The Idiot three prisoners were tied to stakes facing the firing squad: Dostoevsky was among the next in line. Just as the first shots were about to be fired, a message arrived from the Tsar commuting the sentences to hard labor in Siberia. The experience had a profound effect on Dostoevsky, and in Part 1 of "The Idiot" (written twenty years after the event) the character of Prince Myshkin repeatedly speaks in depth on the subject of capital punishment. On one occasion, conversing with the Epanchin women, he recounts an anecdote that exactly mirrors Dostoevsky's own experience. A man of 27, who
Prince Myshkin the Prince have much in common. It is occasionally evident that Ippolit shares Myshkin's sense of the sacred and the beautiful, and he consciously addresses himself to that sensibility when constructing his atheistic philosophy. Ippolit's interpretation of the book's key religious symbol, Holbein's painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb", as something that perfectly illustrates the omnipotence of 'blind nature', is posited precisely because it is Christ who is depicted: 'nature' has "senselessly seized, smashed and devoured, dully and without feeling, a great priceless Being, a Being worth all of nature and its laws, worth the whole