Did you know that Dostoevsky was almost executed at the age of 28?
On January 3, 1850, on Semyonovsky Square in St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky and the other Petrashevsky Circle members were led to the scaffold in the center.
The death sentence was read to them, a sword was broken over their heads, white caps were placed on their heads and they were prepared for execution.
Fyodor Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821. By 1847, the young, but already famous writer (after the publication of his novel ‘Poor Folk’, influential critic Vissarion Belinsky dubbed him "the new Gogol") became a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who met and discussed socialist ideas, criticizing the tsarist regime and condoning ideas of a coup d'état. For this, he was arrested, spent eight months in the Peter and Paul Fortress and then sentenced to death.
But, when the command "Ready to charge!" was already given, the real order from Emperor Nicholas I was read out: “Execution by firing squad was replaced by hard labor and military service. This was all a planned staging, intended to psychologically break the condemned. As a result, Nikolai Grigoriev, one of those sentenced to death, went mad.
The feelings Dostoevsky might have experienced right before this mock execution, a sense of the value and finiteness of life, were reflected throughout his subsequent work. It’s believed that he described them most fully and vividly in Prince Myshkin's monologue about the feelings of a condemned man before his execution in his novel ‘The Idiot’.
