Fyodor Dostoevsky was condemned to death—public execution by firing squad....

Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband:

Adultery, Butchery, and Prophecy

By Sean Fitzpatrick

Fyodor Dostoevsky was condemned to death—public execution by firing squad.

The year was 1849 and the young Dostoevsky, fresh from the success of his first novel,Poor Folk, had joined a liberal humanitarian group devoted to studying utopian models of socialism. During one of their meetings, the police appeared and arrested the whole company. They were imprisoned in solitary confinement, sentenced for criticisms against the Russian government, and hauled to the city square to be shot. The death sentence was read aloud in their ringing ears. The ceremonial sword was broken over their hooded heads. The cross was pressed to their trembling lips. The shrouds were pulled across their heaving chests. The first three were bound to the execution posts. Fyodor Dostoevsky, twenty-eight years old, waited in the second batch of three to die. The rifles were lowered. The sergeant raised his saber.

When, all of a sudden, a courier from Tsar Nicholas I rode wildly into the square with word that, by the magnanimity of the tsar, the prisoners were spared their lives and instead sentenced to four years hard labor at the prison of Omsk in Siberia. The drums rolled. The rifles were raised. The whole execution had been nothing more than a terrifying farce—a strategy for the improvement of insubordinates. A number of the prisoners collapsed. Two were driven permanently insane. Fyodor Dostoevsky was left with shattered nerves, epileptic seizures, and a nascent conviction that any effort to conquer human suffering was doomed to failure—leaving Christian submission as the only course for mankind.

It is with gravity that literature by a man with such experiences should be read. The life of Fyodor Dostoevsky was as dark, dramatic, and desperate as his novels. He had a piercing grasp of human psychology, keenly aware of a cruel, vicious streak that had to come to grips with the reality of suffering. Even Nietzsche, himself a man of philosophical severity, held Dostoevsky in contempt for what he called “morbid moral tortures.” The Eternal Husband, written in 1870, is a powerful dose of such morbid moral torture. Though one of his more obscure works, it is hailed as one of his more perfect works for its razor-sharp story and in medias res structure. Besides the plot, it is thematically thick with the thinking of this extraordinary man, implying that the doom of his eternal husband is the doom of all unto eternity.
...............

http://www.crisismagazine.com