"Schneider's glasses"

Freedom in prison

Dostoyevsky's mock execution on the parade ground of the Semyonovsky Guards in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1849.(Bild: Wikipedia)

This time, "Krone" columnist Robert Schneider looks at a particularly gruesome historical anecdote: the mock execution of the great Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.

He was just 28 years old when he was arrested in the middle of the night by the Russian secret police and taken to the notorious Peter Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. At the end of his seven-month pre-trial detention, the military court sentenced the "retired lieutenant engineer (...) to death by firing squad for writing a letter hostile to religion and the government (...)". What Dostoyevsky did not know, however, was that the Tsar never intended to carry out the death penalty. He merely wanted to make the pardon appear extremely generous.

 Dostoyevsky and 14 other "state criminals" were finally led to the parade ground of the Semyonovsky Guards in St. Petersburg on December 22, 1849 in sub-zero temperatures. On the same day, he wrote to his brother Mikhail: "There the death sentence was read out to us, we were kissed on the cross, the sword was broken over our heads and we were dressed for burial (white shirts). Then we were placed in front of the stakes where the execution was to take place. I was the sixth in line (...) and didn't have a minute to live (...)."

The guards put on their rifles, the officer savored the infinitely long pause. Then the call for a pardon rang out. Pardon, however, meant commuting the death sentence to ten years' imprisonment, which Dostoyevsky began on January 23, 1850 in Siberia, 3,000 kilometers away. During these ten years, he wore shackles at all times. In the Omsk Katorga, where he was imprisoned, he wrote one of his most mysterious sentences ever: "Even in prison, one can attain immeasurable freedom."