March – Fyodor Dostoyevsky's monthly Vremya (Вре́мя, Time) begins publication in Saint Petersburg under the nominal editorship of his brother Mikhail. Fyodor's novel The House of the Dead (Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvogo doma) is first published in it this year.
October 20 – Poet and dramatist Apollo Korzeniowski is arrested for his political activities and placed in the infamous Tenth Pavilion of Warsaw Citadel.
unknown date – The first modern New Zealand novel, Henry Butler Stoney's Taranaki: A Tale of the War, is published.
Seeley Regester (Metta Victoria Fuller Victor) – Maum Guinea, and Her Plantation "Children", or, Holiday-week on a Louisiana Estate: a Slave Romance[5]