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) into a single larger scale project, which became "Demons". As work progressed, the liberal and nihilistic characters began to take on a secondary role as Dostoevsky focused more on the amoralism of a charismatic aristocratic figure—Nikolai Stavrogin. Although a merciless satirical attack on various forms of radical thought and action, "Demons" does not bear much resemblance to the typical anti-nihilist novels of the era (as found in the work of Nikolai Leskov for example), which tended to present the nihilists as deceitful and utterly selfish villains in an essentially black and white moral world. Dostoevsky's nihilists are portrayed in their