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
The Double (Dostoevsky novel) see many replicas of himself, has a psychotic break, and is dragged off to an asylum by Doctor Rutenspitz. "The Double" is the most Gogolesque of Dostoevsky's works; its subtitle "A Petersburg Poem" echoes that of Gogol's "Dead Souls". Vladimir Nabokov called it a parody of "The Overcoat". Many others have emphasized the relationship between "The Double" and other of Gogol's Petersburg Tales. One contemporary critic, Konstantin Aksakov, remarked that "Dostoevsky alters and wholly repeats Gogol’s phrases." Most scholars, however, recognize The Double as Dostoevsky’s response to or innovation on Gogol’s work. For example, A.L. Bem called "The Double" "a