Omsk Dostoevsky: Memorable Places, Problems of Restoration and Museumification

Abstract

Omsk is the city where F. M. Dostoevsky served a penal sentence in 1850–1854 and where the “rebirth of his beliefs” occurred. In the first part of the article, Dostoevsky’s memorable sites in Omsk are revealed based on the impressions of the writer himself, as reflected in “Notes from the Dead House” and “Siberian Notebook,” memoir, epistolary, local history and archival sources (Article lists of prisoners of the Omsk prison (ostrog) and maps and plans of the Omsk fortress, stored in the Russian State Military Historical Archive, metric books of Omsk, stored in the Historical archive of the Omsk region). Through the Tara fortress gate, prisoners arrived at the Omsk prison (ostrog); and through the Tobolsk fortress gate, they went to menial jobs. The house of the engineer general have been preserved, who was in charge of prison work (it also housed the engineering office, where Dostoevsky worked as a scribe), as were the complex of the military hospital, where prisoners were treated and had the opportunity to read and write, and where the “Siberian Notebook” was created, the fortress of the Resurrection Military Cathedral, where they were taken for church services and whose rectors nursed the prisoners, and the house of Platz-Major V. G. Krivtsov and the house of the commandant of the Omsk fortress A. F. de Grave. The second part of the article, arranged as a tour of Dostoevsky’s sites in Omsk, describes the history and current state of all identified objects in the same order from the point of view of the restorer and architect. Some loci have disappeared irrevocably; some have been restored for the anniversary of the writer; some of them do not have the status of a monument of history and culture. The task of professional restoration, conservation and museumification of all the memorable sites in Omsk has been set to create a single memorial route “Dostoevsky’s Omsk.”