On December 22, 1849, the tsarist government staged a sadistically brutal and cold-blooded near-execution of 21 members of Petrashevsky’s circle. This was aimed at breaking their will and bringing them to their knees. The condemned were dressed in white shrouds, blindfolded and tied to stakes prior to being shot. The roll of drums resounded through the drill-ground the execution was being staged in, and the condemned were preparing to meet their fate when at the last moment an imperial A.D.C. came galloping into the square with a rescript from the tsar ordering the commutation of the death sentence to penal servitude, and then exile.
Dostoyevsky’s life had been spared, but the sentence had been carried out on the dreams and aspirations of his youth, hopes that died a lingering death during the agony of prison life.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821-1881
by V. Yermilov
He possessed neither overriding revolutionary passion, a stable belief in the strength of the revolutionary movement nor a consistent revolutionary, democratic mode of thought. His democratism was of the emotional and dreamy type, as was his socialism, and he was torn between Belinsky’s atheism and his own leanings towards “Christian socialism.” He had a love of the poor, dreamed of the abolition of serfdom, and wanted full freedom for literature and the press.
Such aspirations were “crimes” in the eyes of the tsarist government, and in 1849 he was sentenced to penal servitude.
This dweller in a world of dreams and images underwent a shock he never recovered from, and which left an indelible impression on all his works, as can be seen in the description of the feelings and thoughts of a man sentenced to death, given in The Idiot.
On December 22, 1849, the tsarist government staged a sadistically brutal and cold-blooded near-execution of 21 members of Petrashevsky’s circle. This was aimed at breaking their will and bringing them to their knees. The condemned were dressed in white shrouds, blindfolded and tied to stakes prior to being shot. The roll of drums resounded through the drill-ground the execution was being staged in, and the condemned were preparing to meet their fate when at the last moment an imperial A.D.C. came galloping into the square with a rescript from the tsar ordering the commutation of the death sentence to penal servitude, and then exile.
Dostoyevsky’s life had been spared, but the sentence had been carried out on the dreams and aspirations of his youth, hopes that died a lingering death during the agony of prison life.
The blow which had descended on him was unexpected aind brutal; his only crime had been the reading aloud of Belinsky’s letter to Gogol. The horror of convict life that he was thrown into, he who had already won a literary reputation and had so many creative plans, was so overwhelming that he proved unable to stand up to the shock. The might of the autocracy seemed to him insuperable and everlasting, and in the depth of his prison Golgotha he could hear the fierce roar of the beast of reaction which seemed the more “triumphant” the more the regime of Nicholas 1 felt the approach of impending doom.
What tormented Dostoyevsky more than anything else during his years of penal servitude was his feeling of intense solitude, the isolation of a small band of intellectuals among the mass of prison inmates who hated them so. This hatred became fused in Dostoyevsky’s mind with a sense of the rift between the mass of the people and the handful of intellectuals who at the time carried the banner of freedom. It was this distance between the people and those who were fighting for freedom that Dostoyevsky came to consider the strongest proof of the unpractical and unreal nature of the struggle for freedom.
The conviction developed in him thai the people stood opposed to the atheism and “free-thinking” of the “gentle-folk,” and that any attempt to come closer to the people called for rejection of all “non-popular” and “lordly” ideas.
The humiliation inflicted on his proud a