he life of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, the towering cultural icon whose two hundredth anniversary was among the past year’s great literary events, would itself have made a remarkable novel—or film, since its pivotal moment was a harrowingly cinematic scene. On December 23, 1849, shortly after his twenty-eighth birthday, the former military engineer was taken to what he believed would be his execution, with twenty other men condemned as dangerous subversives for membership in a clandestine literary circle that trafficked in banned books. The sentence was read out loud, the first three victims were tied to posts before a firing squad, the soldiers took aim; then, drums signaled a retreat and a messenger from Tsar Nicholas I announced a pardon and commutation to hard labor in Siberia. This was not, as some accounts have erroneously said, a last-minute change of heart by the tsar but a pre-planned sadistic charade.
In the remaining three decades of his life, Dostoevsky spent four years in a penal colony (reduced from the original eight-year sentence); had a stormy marriage and an even more tumultuous love affair before finding happiness and stability with his second wife, Anna; overcame a gambling addition that at one point reduced him and Anna to penury; fathered four children and was devastated by the deaths of two of them at a young age; struggled for years to establish himself as a writer and journalist; and finally achieved fame that brought more than 60,000 mourners to his funeral when he died at 59 of a pulmonary hemorrhage on February 9, 1881.
