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
Fyodor Dostoevsky children, while Dostoevsky stayed in St Petersburg to continue with his "Diary". In March 1874, Dostoevsky left "The Citizen" because of the stressful work and interference from the Russian bureaucracy. In his fifteen months with "The Citizen", he had been taken to court twice: on 11 June 1873 for citing the words of Prince Meshchersky without permission, and again on 23 March 1874. Dostoevsky offered to sell a new novel he had not yet begun to write to "The Russian Messenger", but the magazine refused. Nikolay Nekrasov suggested that he publish "A Writer's Diary" in "Notes of the Fatherland"; he