(from Episode 24:)
She imagines Dostoevsky running by her side. He knew something about danger. He faced a firing squad in St Petersburg on a cold day in December 1849, when he was twenty-two years old, before he had written any of the immortal books. His crime was to belong to the group of intellectuals called the Petrashevsky circle, which had published texts abusing the government and the Orthodox Church. In reality he wasn’t about to die. It was a mock execution, designed to terrify him into meekness along with the other similarly sentenced eggheads; but they, he, didn’t know that. He stood there blindfolded in the cold, waiting for the bullet that never came. He was sent to do four years of forced labor in Siberia instead. Later, in The Idiot, he gave these thoughts to Prince Myshkin: “the strongest pain may not be in the wounds but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second – your soul will fly out of your body and you’ll no longer be a man.” The anticipation of certain death, death on a fixed timetable, is worse than the actual moment of dying.
House of the Dead is highly recommended.