of its owner, and Mr. Staniukóvich was financially ruined. If the Russian Government deals in this arbitrary way with men of rank, wealth, and high social position in the capital of the empire, it can be imagined what treatment is accorded to authors, physicians, students, and small landed proprietors whose presence is regarded as "prejudicial to public order" in the provinces.
In the year 1880 the well-known and gifted Russian novelist Vladímir Korolénko, two of whose books have recently been translated into English and published in Boston,[1] was exiled to Eastern Siberia as a result of what the Government itself finally admitted to be an official mistake. Through the influence of Prince Imeretínski, Mr. Korolénko succeeded in getting this mistake corrected before he reached his ultimate destination and was released in the West Siberian city of Tomsk. Hardly had he returned, however, to European Russia, when he was called upon to take the oath of allegiance to Alexander III., and to swear that he would betray every one of his friends or acquaintances whom he knew to be engaged in revolutionary or anti-Government work. No honorable and self-respecting man could take such an oath as that, and of course Mr. Korolénko declined to do so. He was thereupon exiled by administrative process to the East Siberian territory of Yakútsk, where, in a wretched native ulús, he lived for about three years.[2]
Mr. Boródin, another Russian author and a well-known contributor to the Russian magazine Annals of the Fatherland, was banished to the territory of Yakútsk on account of the alleged "dangerous" and "pernicious" character of a certain manuscript found in his house by the police during
- ↑ "The Vagrant," a series of sketches of Siberian life and experience, and "The Blind Musician."
- ↑ A statement of the circumstances of Mr. Korolénko's first exile to Siberia was published over the signature of the well-known author S. A. Priklónski in the newspaper Zémstvo for 1881, No. 10, p. 19. Korolénko has been four times banished to various parts of the empire without trial or hearing.
