Fyodor Dostoevskythe novelist of guilt

The charge was reading banned literature aloud. He was marched to a square in Saint Petersburg, tied to a post, and told to prepare himself. The rifles came up. A messenger arrived with a reprieve that had been signed days earlier, the whole execution was theatre, staged by the Tsar to make a point. One man in the group lost his mind on the spot.

Dostoevsky spent the next four years in a Siberian prison camp with one book permitted to him: the New Testament. He read it until he had it by heart, surrounded by murderers he could not stop finding human. Every novel he wrote afterward is populated by those men.

He wrote most of his best work against deadlines he had already spent the advance on, some of it dictated at speed to a stenographer he later married. Crime and Punishment was written in that state, broke, epileptic, and gambling badly. It is not a tidy book. That is largely the point.

“Pain and suffering are the price of a deep heart.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky