Dostoevsky question

[Oleg Gleizer]

Dear Everybody,

I need some help from a specialist in Dostoevsky's biography,  
especially his "katorga" years, please.

The story I don't remember a source of, goes like this:

When Fedor Mikhailovich was sentenced to jail time, there was a war  
among the Russian criminal ranks similar to the one between the  
"thieves" and "bitches" of the late 1940s - early 1950s. The names of  
the groups were different, but the essence of the war was the same:  
career criminals were split into two camps, the one rejecting any  
form of cooperation with the authorities and the other accepting it  
one way or the other.   Each camp tried to exterminate the opposite  
in a power struggle. The story goes that FMD was mistaken for a  
"bitch" and had to fight for his life in a "thieves"-controlled  
"peresilka" or "ostrog", which he did successfully with a knife for a  
period of approximately 24 hours. Subsequently, the authorities had  
to send FMD to Omsk instead of wherever he was initially supposed to go.

There is not a trace of the story in the "The House of the Dead". I  
wonder if the story is true at all, and if so, then what documents or  
secondary sources can clarify the picture?

Alex Litvin

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