In this project I explore nineteenth century narratives of Siberian exile. The writers that I work with––Anton Chekhov, George Kennan, Peter Kropotkin, Henry Lansdell, and others—were all facing difficulties in their attempts to represent the social realities and human experiences of exile. This forced them to experiment with novel modes of expression and representation. As such, their narratives allow for a “re-reading” of some of the constitutive features of early modernism and its reconfiguration of literature, religion, and science.