The Mock Execution of Fyodor Dostoevsky

In 1849, author Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death because he had read out loud a letter written by one intellectual to another that the regime regarded as subversive. Tsar Nicholas I, who liked to display an all-powerful but merciful image to his subjects, commuted Dostoevsky’s death sentence to hard labor in Siberia. The law required that in such cases of imperial mercy the accused undergo a ritual, mock execution but no one told Dostoevsky about the commutation until he was terrifying moments away from what he thought was an actual firing squad.

He was then sent to a Siberian prison, where he lived with hundreds of convicts, some of whom hated the elite inmates. “They would have eaten us alive, given the chance.” Convicts in Siberia had murdered old people and children without the slightest remorse or fear of divine retribution. “In the furthest flung places,” a convicted murderer once explained to a prisoner sentenced for political offenses, “where crows don’t even carry bones and where animals don’t go, we’ve seen neither God nor the Devil.”

But the men with whom Dostoevsky shared his captivity became the basis for the characters in his great, post-Siberia novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov.

And read the New York Times book review of Into Siberia. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/bo...

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