But this commuted sentence was only read out to Dostoevsky and his associates after the gruesome ceremony on Semyonovsky Square where they had been brought to face a firing squad. In a letter to his elder brother, Dostoevsky gives this description of his mock execution:

“Today, December 22nd, we were all taken to Semyonovsky Square. There the sentence of death was read out to us, we were all made to kiss the cross, a sword was broken over our heads, and we were told to put on our white execution shirts. Then three of us were tied to the posts to be executed. I was the sixth, and therefore in the second group of those to be executed. I had only one more minute to live. I thought of you, dear brother, and all of yours; during the last minute it was only you I was thinking of, my dear, dear brother. I had time to embrace Plescheyev and Durov who were standing beside me and to take leave of them. Then the retreat was sounded on the drums, those tied to the posts were taken back, and an order from His Imperial Majesty was read to us granting us our lives. Afterwards our sentences were read out to us.”

The sentence against Dostoevsky ran: “For taking part in criminal plots, for circulating the letter of the writer Belinsky, full of insolent attacks against the Orthodox Church and the Government, and for attempting, with others, to circulate articles directed against the Government by means of a home-printing press, to be sentenced to eight years penal servitude.”

The sentence was reduced to four years by the Emperor Nicholas I. Dostoevsky finally broke with his liberal past during his imprisonment in Siberia, though signs of the coming change can already be discerned in A Little Hero, the “children’s story” Dostoevsky wrote while under arrest in the Petropavlovsk Fortress. In that story Dostoevsky draws a scathingly frank picture of Petrashevsky in the guise of the husband of the story’s heroine, M-me M., as a man with “a lump of fat instead of a heart.”

The Peasant Marey is a biographical account of Dostoevsky’s life in prison, containing a vivid flash-back to his early childhood on his father’s small country estate. It was published in February, 1876, in A Writer’s Diary, a monthly periodical “without contributors or programme” which Dostoevsky published between 1876 and 1878. The theme of the story was provided by Konstantin Aksakov, son of Sergey Aksakov, the famous author of A Family Chronicle, and leader of the so-called Slavophiles, who, in an article published posthumously, argued that the common people in Russia had always shown a high degree of culture. After discussing this statement at length and acknowledging the close ties that bound the best Russian writers to the common people, Dostoevsky begins his story of the peasant Marey in these words: “But all these professions of faith are, I think, extremely boring to read and, therefore, I will tell you an anecdote, or perhaps not even an anecdote but just an old reminiscence of mine which for some reason I want very much to tell you here at the conclusion of my treatise on the common people. I was only nine years old at the time … but no—perhaps I’d better start with my twenty-ninth year.”

The episode of the peasant Marey probably took place in 1831, shortly after Dostoevsky’s father had bought the small estate in the Tula province. The prison episode occurred during Easter of 1850 (April 24th), and is described at much greater length in The House of the Dead (published in 1861). Dostoevsky also made use of this childhood incident in The Adolescent, the novel he wrote in 1874.

Dostoevsky was released from prison in March, 1854. At that time his political views had completely changed and he became a passionate adherent of the most reactionary forces in Russia. Before his release from prison he wrote a number of “Odes” to members of the Czar’s family, couched in the most fulsomely servile language (Dostoevsky’s rather poor poetic efforts were usually connected with some political event, such as the Crimean War). After his release from prison he was forced to join the army as a private, being promoted to non-commissioned rank in January, 1856, and in October of the same year to the commissioned rank of lieutenant. He was still forbidden to return to Russia. In February, 1857, he married a twenty-nine-year-old widow, Maria Dmitriyevna Issayeva. Two years later he resigned from the army. In the same year he was granted permission to return to Russia, but not to Petersburg or Moscow. He spent some months in Tver (Kalinin of today) and only at the end of 1859 was he allowed to return to Petersburg. Between 1859 and 1861 he published three novels, including his comic masterpiece The Village of Stepanchikovo. In March, 1861, Dostoevsky embarked on his journalistic career with the publication of the monthly periodical Vremya (“Time”), under the editorship of his brother Mikhail (being still under police supervision, Dostoevsky himself could not appear as the editor of the journal). Vremya was a great financial success. In June, 1862, Dostoevsky left for his first journey abroad, mainly for reasons of health.