Abstract
The essay explores the significance of questions of knowledge to the depiction of prisoners in three prominent katorga narratives from the second half of the nineteenth century: Dostoevskii's Notes from the House of the Dead, Kennan's Siberia and the Exile System, and Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. Comparing the different discourses of unknowability these authors employ, it argues that the relationship of the writers or narrators to the outcast status of the convicts takes their texts beyond the immediate context, to shape views of the penal system as expressing the increasing instability of identity, social hierarchies and moral life in Russia.
Highlights
Siberia and the Exile SystemGeorge Kennan’s record of his travels in 1885 is, like Chekhov’s text, full of facts and figures
STUDIES OF THE EXILE AND PRISON POPULATIONS OF SIBERIA IN the Imperial era have, until recently, privileged the experiences of the relatively small number of representatives from the educated and articulate elite, and of political prisoners, over the majority convicted of criminal offences, who came mainly from the peasantry
I would like to thank the editors of this special issue of Europe-Asia Studies, participants in the ‘Villains and Victims’ conference, University of Nottingham, April 2010, and panellists and audience at the BASEES annual conference, Cambridge, March 2010, for the discussion and comments about aspects of my essay, which proved very helpful in the process of revision
Summary
George Kennan’s record of his travels in 1885 is, like Chekhov’s text, full of facts and figures. The sense of estrangement Siberia engenders in those who travel to it—both voluntary visitors and involuntary convicts— originates not primarily in its geography or its native inhabitants, but in the prison and exile system introduced by European Russia, the major victims of this being the convicts who populate it It is they, rather than the colonised natives, who emerge as Siberia’s shadowy other; distanced, homogenised and hidden from view, neither familiar nor exotic, the inaccessibility of the convicts forms a lacuna in the text as the author persistently alludes to his inability to speak of them. They are confronted with different problems of not knowing which reconfigure the Siberian question in social and moral terms, and have a radical impact on their own (or their narrator’s) identity
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