This experience shocked Dostoevsky forever.

 

On December 22, 1849, Dostoevsky and twenty other defendants were on the scaffold, ready to be executed. Just then, the communication of the pardon from the tsar arrived: the death penalty was revoked.

This experience shocked Dostoevsky forever. That day, without having committed a "crime", he really experienced the "punishment". Since then, the theme of the death penalty and the value of human life have often returned in his thoughts and books.

It all began on April 23, when Dostoevsky was arrested in St. Petersburg. The accusation was that he had participated in the Petraševskij circle, a discussion group on the progressive ideas of the time. In reality, these were meetings where freedom of thought was discussed and censorship and serfdom were criticized.

In Europe, in 1848, there had been many revolutions. In Russia, the authorities feared that even a simple debate could become dangerous and decided to intervene.

On November 16, Dostoevsky received the sentence: death sentence. On December 22 it was taken to the square of the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul. The sentence was read to him and he was dressed in the white tunic of the condemned. Tied to the stake, Dostoevsky thought only of his brother.

Shortly before the execution, a guard read the proclamation: the sentence had been commuted to hard labor and deportation to Siberia. "For four years. Then a private soldier with no right of promotion," the tsar added.

Two days later the long journey to Siberia began. Dostoevsky was imprisoned in the fortress of Omsk for four years, then sent as a simple soldier to Semipalatinsk.

All this experience deeply marked his health and his writing. The epilepsy worsened, and the memory of those moments resurfaced often in his novels.

In "The Idiot", Dostoevsky has Prince Myshkin say: "Read this soldier the sentence that condemns him with certainty, and he will go mad or cry. Who said that human nature is able to endure this without going mad? Why such an affront, monstrous, useless, vain? Perhaps there is a man to whom they read the sentence, gave them time to torture themselves, and then said: 'Go, you are pardoned: here is such a man perhaps could tell it".

An event that changed Dostoevsky and his outlook on life forever.