Omsk

The Siberian fortress town where Dostoyevsky served four years of hard labour, an experience he said remade everything he believed.

Dostoyevsky arrived in chains in 1850 and spent four years in the Omsk stockade among murderers and thieves, doing heavy work in extreme cold with a copy of the New Testament as the only book he was allowed. He came out with a chronic illness, a religious conviction he had not had before, and the material for The House of the Dead. He also came out convinced that the educated radicals he had belonged to understood nothing about the people they meant to save.