Travels from Dostoevsky's Siberia: Encounters with Polish Literary Exiles

Abstract

Elizabeth Blake's latest work affords Dostoevsky scholars an intriguing and captivating glimpse into the experience of Polish political prisoners whose time of exile in Siberia overlapped or coincided with Dostoevsky's own incarceration in Siberia. Blake states her task is “to introduce new avenues for understanding Fedor Dostoevsky's experience of incarceration and exile” (p. 1). Indeed, Blake's translations do just that. But they also forge a new path toward a broader examination of the construction of political and national identity.The book begins with a general introduction that situates the Polish memoirists against the larger context of the Polish uprising and the ongoing Polish resistance to the repressive Russian empire. Three sections follow, each devoted to a Polish author: Józef Bogusławski, Rufin Piotrowski, and Bronisław Zaleski. All three are “Dostoesvky's contemporary peers in the Russian Empire,” and all “were arrested and deported to Siberia and Orenburg for their political activism” (p. 1). Blake provides a biographical and literary background on each author at the start of each section, as well as commentary on the work of the author. Bogusławski's piece A Siberian Memoir is an unfinished manuscript that was published in the Kraków journal New Reform. Bogusławski had “extensive knowledge about a number of prominent agitators in the Congress Kingdom before 1863” (p. 29). This longest of the three memoirs, provides abundant and rich detail about numerous aspects of his experience as a political prisoner, notably, the journey to Siberia and the day-to-day existence of the prisoners. He also includes accounts of his arguments with Dostoevsky. Piotrowski's Memoirs from a Stay in Siberia “captured the imagination of the European reading public with [its] escape narrative” (p. 133). For Dostoevsky scholars this narrative provides “additional portraits of several influential officials who attempted to alleviate the living conditions of political prisoners” (p. 133). The third section, entitled “Beyond Omsk,” attempts to “situate Dostoevsky within various communities of exiles” (p. 158).The general introduction and the short biographical background Blake provides on each author was very much appreciated by this scholar who will openly admit a woeful knowledge of Polish history and literary tradition. Blake has fulfilled an unenviable task here. She has a large cast of characters to introduce, and a great deal of significant history to condense in a short introduction. If, like myself, you are unfamiliar with the events of the Polish uprising and the Polish luminaries who populate the backdrop to the memoirs, Blake's compact and dense style will take some unpacking. Taking the time to reread a few passages here and there was well worth it. By the time I reached the author biographies, names, events, and time frames were beginning to stick. Blake's tapestry leaves little out and functions as its own history primer, one which I will return to as a reference.Blake's introduction also touches upon the Russian imperial penal system and its techniques of incarceration and punishment. Blake also directs attention here to the construction of identity as a prisoner. Despite numerous commonalities in the experiences of all prisoners—charges and conditions of the trial, corporal punishment, in particular, whipping and running the gauntlet, the hardships of being transported to Siberia, forced labor, sickness, hunger, infestation of vermin—the Polish memoirists sharply delineate the prisoners into two categories, the Russians, and everyone else. The latter includes the Poles and other oppressed nationalities in the empire such as the Kirghiz and the Circassians.The construction of the prisoners’ identity in opposition to “Russianness” as a mark of oppressiveness, rather than along traits of shared experience, opens a new avenue to examine nationalism and xenophobia in the writings of the memoirists and their contemporaries, Russian, Polish, and others. It provides a looking glass for Dostoevsky's xenophobic and chauvinist attitudes to Poles and Poland. The Polish authors in this volume expose their own prejudices and snobbery by depicting Russia and Russians in a manner similar to Dostoevsky's depiction of them. Was Dostoevsky's depiction of the Poles across his post-Siberian fiction as much a tit for tat as a visceral knee-jerk?