On this day the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky escaped imminent death. He had been convicted of participating in a secret revolutionary society with conspiratorial aims, the Petrashevsky Circle, and had been sentenced to death. After the sentence, the conspirators were taken to Semyonov Place in Saint Petersburg where they were lined up in front of a firing squad. The execution was about to take place when a cart arrived with a letter from the Tzar commuting the sentence. Dostoevsky later described the experience of what he believed to be the last moments of his life in his novel The Idiot.
Dostoevsky Escapes Death Sentence
22nd December 1849