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
In Return: Just a Book jump across geographical distances and centuries. It employs the real-life story of how the life and work of the great Russian master Dostoevsky inspired the Indian writer, Perumpadavam Sreedharan, to write a novel about him which, incidentally, became a best-seller. Perumpadavam Sreedharan's novel in Malayalam Oru Sankeerthanam Pole (‘Like a Psalm’) was written in 1993 and dealt with 21 days in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Those were the days Dostoevsky fell in love with Anna Gregoryevna Snitkina, who was his new stenographer taking down his novel The Gambler. In heavy debt to his publisher, Dostoevsky was facing a deadline