Dostoevsky was sentenced to death in 1849 for taking part in the Petrashevsky circle, a group that discussed French socialism and the emancipation of the serfs in Russia under Nicholas I. The charges were that he had read aloud and circulated Belinsky's forbidden letter to Gogol, had not reported a subversive text by Grigoryev, and had taken part in conversations about printing and distributing works against the government on a homemade lithograph press.
Since 1847 he had attended the Friday meetings of Mikhail Petrashevsky and had joined a smaller and more radical group around Nikolai Speshnev, which planned to set up a clandestine printing press. A police agent who had infiltrated the group recorded the last meetings, and Dostoevsky was arrested in the early hours of April 23, 1849. He spent eight months in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
On November 16, the military-civil tribunal sentenced fifteen defendants to be shot, he among them. Tsar Nicholas I commuted the sentences, but ordered that the commutation be announced only at the last moment. On December 22, 1849, according to the Russian calendar, in Semyonovsky Square, the condemned men put on their shrouds, the first three were tied to the posts, and only then did the roll of the drums announce the pardon. Dostoevsky, a former officer, recognized the signal before the others; one companion went mad right there. That night he wrote to his brother that life was a gift and that he would be reborn. The sentence came down to four years of hard labor, followed by service as a soldier.
The sources differ on the count: one records fifteen men sentenced to death by the tribunal; another writes that Nicholas condemned Dostoevsky, Petrashevsky, and fourteen others, that is, sixteen. Between one and the other, the Auditor-General's Office considered that all the defendants should have been sentenced to death, and it was up to the tsar to commute the sentences.