Our Notes & References

First complete edition of this early masterpiece by Dostoevsky, greatly appreciated by Tolstoy and which Lenin described as an ‘unsurpassed work of Russian and world literature’. Dostoevsky’s passionate description of life in a Siberian prison camp is based on his own experience of four years of imprisonment in Katoga prison camp near Omsk, Siberia. It “provided the Russian public with its first, terrifying image of what lay ahead for those sentenced for a political crime […] No writer was now more celebrated than Dostoevsky, whose name was surrounded with the halo of his former suffering” (Frank).

Marked as “second edition” on the title pages, this edition follows the publication of volume one only, by Eduard Prats, and the serial publication by Bazunov in the periodical Vremia [Time], both also in 1862.

Provenance

Mikhail Krasnov (European private collector).

Bibliography

Frank, Dostoevsky. The Stir of Liberation, p.140; Kilgour 279 (this edition).