Meet Dostoevsky: Four Years in Siberia With One Book

The mock execution

He was arrested for belonging to a circle that met to discuss banned books; the chief evidence was that a forbidden letter had been read aloud. He was sentenced to death, marched out, and stood before a firing squad in December 1849 before a reprieve was read out.

The reprieve had been arranged in advance. The execution was staged by the Tsar as a lesson, and the men on the scaffold did not know it.

One book for four years

Four years of hard labour in Siberia followed, where the only book prisoners were allowed was the New Testament. He went in a socialist and came out an Orthodox believer convinced the radicals would destroy the country.

A ruinous contract, and the stenographer

He was a compulsive gambler who repeatedly ruined himself and his family at roulette. One contract was so punitive that losing it would have handed a publisher the rights to everything he wrote for nine years.

He dictated The Gambler in twenty-six days to meet the deadline, and married the stenographer who took it down.

Fifteen years

Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov were all written in the last fifteen years of his life, much of it under debt and grief — his first wife and his brother died within months of each other, and he took on his brother's debts along with the loss.

The Grand Inquisitor chapter, which argues that most people will trade freedom for bread and certainty, is put in the mouth of a character arguing against Christ. He gave the strongest version of the case he opposed to the man opposing him.

What readers of the novels do not expect

His journalism is a harder read than his fiction. The later Diary of a Writer carries Russian nationalism and antisemitism that people who know him only through the novels are often unprepared for.

His Pushkin speech in 1880 reduced the hall to weeping and embracing strangers. Eight months later tens of thousands followed his coffin through Petersburg.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when you are certain you are right about people. He argues the other side better than the other side does, and he is the best company available on the question of what suffering is actually for.