Problems of Penal Policy of the Russian Empire in the Literary and Journalistic Heritage of N.M. Yadrintsev and F.M. Dostoevsky

This work is aimed at studying the problems of the criminal-executive (penitentiary) policy of tsarism in the assessments of pre-revolutionary writers -the Siberian regionalist N.M.Yadrintsev and the great Russian novelist F.M. Dostoevsky.Thus, the purpose of the article is to explicate narratives about the essence, content and problems of implementing the penal policy of the Russian Empire in the literary and journalistic heritage of N.M.Yadrintsev and F.M. Dostoevsky.The research is carried out on the basis of an interdisciplinary methodology that organically combines the tools of the "new intellectual history", hermeneutic content analysis and the paradigm of the "new social history".This research approach is aimed at explicating a system of views and concepts on a specific social problem, taking into account the context of the era.The source base for the work was published sources: the corpus of artistic, literary and journalistic texts by N.M.Yadrintsev and F.M. Dostoevsky, dedicated to the problems of prison and hard labor in the history of the Russian Empire.The authors show that the journalism of the classics of regional thought includes a large component in the field of exile as a form and type of punishment, the fate of exiled settlers, their colonization significance, and extensive problems in the field of prison studies.It is also noted that F.M. Dostoevsky formulated an important idea for penitentiary studies: for work in prison to have the character of not only punishment, but also to have a corrective effect, it must be meaningful and useful.In general, the authors found that as a means of correction F.M. Dostoevsky understood labor, collective interaction and collective organization, taking into account the rules of community life inherent in this organization, as well as reading, education and training.Level of reflection N.M.Yadrintsev about the state and prospects of imperial penal policy was of a practice-oriented nature.