On this day in 1849 twenty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky was, at the last moment, granted pardon from a mock-execution orchestrated by Czar Nicholas I. Dostoevsky had been arrested eight months earlier for belonging to an underground group of political revolutionaries -- "champions of communism and new ideas," as the authorities put it -- and imprisoned in the Peter-Paul Fortress (run by a General Nabokov, relative of Vladimir). Most in the group expected to receive a few months exile or some such wrist-slap for their idealistic talk; instead they fell victim to a macabre drama staged personally by the Czar as a way of instilling loyalty, gratitude and fear in his wayward subjects ... FULL STORY »
