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 the novel, remarking that "Only "Crime and Punishment" was read in 1866" and that Dostoevsky had managed to portray a Russian person aptly and realistically. Otherwise, it received a mixed reception from critics, with most of the negative responses coming from nihilists. Grigory Eliseev of the radical magazine "The Contemporary" called the novel a "fantasy according to which the entire student body is accused without exception of attempting murder and robbery". The novel's protagonist, the 26-year-old Prince Myshkin, returns to Russia after several years at a Swiss sanatorium. Scorned by Saint Petersburg society for his trusting nature and naivety, he