(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
House of the Dead is highly recommended.