الفصل الفصل 1 · (that “stern and just man,” as Maurice Baring calls him) this was

. (that “stern and just man,” as Maurice Baring calls him) this was

enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight months’ imprisonment

he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to

be shot. Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: “They snapped

words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by

persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes,

to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only

a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and

I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to

bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound,

brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared

us our lives.” The sentence was commuted to hard labour.

One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and

never regained his sanity.

The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on

Dostoevsky’s mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to

accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing

in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings.

He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the

cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal

servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where

he began the “Dead House,” and some years of service in a disciplinary

battalion.

He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest

and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he

suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times

a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was

allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal--“Vremya,” which was

forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost

his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet

he took upon himself the payment of his brother’s debts. He started

another journal--“The Epoch,” which within a few months was also

prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother’s family was

dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is

said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were

much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife.

In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the

monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary

demonstrations of love and honour.

A few months later Dostoevsky died. He was followed to the grave by a

vast multitude of mourners, who “gave the hapless man the funeral of a

king.” He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia.

In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling

inspired by Dostoevsky: “He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and

our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than

we have his insight impresses us as wisdom... that wisdom of the heart

which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other

gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he

became great.”

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT