At the Russian frontier station of Vérzhbolof he was suddenly arrested, was taken thence to St. Petersburg under guard, and was there thrown into the fortress of Petropávlovsk. His wife, knowing nothing of this misfortune, continued to write to him at St. Petersburg without getting any answers to her letters, until finally she became alarmed, and telegraphed to the editorial department of the Diélo, asking what had happened to her husband and why he did not write to her. The managing editor of the magazine replied that Mr. Staniukóvich was not there, and that they had supposed him to be still in Baden-Baden. Upon the receipt of this telegram, Mrs. Staniukóvich, thoroughly frightened, proceeded at once with her children to St. Petersburg. Nothing whatever could be learned there with regard to her husband's whereabouts. He had not been seen at the editorial rooms of the Diélo, and none of his friends had heard anything of or from him in two weeks. He had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. At last, after days of torturing anxiety, Mrs. Staniukóvich was advised to make inquiries of General Órzhefski, the chief of gendarmes. She did so, and found that her husband was a prisoner in one of the casemates of the Petropávlovsk fortress. The police, as it afterward appeared, had for some time been intercepting and reading his letters, and had ascertained that he was in correspondence with a well-known Russian revolutionist who was then living in Switzerland. The correspondence was perfectly innocent in its character, and related solely to the business of the magazine; but the fact that an editor, and a man of known liberal views, was in communication with a political refugee was regarded as sufficient evidence that his presence in St. Petersburg would be "prejudicial to public order," and his arrest followed. In May, 1885, he was exiled for three years by administrative process to the city of Tomsk in Western Siberia. The publication of the magazine was of course suspended in consequence of the imprisonment and ultimate banishment
