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THE GREAT KÍRGHIS STEPPE
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fellow prisoners, he was twice flogged[1] but I was told that it had long before been torn down.
I did not wonder that the Government should have
THE EXILE SUBURB—OMSK.
wished to tear down walls that had witnessed such scenes of misery and cruelty as those described in Dostoyéfski's
- ↑ A touching account of this part of Dostoyéfski's life, by a convict named Rozhnófski who occupied the same cell with him in the Omsk ostróg, has recently been published in the Tiflis newspaper Kavkáz. Rozhnófski says that Dostoyéfski was flogged the first time for making complaint, in 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 ostróg had ordered him not to do so. The flogging in each ease was so brutally severe that the sufferer had to be taken to the hospital, and after the second "execution," Rozhnófski says, the convicts generally regarded Dostoyéfski as dead. When he reappeared among them, after lying six weeks in the hospital, they gave him the nick-name pokóinik [the deceased]. For further particulars of Dostoyéfski's trial, condemnation, and life in penal servitude see Atéchestvenia Zapiski [Annals of the Fatherland], Feb. 1881, and March, 1882.
