On December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg\u2019s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps\u2014their funeral shrouds\u2014and offered last rites. The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.<\/p>\n
Accounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white; a second went mad and never recovered his sanity; a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment.<\/p>\n
The mock-execution and the years in Siberian prison\u2014thinly fictionalized in his novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860)\u2014changed Dostoevsky forever. His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared. His religious faith deepened. The sadism of both prisoners and guards taught him that the sunny view of human nature presumed by utilitarianism, liberalism, and socialism were preposterous. Real human beings differed fundamentally from what these philosophies presumed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n People do not live by bread\u2014or, what philosophers called the maximalization of \u201cadvantage\u201d\u2014alone. All utopian ideologies presuppose that human nature is fundamentally good and simple: evil and apparent complexity result from a corrupt social order. Eliminate want and you eliminate crime. For many intellectuals, science itself had proven these contentions and indicated the way to the best of all possible worlds. Dostoevsky rejected all these ideas as pernicious nonsense. \u201cIt is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness,\u201d he wrote in a review of Tolstoy\u2019s Anna Karenina, \u201cthat evil lies deeper in human beings than our social-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it always has been . . . and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges\u201d except God Himself.<\/p>\n Read it all<\/a> (emphasis mine).<\/p>\n His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared. His religious faith deepened. https:\/\/t.co\/6ka4j3frZO<\/a><\/p>\n — The New Criterion (@newcriterion) January 14, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n