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The essay explores the significance of questions of knowledge to the depiction of prisoners in three prominent katorga narratives from the second half of the nineteenth century: Dostoevskii's Notes from the House of the Dead, Kennan's Siberia and the Exile System, and Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. Comparing the different discourses of unknowability these authors employ, it argues that the relationship of the writers or narrators to the outcast status of the convicts takes their texts beyond the immediate context, to shape views of the penal system as expressing the increasing instability of identity, social hierarchies and moral life in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]