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
Demons (Dostoevsky novel) Matryosha, described by Stavrogin in his confessional letter. After her encounter with Stavrogin, she tells her mother that she has "killed God". When she hangs herself Stavrogin is present in the next room and aware of what she is doing. A common criticism of "Demons", particularly from Dostoevsky's liberal and radical contemporaries, is that it is exaggerated and unrealistic, a result of the author's over-active imagination and excessive interest in the psycho-pathological. However, despite giving freedom to his imagination, Dostoevsky took great pains to derive the novel's characters and story from real people and real ideas of the time. According