“Take a soldier, put him right in front of a cannon during a battle, and shoot at him, and he’ll still keep hoping, but read the same soldier a sentence for certain, and he’ll lose his mind or start weeping.”
Prince Myshkin thinks that may make the execution even worse. His interlocutor makes the remark that at least there’s not too much suffering involved for the one sentenced to death by guillotine. The first is when the titular Prince Myshkin is discussing an execution by guillotine he witnessed prior to returning to Russia. Two instances early on in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot seem especially autobiographical. Thankfully, for those of us lucky enough to be unacquainted with the death penalty, we need not rely on the words of any lesser a writer than Dostoevsky himself. My words would fall short of accurately describing this and I pray I never have the experience necessary to give an adequate account. At the same time, what should not be left aside in this conversation is the mental toll exacted on the individual who is sentenced to death by the state. Those opposed to the death penalty are correct to point out the inherent injustice in the possibility of sentencing an innocent person to death and to cite the grossly expensive nature of capital punishment. There can be no doubt this incident had a profound effect upon the young Dostoevsky. Every last detail - from the blindfolds to the firing squad, to the extraordinarily convenient last-minute messenger - had been pre-arranged in a twisted form of psychological torture.
“Performed” is an especially appropriate word as the entire execution was just that - a performance, otherwise known as a mock execution, designed to instill terror into the prisoners and dissidents.Īt the very last minute, as the rifles were loaded and aimed, a messenger arrived on horseback waving a white flag and telling the armed men to stop the execution, on direct orders from the Tsar. The execution was to be carried out on the orders of Tsar Nicholas I, performed by a firing squad in a public square. The entire execution was just a performance, otherwise known as a mock execution, designed to instill terror. A Tactic of Terrorĭue to his involvement in the intellectual group known as the Petrashevsky Circle, Dostoevsky, along with others, was sentenced to death by firing squad for propagating letters containing abusive remarks about the Orthodox Church and the Russian government. Petersburg when a blindfolded Fyodor Dostoevsky, who would later become one of Russia’s greatest writers, was about to be executed.
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