Omsk: Dostoevsky's Siberian exile

At the confluence of the Irtysh and Om rivers in western Siberia, Omsk holds the memory of the long imprisonment of writer Fëdor Dostoevsky.

The metro conveniently and rapidly connects the main city attractions.

The Dostoevsky Literary Museum, housed in the building where the writer was imprisoned, recounts the four years of captivity that inspired 'Memoirs from a House of the Dead'.

A few minutes away, the Omsk Fortress, an eighteenth-century Cossack outpost, preserves restored military buildings right in the heart of the modern city.

Continuing towards the centre, you visit the Omsk Regional Museum, which displays archaeological finds from ancient Siberian peoples and Russian colonisation.

Towards evening, the Irtysh riverfront enlivens pleasant urban walks with views of the confluence of the two great rivers.

Fyodor Dostoevsky spent four years in hard labor at Omsk between 1850 and 1854 for his participation in an intellectual circle deemed subversive by the tsar, an experience that profoundly shaped his later works.

Omsk, founded in 1716 as a Cossack fortress on the eastern frontier of the Russian empire, briefly served as the de facto capital of Russia during the tumultuous civil war of 1918-1920.