No one resented Europe more than Dostoevsky. At the time of the Crimean War, he was serving as a soldier in the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Central Asia following his release from a Siberian prison camp, to which he had been exiled for his involvement in the left-wing Petrashevsky circle in 1849. In the only published verse he ever wrote (and the poetic qualities of ‘On the European Events of 1854’ are such that one can see why this was so), Dostoevsky portrayed the Crimean War as the ‘crucifixion of the Russian Christ’.
