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Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working

and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five

children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings

in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious

character.

Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the

final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had

already begun his first work, "Poor Folk."

This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and

was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself

instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career

seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he

was arrested.

Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky

was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier

and Proudhon. He was accused of "taking part in conversations against

the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of

knowing of the intention to set up a printing press." Under Nicholas

I. (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.

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