DOSTOEVSKY FEODOR MIHAJLOVICH. ARREST. PENAL SERVITUDE

In April, 1849 writer Dostoevsky has been arrested on business petrashevtsev and placed in the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress. On the first interrogation ' the rebel ' has declared: ' I the freethinker in the same sense in which can be named by the freethinker and each person who in the heart of the heart feels has the right to be the citizen, feels has the right to wish well to the fatherland because finds in the heart and love to fatherland, and consciousness that never has damaged nothing to it '.

And after eight months, on December, 22nd, 1849 among others petrashevtsev it have deduced on the Semenovsky parade-ground in Petersburg where the condemned had been read the death sentence. Only after the first group of criminals was blindfolded also by soldiers have thrown up guns for a volley, has been declared that execution is replaced with penal servitude with the subsequent service in army private soldiers. Later Dostoevsky recollected: ' the death penalty Sentence rasstreljaniem, read to all of us preliminary, has been read at all for fun; almost all sentenced have been assured that it will be executed, and have taken out, at least, ten awful, immensely terrible minutes of expectation of death. These last minutes some of us … can be, and repented of other heavy affairs … but that business for which us have condemned, those thoughts, those concepts which owned our spirit, were represented by a clearing martyrdom for which to us much will say goodbye! '

In the end of January, 1850 Dostoevsky has been delivered in the Omsk jail where full 4-year-old term of a hard labour has left. Here that Dostoevsky about the stay on penal servitude wrote: ' we Lived in a heap, all together in one barracks … Us as seldej in a keg … we Slept on naked plank beds, one pillow was allowed. Took cover short short fur coats … All night long you will tremble … I often the patient in hospital lay. From frustration of nerves I had paduchaja … And on penal servitude between robbers I, in four years, have distinguished at last people … That for the wonderful people. In general time for me is not lost. If I have learnt not Russia, so the people Russian well and so it is good as, maybe, not many know it '.

The Years spent among criminals, have seriously affected outlook of the young writer: ' It was suffering inexpressible, infinite … any minute gravitated as a stone at me on a shower '. The endured nervous shocks, melancholy and loneliness, ' court over itself ', ' strict revision of a former life ', difficult scale of feelings with despair to belief in fast realisation of the high calling, all this sincere experience ostrozhnyh years subsequently became a biographic basis ' Notes from the Dead house ', the tragical confessionary book which have amazed contemporaries by courage and strength of mind of the writer.