Redoubts in all their Russian forms also offered stable bases in which to erect magnetic tents or perform celestial navigation. Returning west to <placeName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0007824 https://www.geonames.org/1496153">Omsk</placeName>, the administrative seat of the <placeName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0006725 https://www.geonames.org/1524297">Irtysch</placeName> Line, Humboldt recorded longitude from the commanding quarters of the city’s <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rendition="#i">katorga</hi>—the same that held <persName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0020376 https://d-nb.info/gnd/118527053">Fyodor Dostoevsky</persName> from 1850–1854.<note xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" place="foot" xml:id="ftn28" n="28"> <ref target="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0005449/8v">Humboldt RST I, 8v</ref>, <ref target="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0005449/31v">31v</ref>–<ref target="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0005449/32v">32v</ref>; <bibl corresp="https://edition-humboldt.de/TKGUVJEV">Humboldt 1843</bibl>, III, 490; <bibl corresp="https://edition-humboldt.de/DV9UD9GW">Humboldt 1844</bibl>, II, 305.</note> Humboldt’s “notes from a dead house” betray little of the penal institution Dostoevsky would describe: the barracks, workhouses, and hexagonal ramparts that, in 1829, confined some 200 inmates with half-shaven heads.<note xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" place="foot" xml:id="ftn29" n="29"> <bibl corresp="https://edition-humboldt.de/NADISPBH">Gentes 2010</bibl>, 180.</note> In his semi-autobiographical novel, Dostoevsky’s narrator recorded a particular hatred for “the major’s house,” an “accursed and loathsome place,” in whose garden Humboldt once tilted his <persName xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" ref="https://edition-humboldt.de/H0000728 http://d-nb.info/gnd/117686573">Ramsden</persName> telescope to the sky. Yet Dostoevsky’s prisoner found solace in the same “unfathomable blue sky” that Humboldt surveilled, “as a captive gazes at freedom from the window of his prison.”<note xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" place="foot" xml:id="ftn30" n="30"> <bibl corresp="https://edition-humboldt.de/4WU5BUNZ">Dostoevsky 2008</bibl>, 275–276.</note> The Omsk <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rendition="#i">katorga</hi> was both a penitentiary and an observatory; its barricaded structures welcoming to the savant, repulsive to the convict; its sky a realm of celestial navigation, or salvation. Such were the complex semiotics of science in a land known as the “vast roofless prison.”