On Nov.16, the 2018 Cundill History Prize was awarded to Maya Jasanoff for her account of the life of Joseph Conrad in her book “The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.” Juror Jeffrey Simpson, former Globe and Mail national affairs columnist and winner of Canadian literary prizes, commented on the winning book in a press release on the Cundill Prize website.
“Extremely well plotted, technically brilliant, and beautifully written, this is a work of history that presents us with new ways of reading about authors and their times,” Simpson said.
Last year in 2017, the jury of the Cundill History Prize, administered by McGill University in honour of its founder and McGill alumnus Peter Cundill, made the unanimous decision to award the first prize to Daniel Beer, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. Beer received USD$75,000 for his groundbreaking study of Siberian penal colonies in his book “The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars,” while the two runners-up each received USD$10,000.
McGill invited Beer to return to McGill to deliver a lecture on his book as part of the 2018 Cundill History Prize event series. Beer’s lecture followed the gruelling 3,600 kilometre journey across Siberia made by one million Russian convicts on foot, in an attempt to both punish the prisoners and colonize the territory. Siberia had become a dumping ground for Russian criminals and political rebels from the beginning of the 19th century until the Russian Revolution.
“[In the book], I tried to humanize the large canvas of the exile system through a focus on individuals who were caught up in it,” Beer said. “That has its own frustrations, of course, because very large numbers of people who were illiterate left no record [….] Many of them vanish from historical records.”
One such untold story is that of Nataylia Sigida, a woman who was exiled for operating an underground printing press. Following the failed 1889 hunger strike protesting the harsh treatment in Kara, a Siberian women’s prison, Sigida escalated the conflict between the female prisoners and the authorities.
“Sigida requested a meeting to see the head of the prison, Masyukov,” Beer said. “[After being] admitted into his office, Sigida walked up to Masyukov and slapped him in the face.”
Beer explained that slapping Masyukov was considered a symbolic assault on the Tsarist system as a whole, an offence punishable by 100 strokes of a birch rod. Since educated Russians and women were usually exempt from corporal punishment, this event was considered an atrocity by Sigida, other prisoners, and the prison doctor who refused to condone the sentence.
“In the moments before flogging, Sigida declared [that] the punishment was, for her, the equivalent to a death sentence,” Beer said. “These were not empty words. After she was returned to her cell later that day, Sigida and three fellow women poisoned themselves.”
Beer critically examined the inadequacy of the Tsarist Empire’s exile system in the time period before the revolutions, explaining the difficulties the authorities faced in their attempts to control the exiled population.
“The authorities struggled to contain the exiles, let alone organize them into labour,” Beer said. “They couldn’t stop them simply walking out [….] In the last quarter of the 19th century […], up to a third of Siberia’s 300,000 exiles [were] on the run!”
Lyudmila Parts, associate professor in Russian Studies at McGill, concluded the lecture with a reflection on the significance and relevance of Beer’s lecture.
“The discussion this evening reminded us of how and to what extent the mechanisms of power continue to function across time and space,” Parts said.
