Pëtr F. Iakubovich was born in Novgorod Province to a noble family in 1860, during a period of upheaval in Russia called the Great Reforms. In 1884, he was arrested and convicted as a member of the terrorist organization the People’s Will. Iakubovich spent five years at a Siberian penal labor prison, followed by several more as a forced settler in Tobolsk Province. He began writing about his experiences while still in prison. The book he eventually produced is a quasi-fictionalized memoir loosely modeled on Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from a Dead House.”

Iakubovich represents himself through his protagonist Ivan Nikolaevich. For most of Volume One, Ivan Nikolaevich must deal, as an imprisoned nobleman, with a population largely comprised of violent criminals. As commoners, these are people with whom he barely interacted in his earlier life, but he is now living cheek-by-jowl with them. His conflicts and faux pas with Buzzy, Goncharov, the cousins Burenkov et al. are by turns comic and dreadful. Ivan Nikolaevich nevertheless manages to befriend several and to learn their life stories. Iakubovich uses these character vignettes to cast light on Imperial Russia’s underclass. Though his circumstances do not afford the privileges he previously enjoyed, Ivan Nikolaevich does enjoy unusual access to the lonely and jaded prison commandant, Luchezarov—better known to prisoners as “Six-Eyes.” But despite his verbal jousts with Luchezarov, Ivan Nikolaevich finds himself contemplating suicide.

Volume Two begins with the arrival at the prison of two fellow revolutionaries—Dmitrii Shteinhart and Valerian Bashurov. Ivan Nikolaevich is overjoyed to find himself with like-minded compatriots, and the three self-styled reformers take it upon themselves to undermine Luchezarov’s increasingly despotic management and to improve conditions for all the prisoners. Several conflicts emerge, and Iakubovich uses these to both parody and indict the penal justice system and Russian bureaucracy. Finally, Luchezarov is forced from office and the prison regime he installed is condemned by a superior. Soon after, Ivan Nikolaevich leaves prison for forced settlement. This much briefer section of the work concerns his difficulty in readjusting to life outside prison and his joy at being joined by his sister (in real life, she was Iakubovich’s fiancée). The book ends with a melancholy reflection on the human destruction wrought by the tsarist penal system.

Pëtr F. Iakubovich was a Russian dissident imprisoned in the late nineteenth century.

Andrew A. Gentes is an historian and translator who lives with his wife in New Hampshire.

Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

Acknowledgments; Introduction; A Note on Transliteration; Characters; In Place of a Foreword; ON THE THRESHOLD: Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V; SHELAI MINE: The Encounter; First Night; First Day’s Impressions and Understandings; Inside the Barrel-Organ; In the Mine’s Depths; We Begin; Prison Workdays; My School Begins; Malakhov and Goncharov; My Students the Burenkovs; Semënov; Reading the Bible, Iashka-the-Marmot, The Poet, The Penal Laborer; Chirok; Luchezarov; Great Poets Face the “Katorga” Tribunal; Shah Lamas; The Usual Outcome; In the Mining Gallery; THE LITTLE EAGLE OF FERGANA; SOLITUDE: In a New Ward, Innocents and Brutes; Efimov, A Prison Sophist and Mephistopheles; Demons of Evil and Destruction; New Students, Lunkov; Sakhalin Disturbances; Nikifor’s Romance, The Send-Off; Escapes and First Blood; The Wagger Amuses Me; A Massacre of Women and Innocents; A Curious Conversation; Hitting Back; Shelai’s Guests; Night; Notes