ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the image of Siberia and the Tsarist exile system in Victorian literary and popular culture up to the 1880s. It advances two core arguments. Firstly, it shows that Siberian exile was a stock theme in British literary representations of Russia from the early nineteenth century onwards, but one that became increasingly politicized over time. Prior to the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Polish uprising of 1863, Siberia served mainly as a source of exotica and ‘local colour’ for fiction writers and a reading public that knew little about Russia. Yet as Russia loomed ever larger in the worldview of the Victorian public, representations of Siberian exile came to serve as a Russophobic political trope, as shorthand for criticism of the Tsarist regime and evidence of Russia’s ‘otherness’ in relation to Europe. Secondly, it shows that the mythology of Siberian exile caught on in Victorian Britain largely due to Polish émigré propaganda and popular sympathy for the Polish national cause. The fate of Polish insurgents exiled to Siberia after the 1830 and 1863 uprisings became a locus for Victorian Polonophilism, with Siberia depicted as a battleground between Western liberty and Russian autocracy. When Russian revolutionary émigrés began to publicize tales of their own comrades’ Siberian sufferings in the 1880s, they therefore drew upon these established tropes and situated themselves within an imagined continuum of enlightened struggle against Russia’s oriental despotism.
