Was Dostoevsky Really Sentenced to Death? The Mock Execution Behind Crime and Punishment

Yes. Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad in 1849 for his part in a circle of political radicals, and on 23 December of that year he stood with his fellow prisoners on Semyonov Place in Saint Petersburg, waiting to be shot, when a letter from Tsar Nicholas I commuting the sentence was read out at the last moment. Instead of dying, he was sent to four years of hard labour in a prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, followed by compulsory military service. The man who walked away from that square was not the same writer who had walked onto it, and almost everything he wrote afterwards, from Crime and Punishment to The Brothers Karamazov, carries the mark of those minutes.

A doctor's son who grew up beside a hospital for the poor

Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 11 November 1821, the second child of Dr Mikhail Dostoevsky and Maria Nechayeva. The family lived on the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, where the boy saw patients from the very bottom of Russian society. His nanny read him fairy tales and heroic sagas, and his mother taught him to read using the Bible.

His teenage years were marked by loss. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, and his father died in 1839. The official cause was a stroke, though a neighbour accused the family's serfs of murdering him; they were acquitted in court, but the story lived on in the family. A father's violent death, real or rumoured, would later sit at the very centre of his last novel.

From engineer to overnight literary star

In 1838 he entered the Military Engineering Institute in Saint Petersburg, which he disliked, and in 1843 he took a job as an engineer. His first finished literary work was a translation of Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet. That detail is worth pausing on: one of the greatest novelists in history learned his craft partly by translating someone else's prose.

His own first novel, Poor Folk, reached the powerful critic Vissarion Belinsky, who hailed it as Russia's first "social novel". It was published in January 1846, and the young author became famous almost overnight. The friendship with Belinsky did not last, however. Belinsky was an atheist and materialist, while Dostoevsky held on to his Orthodox faith.

The Petrashevsky Circle and the firing squad

In 1846 Dostoevsky began attending the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who discussed socialist ideas and criticised the regime, and he later joined a more secret group formed within it by Nikolay Speshnev. He was arrested on 23 April 1849 and held in the Peter and Paul Fortress. A commission sentenced the members to death.

The reprieve came only after the prisoners had been brought out and prepared for execution, which is why the episode is often called a mock execution. Dostoevsky never forgot what it felt like to believe he had only minutes to live. In The Idiot, he gives the experience to Prince Myshkin, who describes the thoughts of a man facing execution.

Four years in the House of the Dead

The prison camp in Omsk was harsh, and for four years he lived among ordinary convicts, far from the literary salons of the capital. He was released from the camp in February 1854, served in the army, and wrote about the experience in The House of the Dead, published in 1861.

In exile he married Maria Isaeva in 1857. It was an unhappy marriage, though he later wrote that they "could not stop loving each other". Sources also describe signs of epilepsy in these years, although stories that his seizures began in childhood come from later family accounts considered unreliable.

Debts, roulette and Notes from Underground

The 1860s brought a run of disasters. In 1864 both his wife and his beloved brother Mikhail died, leaving him responsible for his stepson and his brother's family. He also developed a serious gambling addiction, losing heavily at the roulette tables of Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden.

Out of this chaos came Notes from Underground (1864), the bitter monologue of a man who refuses to be reasonable. It is often considered one of the first works of existentialist literature.

Crime and Punishment: a man who steps across the line

In 1866 Crime and Punishment began appearing in monthly instalments in The Russian Messenger. Its hero, Rodion Raskolnikov, is a poor former law student in Saint Petersburg who murders an elderly pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, and then her half-sister Lizaveta, who walks in during the crime. Raskolnikov has a theory that extraordinary people, like Napoleon, may step beyond ordinary morality for a greater purpose. The novel shows that theory collapsing under the weight of his guilt.

The investigator Porfiry Petrovich never simply accuses him; he lets Raskolnikov's conscience do the work. And it is Sonya Marmeladova, a young woman forced into prostitution to feed her family, who hears his confession first. The novel ends in Siberia, where Raskolnikov, sentenced to eight years of penal servitude, begins to change under her influence. Readers who know the author's biography will recognise the setting.

A small language lesson hides in the title. The Russian word for crime, prestupleniye, literally suggests "stepping across" a boundary, a sense English loses.

Twenty-six days and a stenographer named Anna

The same year, Dostoevsky faced a ruinous contract: he had promised the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky a new novel by November 1866 and had not written a word. A friend advised him to hire a stenographer, and he was sent a 20-year-old student, Anna Snitkina. Dictating to her, he finished The Gambler in 26 days. They married in February 1867, and the couple spent more than four years abroad, escaping creditors, during which he wrote The Idiot and began Demons. In April 1871 he visited a gambling hall for the last time.

The Brothers Karamazov and a lasting shadow

His final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), returns to a father's murder and to the questions of faith, doubt and responsibility that had followed him since his youth. In June 1880 his speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow received a rapturous ovation. He died in Saint Petersburg on 9 February 1881, aged 59.

His influence has been enormous. Writers from Chekhov to Camus and Sartre learned from him, Nietzsche called him "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn", and his books have been translated into more than 170 languages.

Learn with Dostoevsky: English phrases about guilt and second chances

Phrase	Meaning	Example
a narrow escape	a situation where you almost suffered disaster	His pardon was the narrowest of escapes.
to cross the line	to do something morally unacceptable	Raskolnikov crossed the line when he killed.
a guilty conscience	the feeling that you did something wrong	A guilty conscience kept him awake.
a second chance	another opportunity after failure	Siberia gave him a second chance at life.
against the clock	with very little time	He wrote The Gambler against the clock.

Try this: Dostoevsky dictated a novel in 26 days. Set a timer for five minutes and "dictate" (say out loud, then write down) a short English story about a narrow escape, using at least three phrases from the table.