Circle to Siberia
Books and reading lead to Penal Colony
Mikhail Petrashevsky (1821-1866), Russian revolutionary and utopian theorist, bought books from a bookseller with connections in Paris. His collection became the largest multilingual library of philosophy and economics in Russia. Many of the books were about socialism and Fourierism1 and thus illegal. Others were books by members of Die Freien (The Free Ones) which included a 19th-century circle of Young Hegelians formed at the University of Berlin.
The Petrashevsky Circle
The Petrashevsky Circle was a Russian literary discussion group of progressive-minded intellectuals who gathered with Mikhail Petrashevsky in St. Petersburg in the 1840s. The meetings were originally intended to provide self-education and acquaint the members with the theories of French socialists. Fyodor Dostoevsky was a member.
Members of the Petrashevsky Circle Arrested
Betrayed by a provocateur, all members of the Petrashevsky Circle were arrested on the night of April 23, 1849.2 While 123 people were under investigation, 22 of them were brought to military tribunal and all but one sentenced to be executed. All the condemned were brought to Semenovsky Square to be executed on 22 December 22 1849. After the preparatory ceremony had been completed, however, it was declared that the capital punishment would be commuted to banishment to a penal colony, prisoner companies, and combat troops.
Dostoevsky was accused of reading works by Belinsky
Dostoevsky was accused of reading works by the literary critic Belinsky, including the banned Letter to Gogol, which stated:
The most vital national problems in Russia today are the abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment
Dostoevsky circulated copies.3 For his participation in the Petrashevsky Circle Dostoevsky served four years of exile with hard labor at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, followed by a term of compulsory military service. Classified as "one of the most dangerous convicts," Dostoevsky had his hands and feet shackled until his release.
Dostoevsky in Siberia
The short video, Dostoevsky in Siberia, is in Russian but has English subtitles.
Fourierism is the systematic set of economic, political, and social beliefs first espoused by French intellectual Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Based upon a belief in the inevitability of communal associations of people who worked and lived together as part of the human future, Fourier's committed supporters referred to his doctrines as associationism.
Birmingham, Kevin. 2021. The sinner and the saint: Dostoevsky and the gentleman murderer who inspired a masterpiece. New York: Penguin.
Belinskii, a literary critic, wrote a Letter to Gogol in response to the Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol's, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. Belinskii accused Gogol of defending the church and state authorities and being a traitor to the common good. Belinskii denounced Gogol's views and argued for a socially/politically committed art. The government banned circulation of the letter; however, it had a wide, illegal distribution and became in the following decades the central manifesto of Russian liberals.
In Petrashevsky's time, "Russian liberals" was an oxymoron. However, the leaders of both White Russia and Red Russia had to pretend that the literary circles. then popular in both groups were counter-revolutionary, at least so far as the other side's was. This contributed to a general anti[intellectual environment that swept through what are now Ukraine and Belarus.