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
Prince Myshkin Nastasya Filippovna persistently reasserts the negative voice of her guilt in her words and actions, Myshkin remains in her consciousness as the voice of her innocence. Near the end of the novel, when Aglaya Ivanovna (with whom the Prince is in love) has become Nastasya Filippovna's accuser, Myshkin again defends her, telling Aglaya that the accusations are unjust. According to the narrator, Nastasya Filippovna "—though she sometimes behaved with such cynicism and impudence—was really far more modest, soft, and trustful than might have been believed... Myshkin understood this." —Parfyón Semyónovich Rogózhin (pre-reform Russian: ; post-reform ) After meeting Myshkin on