siberian exile system with generations of articulate, well-educated prisoners. In this illuminating triad of memoirs, Elizabeth Blake supplements her path-breaking Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground (2014) with accounts by three Polish political activists and writers who shared Dostoevsky’s fate at mid-century, but did not fictionalize it. A courageous, strikingly dry-eyed contribution to witness literature.” —Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University

“Elizabeth Blake’s impressive knowledge of Dostoevsky, her translations of Boguslawski, Zaleski, and Piotrowski, and her meticulously researched essays combine to vastly enrich our understanding of the mid-nineteenth century experience of Siberian incarceration and exile while bringing into sharp, often disturbing focus the debated and contested subject of Dostoevsky and the Poles. Blake highlights how these memoirs foreshadow future insights of Foucault and Solzhenitsyn on penal systems and practices. The prison fortress, whether Dostoevsky’s ‘dead house,’ Boguslawski’s ‘grave of the living’ or Zaleski’s ‘living grave’ embodies the dreadful fear of being forgotten in a grave occupied by unfortunates who have been buried alive.” —Robin Feuer Miller, Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities, Brandeis University