Description
Book SynopsisPëtr 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“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” after it, Iakubovich’s “In the World of the Outcasts” is both a valuable historical document and a compelling work of literary fiction.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.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments; 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
