Trans-Sib
SIR,—Here on this small island thirty miles at sea –notable among other things for the fact that the eighteenth-century ancestors of us Tuppers, Coffins and Starbucks would have starved to death but for the mercies of British skippers while the American colonial government embargoed the community— we are rather remote from the world of instant communication. And so I have only recently seen Mr. Ronald Hingley's generous review of my book To the Great Ocean : Siberia and the Trans-Siberian Railway (Seeker and Warburg) in the SPECTATOR of November 26. Mr. Hingley wrote that 'It is news to me that Dostoievsky was once almost thrashed to death for complaining about the soup in Omsk Jail and I should like to have seen this extraordinary statement documented.'
I am happy to comply. In a footnote on page 143 of Volume I of George Kennan's celebrated Siberia and the Exile System (1891). this foremost nine- teenth-century authority on Tsarist penal conditions observes: 'A touching account of this part of Dostoyefski's life, by a convict named Rozhnofski who occupied the same cell with him in the Omsk ostrog, has recently been published in the Tiflis newspaper Karkas. Rozhnofski says that Dostoyef- ski was flogged the first time for making complaint, on behalf of the other prisoners, of a lump of filth found in their soup. .His second punishment was for saving a fellow-prisoner from drowning when the major in command of the ostrog had ordered him not to do so The flogging in each case was so brutally severe that the sufferer had to be taken to the hospital, and after the second "execution," Rozhnofski says. the convicts generally regarded Dostoyefski as dead. When he reappeared among them, after lying six weeks in the hospital, they gave him the nickname pokoinik [the deceased]. For further particulars of Dostoyefski's trial, condemna- tion, and life in penal servitude see Atechestvenia Zapiski [Annals of the Fatherland], Feb. 1881, and March, 1882.'
I hope that my respect for Kennan's accuracy has not led me to commit the shocking error suggested both by Mr. Hingley and an anonymous critic in The (daily London) Times.
H A R MON TUPPER
Polpis Road, Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA
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