1849 Fyodor Dostoyevsky came to literary fame precociously, at the age of 24, with his first novel, Poor Folk (1845). As the title indicates, the work was what contemporary Britons called a ‘social problem novel’, or ‘political fiction’. It was politics that almost ended the young writer’s career before it had properly got going, four years later. The experience – arguably – made him the novelist he became.
In early 1849, secret police in St Petersburg uncovered an underground socialist cell, ‘the Petrashevsky Group’. Tsar Nicholas I demanded exemplary punishment. The ringleaders, among them Dostoyevsky, were arrested on 23 April, and peremptorily sentenced to death.
On 22 December 1849, twenty of the Petrashevsky Group were publicly executed, by firing squad, in St Petersburg’s Semenovsky Plaza. Dostoyevsky, stripped to his underclothes and freezing in the sub-zero morning temperature, heard his sentence read out. But before he was blindfolded and led to be bound to the execution post, the event was stopped. An arbitrary amnesty was announced for certain of the convicted. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years of penal servitude in Siberia and another four years of service as a soldier, also in Siberia.
Later that day he wrote to his brother to say: ‘I did not whimper, complain and lose courage. Life, life is everywhere, life is inside us.’ The traumatic event is directly recalled in Notes from the Underground, where the narrator recalls:
[A] man I met last year … was led out along with others on to a scaffold and had his sentence of death by shooting read out to him, for political offences. About twenty minutes later a reprieve was read out and a milder punishment substituted … he was dying at 27, healthy and strong … he says that nothing was more terrible at that moment than the nagging thought: ‘What if I didn’t have to die! … I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for.’
The experience is also clearly evoked in the crisis of Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov finally confronts the consequences of his guilt (like the author, he escapes execution and undergoes exile to a Siberian camp). When the hero resolves to confess, he is described as having ‘a feeling akin to that of a dead man upon suddenly receiving his pardon’.
It’s hard to think of a more personally painful but artistically rewarding apprenticeship for an author than Dostoyevsky’s trial by fire (and, of course, ‘hold your fire’).