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 of which profoundly influenced "The Trial". Sigmund Freud called "The Brothers Karamazov" "the most magnificent novel ever written". Modern cultural movements such as the surrealists, the existentialists and the Beats cite Dostoevsky as an influence, and he is cited as the forerunner of Russian symbolism, existentialism, expressionism and psychoanalysis. In 1956 an olive-green postage stamp dedicated to Dostoevsky was released in the Soviet Union, with a print run of 1,000 copies. A Dostoevsky Museum was opened on 12 November 1971 in the apartment where he wrote his first and final novels. A crater on Mercury was named after him in