Every Friday Petrashevsky, the well-educated eccentric whom we would now describe as “a character out of Dostoyevsky,” hosted fifteen to twenty young people, the cream of the capital’s intelligentsia: clerks, officers, teachers, musicians, artists, scholars, and writers, among them Apollon Grigoryev. In the lively, companionable atmosphere, they read lectures, discussed the ideas of the French Utopian socialists Count Henri de St.Simon and Charles Fourier, and current issues like censorship and emancipation. Petrashevsky’s “Project for Emancipation of the Serfs” was one of the most daring political documents of the time. Several members of the circle openly called for revolution in Russia. Worried by the birth of socialist society in the capital, the secret police placed an agent provocateur in Petrashevsky’s circle.
On February 22, 1848, a ball given by the tsarevich was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Emperor Nicholas, who announced to the astonished guests, “Gentlemen, saddle your horses! A republic has been proclaimed in France!” The tsar really had planned to send troops to aid the dethroned Louis-Philippe but changed his mind and instead tightened the controls in his already choking capital.
Nicholas and his entourage were in a panic and feared the worst. Once, the empress returned from a walk and related happily that the residents of Petersburg still raised their hats to her. “They’re bowing! They’re bowing!” she exclaimed delightedly. Traumatized for life by the Decembrist uprising of 1825, Nicholas assiduously sought and snuffed out conspiracies. The Petrashevsky circle was an ideal target for him.
On the night of April 22, 1849, after a regular Friday night meeting at Petrashevsky’s house, the members were arrested on orders written by the tsar: “Begin arrests…. God speed! May His will be done!” They were driven in special black carriages to the Third Division. (Stalin’s victims were brought to the Lubyanka Prison in cars dubbed Black Marias.) Among the thirty-four “conspirators” arrested was a constant visitor to Petrashevsky’s home, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Next to his name on the list were the words “One of the most important.”
Dostoyevsky and the others in the case were kept in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Nicholas was furious: “Let them arrest half the residents of the capital, but they must find the threads of the conspiracy.” Dostoyevsky was interrogated and the investigator promised, “I am empowered by the Tsar to pardon you if you tell me everything.” Dostoyevsky said nothing. The sentence, pronounced by a military court, read, “Death penalty by firing squad.” In the case of the “state criminal” Petrashevsky, twenty-one other people were also condemned to death.
Nicholas worked out the ceremony of the execution himself. A lover of military maneuvers and parades, he selected the square of the Semyonovsky Life Guards Regiment as the site. In the 1960s, when I attended plays at the Leningrad Theater for Young Audiences and crossed the vast square now named Young Pioneer, I had no idea that it was there that Dostoyevsky and his comrades were brought under gendarme convoy on December 22, 1849.
They were made to stand on a wooden platform erected in the middle of the square. Dostoyevsky managed to tell his neighbor the plot of a new novella he had written in the Peter and Paul Fortress. A young, frightened priest gave the condemned men a last sermon. Dostoyevsky later said, “I didn’t believe it, I didn’t understand, until I saw the cross…. A priest… We refused to confess, but then we kissed the cross. They wouldn’t joke with the cross!”
Dostoyevsky and the others were dressed in white canvas robes with long sleeves that reached almost to the ground, and pointed hoods that fell over their eyes. Petrashevsky laughed hysterically and said, “Gentlemen! We must look ridiculous in these rags!” He and two others were tied to three stakes hammered into the ground in front of the platform. The orders rang out: “Pull the hoods over their eyes!” The squad aimed their rifles at the men. “I was in the second row, and I had less than a minute to live,” Dostoyevsky later recalled in horror.
But instead of gunfire there was a drum roll: retreat! A general rode up to the platform and read Nicholas’s decree reducing the death penalty to hard labor. One of the men tied to the stake went mad. Another cried out angrily, “Who asked him?” No one felt any gratitude to the emperor, who had come up with this sadistic ritual. Dostoyevsky never forgave Nicholas for the “tragicomedy” of his mock execution. “Why such mockery, so ugly, unnecessary, useless?”
Sent to Siberia to the Omsk Fortress, which served as prison, Dostoyevsky spent four years in heavy shackles, day and night. He didn’t take up a pen for almost ten years.
