Abstract

Pëtr Filippovich Iakubovich represents the many young people whose opposition to the Russian state turned to extremism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His conviction and banishment to forced labor and settlement in Siberia was an experience shared by many. But, unlike most, Iakubovich detailed his experiences in a thrilling and insightful roman à clef. Like the better-known accounts by Dostoevskii and Chekhov, Iakubovich’s novel paints a picture of his fellow criminal inmates that is both objective and insightful. “In the World of the Outcasts” proved especially popular, appearing first in serial form between 1895 and 1898, and then as a book which ran through three editions prior to 1917. Along with other exposés of official malfeasance and corruption, it helped to focus popular resentment against the Romanovs. The book reappeared in 1964, in one of the last breaths of fresh air before Khrushchëv was supplanted by Brezhnev’s neo-Stalinism. Laying bare the facts of Russia’s penal system like Dostoevskii’s “Notes from a Dead House” before it, and Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” after it, Iakubovich’s “In the World of the Outcasts” is both a valuable historical document and a compelling work of literary fiction. This translation marks the first appearance of Iakubovich’s masterpiece in English.

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.