Knowing Russia’s Convicts: The Other in Narratives of Imprisonment and Exile of the Late Imperial Era

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. 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. As Lincoln (1994, p. 175) states, ‘history remembers little about this horde’, whose ‘faces do not readily emerge’, and our understanding of this more common experience of punishment remains underdeveloped. Current attempts to uncover the traces left by ordinary prisoners, thereby providing a fuller picture of the experience of imprisonment and exile, are reflected in the present collection by Sarah Badcock’s contribution, in which she addresses the problem of the unknown and unknowable ‘punished’ by examining the question of illness, an area where the voices of the doubly marginalised may be heard. This essay seeks to complement her approach by exploring depictions of, and relationships with, ordinary convicts in three texts that have made significant contributions to the popular image of Siberia and debates about Russian The initial stage of my research project on Russian labour camp narratives was funded by a Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship at the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Nottingham. I acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust with thanks. 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. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for Europe-Asia Studies for their positive and useful comments. EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 65, No. 9, November 2013, 1700–1715 ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/13/901700–16q 2013 TheAuthor(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2013.844509 penal policy, in both Russia and abroad, in order to conceptualise the framework in which the convicts’ unknowability is constructed. In addressing the unknowability of convicts and the role this plays in Siberian texts, Anton Chekhov’s Ostrov Sakhalin, published in 1895, is crucial, because of the author’s initial aim of understanding the island’s population by conducting a census; his text catalogues the inadequacy of his approach, as he proves unable to gather the information he requires (Chekhov 1978, pp. 66–75). Popkin (1992, p. 39), noting that ‘these convicts are not accessible to [Chekhov] as real objects of knowledge’, has described this feature of Sakhalin Island as evidence of an epistemological crisis which renders inapplicable the ideal of total surveillance and complete knowledge that underpins power in the panoptic paradigm of Foucault’s analysis of the European penal system: ‘[t]he complete failure to distinguish between prisoners makes impossible any Foucauldian quantification or scientific calibration of sentence to crime’ (p. 44). Popkin (1992, p. 51) avers that the failure of knowledge is central to the ‘senselessness and horror’ Chekhov conveys, and suggests that the anti-panoptic model he depicts originates in aspects of the exile system itself (p. 49); however, her article does not elaborate on the latter point. Examination of Sakhalin Island alongside two other famous texts which Chekhov knew before his own visit (Chekhov 1978, pp. 60, 320) and to which his own work was in part a response—Dostoevskii’s Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, published in 1861 and George Kennan’s two volumes of Siberia and the Exile System (1891)—reveals that Chekhov was not alone in experiencing the failure of knowledge, suggesting a broader underlying question than that of the inadequacy of his scientific approach. These texts merit comparison because they reflect three paradigmatic outsider positions in relation to the subject matter: the prisoner, the Russian visitor and the overseas visitor, each separated from—and therefore lacking knowledge of—the peasant convicts to a different degree. In addition to covering substantially different ground by virtue of their authorial perspectives, the works also represent different but overlapping genres that frame the topic in different ways and encompass both factual and fiction forms, conforming to a tendency ‘towards generic hybridization’ (Cole 1991, p. 93) apparent in Russian prison writing. Kennan’s generally straightforward travelogue is complemented by Chekhov’s use of the modes of travel notes and scientific and sociological research, as well as his incorporation of more literary features (Ryfa 1999, pp. 69–70), whilst Dostoevskii’s work hovers unstably between memoir, sketches, fiction (Dwyer 2012, p. 210) and documentary prose (Jackson 1981, p. 6). Each text, moreover, contains polemical features that mark significant moments in the development of writing about Siberian katorga: Dostoevskii’s novel is frequently cited as the foundational text for the tradition of Russian prison writing; Chekhov’s work led to a significant debate within Russia about the penal system and instigated some reform (Ryfa 1999, p. 211); and Kennan’s volumes provide the international dimension that became increasingly important in discussions of the ‘Siberian question’, and the forms and places of For a translation into English see Chekhov (2007). For a translation into English see Dostoevsky (2004). On connections betweenNotes from the House of the Dead and Sakhalin Island, see Cole (1991, pp. 111–19), Ryfa (1999, pp. 143–74) and Polakiewicz (2001). Ryfa (1999, pp. 120–23) also discusses the relationship between Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System and Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island. A similar pattern is also apparent in Doroshevich (1903), but this work is excluded from consideration as, written only a few years after Chekhov’s, about the same places, institutions and, in some cases, people, it covers much of the same ground as its predecessor, particularly in relation to the question of knowledge. KNOWING RUSSIA’S CONVICTS 1701