Fyodor Dostoevsky was delivered to the Peter and Paul Fortress on the night of April 23 to 24, 1849, from the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery on the Fontanka Embankment (now No. 15), accompanied by a gendarme lieutenant. In “individual” carriages under the guard of gendarme officers, thirteen of the “main culprits” were sent to the fortress at intervals of 10–15 minutes.

The first to be arrested, at 10:15 p.m., was Petrashevsky (in the photograph). Dostoevsky was arrested at 11:25 p.m. Thus, Dostoevsky arrived at the fortress well past midnight. There he was confined in cell No. 9 of the secret house of the Alekseevsky ravelin (now demolished; house No. 14 stands in its place, https://reveal.world/story/petropavlovskaya-krepost-glavnaya-tajnaya-tyur-ma-imperii).

His neighbors were: in cell No. 8 — Filippov, and in cell No. 10 — Balasoglo. In July 1849, when some of those arrested in the Petrashevsky case were released, including Beletsky, who was held in cell No. 7 and freed on July 10, Dostoevsky was transferred to his cell.

The public reading of a forbidden letter from Vissarion Belinsky to Nikolai Gogol proved fatal for him. During a search of Dostoevsky’s residence, other banned literature was also found. Six months later, the author of the novel Poor Folk would be sentenced to “death by firing squad.”

Dostoevsky’s close association with the Petrashevsky circle—a secret organization named after its founder, titular counselor Mikhail Petrashevsky—led to major troubles in his life. Gathering together, they held so-called “Fridays”: confidential meetings where they discussed topics too bold for Nicholas I’s Russia, from freedom of the press to the emancipation of the serfs. The movement’s leader promoted the principles of utopian socialism, but the political views of his followers varied widely. Therefore, the Petrashevsky group split into small, autonomously functioning circles based on interests. Dostoevsky aligned himself with the main radicals. In their presence, he read the ill-fated letter from Belinsky several times, which was considered a grave crime in the empire at the time. “Once a week, Petrashevsky held meetings where not always the same people attended. It was an interesting kaleidoscope of diverse opinions on current events, government orders, and the latest literary works across various fields of knowledge; city news was brought in, and everything was discussed loudly without any restraint,” wrote Petrashevsky member Dmitry Akhsharumov in his memoirs.

The police managed to infiltrate the organization with their agent. Through him, the content of the conversations reached the authorities. Meanwhile, Dostoevsky himself, according to another circle member, poet Apollon Maykov, considered Petrashevsky “a fool, an actor, and a chatterbox who would get nowhere,” urging people to turn to Nikolai Speshnev, who called himself a “communist,” and Pavel Filippov. The Petrashevsky members were hunted by gendarmes from the Third Section. In a relatively short time, about forty people were arrested. They were young officers, officials, writers, clerks, landowners, and students aged from 19 to 39. Dostoevsky was no longer an inexperienced youth; he joined the Petrashevsky circle consciously. He was approaching his 28th year. Besides his debut novel, which was followed by a 15-year gap before the next, he had written several novellas and stories.

Dostoevsky was closely watched: on March 1, a police agent reported that “Petrashevsky visited the writer.” The following month, the writer himself read Belinsky’s letter and shortly afterward was present when Lieutenant Petrashevsky Nikolai Grigoriev read the agitational “Soldier’s Truth,” which called for the overthrow of the tsar. On April 22, the Third Section authorized Dostoevsky’s arrest. “By highest order, I instruct your excellency to arrest tomorrow at four o’clock past midnight the retired engineer-lieutenant and writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, living at the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Voznesensky Prospect, in the Shil house, on the third floor, in Bremer’s apartment; to seal all his papers and books and deliver them together with Dostoevsky to the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery. In this case, you must strictly ensure that nothing is concealed from Dostoevsky’s papers,” stated the secret message from the chief of gendarmes, General-Adjutant Alexei Orlov. If Dostoevsky denied owning certain papers and books during the search, the Third Section officers had clear instructions not to believe him. Around four in the morning, Dostoevsky returned home. He was given time to fall asleep, and at five they raided and arrested him—the gendarmes thought a sleepy, caught-off-guard person would be easier to “break.”

“On the twenty-second, or rather the twenty-third of April 1849, I returned home around four o’clock from Grigoriev, went to bed, and immediately fell asleep,” recalled the main character of the “special operation.” “No more than an hour later, half-asleep, I noticed some suspicious and unusual people entering my room. A saber clanged, accidentally hitting something. What a strange noise? I opened my eyes with effort and heard a soft, pleasant voice: ‘Get up!’ I looked and saw a quartermaster or private bailiff with handsome sideburns. But he was not the one speaking; it was a gentleman dressed in blue with lieutenant colonel epaulettes.

‘What happened?’ I asked, sitting up in bed.

‘By order...’

I looked: indeed, ‘by order.’ A soldier stood in the doorway, also in blue. It was his saber that clanged...

‘Ah, so that’s what it is!’ I thought. ‘Allow me...’ I began.

‘Nothing, nothing! Get dressed. We will wait,’ added the lieutenant colonel in an even more pleasant voice.”

Then the gendarmes “demanded all the books and began rummaging.” According to Dostoevsky, they found little.

“The papers and letters were neatly tied with a string,” the writer continued. “The bailiff showed much foresight; he looked into the stove and rummaged through my chibouk in the old ashes. At his invitation, a gendarme non-commissioned officer stood on a chair and climbed onto the stove but slipped from the cornice and loudly fell onto the chair, then with the chair onto the floor. Then the insightful gentlemen were convinced that there was nothing on the stove.

On the table lay an old, bent five-altyn coin. The bailiff examined it carefully and finally nodded to the lieutenant colonel.

‘Is it not counterfeit?’ I asked.

‘Hmm... This, however, must be examined...’ muttered the bailiff, and ended up adding it to the case.”

We left. The frightened landlady and her man Ivan, though very frightened, looked with some dull solemnity, appropriate to the event but not festive, accompanied us. A carriage stood at the gate; the soldier, I, the bailiff, and the lieutenant colonel got in. We headed to the Fontanka, to the Chain Bridge near the Summer Garden...”

At the same time, his brother Andrey was arrested at another address.

This was a mistake: the gendarmes’ real target was another Dostoevsky, Mikhail.

At the Third Section headquarters in the former mansion of Count Viktor Kochubey, Fyodor Dostoevsky and other detainees were interrogated throughout the day. At 11 p.m., they were taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Here is how Dostoevsky’s close friend and professional colleague Alexander Milyukov recalled the day of Dostoevsky’s arrest, as told to him by the writer’s elder brother Mikhail.

“On April 23, 1849, returning home from a lecture, I found Mikhail Dostoevsky, who had long been waiting for me,” Milyukov noted. “At first glance, I noticed he was very worried.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you know?’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘Brother Fyodor has been arrested.’

‘What are you saying! When?’

‘Last night... there was a search... he was taken away... the apartment is sealed...’

‘And the others?’

‘Petrashevsky, Speshnev were taken... who else—I don’t know, if not today, then tomorrow they’ll take me too.’”

Milyukov and Mikhail Dostoevsky went to the addresses of their friends: many had disappeared, and their apartments were sealed.

“Besides rumors circulating in the city, which portrayed the Petrashevsky case with the usual additions typical in such cases, we only learned that about thirty people were arrested, all initially brought to the Third Section, then transferred to the Peter and Paul Fortress and held in solitary confinement cells,” Milyukov recounted.

“The Petrashevsky circle had long been under surveillance, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs had introduced a young man to their evenings, who pretended to sympathize with the ideas of liberal youth, regularly attended meetings, incited others to radical talks, then recorded everything said at the evenings and passed it on to the authorities. Mikhail Dostoevsky told me that he had long found him suspicious.” On May 6, the investigative commission would ask Dostoevsky the following questions: what was Petrashevsky’s character as a person in general and as a “political person” in particular; what happened at Petrashevsky’s evenings; was there any secret purpose in Petrashevsky’s society. The writer would spend eight months in confinement, after which the court sentence would be announced and the execution of the Petrashevsky members staged with the breaking of swords over their heads, symbolizing civil death. The news of clemency and replacement of the shooting with eight years of penal servitude would arrive at the last moment—because of this, Lieutenant Grigoriev, who read the “Soldier’s Truth,” would lose his mind forever. Dostoevsky would get off relatively lightly: by order of Nicholas I, his sentence would be halved. After serving as a private by imperial command, following the emperor’s death, the writer would return to St. Petersburg, where he would live and create under the secret surveillance of the police.

The writer was held in the St. Petersburg Fortress for exactly eight months—from April 24 to December 24, 1849. The date of Dostoevsky’s transfer from the fortress to Siberia is documented by the order to the fortress commandant, General-Adjutant I.A. Nabokov, No. 523 dated December 24, 1849: “...the criminals Durov, Dostoevsky, and Yastrzhembsky, held in the Alekseevsky ravelin and scheduled for dispatch this evening to Tobolsk in chains, are to be handed over to Lieutenant Prokofiev of the courier corps assigned for escort and removed from the list of those arrested in the ravelin,” as well as by Nabokov’s report No. 522 of the same date confirming the execution of this order. In a letter to his brother Mikhail dated January 30 – February 22, 1854, from Omsk, Dostoevsky recalled the departure from the Peter and Paul Fortress: “Exactly at 12 o’clock, that is, exactly at Christmas, I put on shackles for the first time. Then we were placed in open sleighs, each separately with a gendarme, and on four sleighs, with the courier in front, we set off from Petersburg.” Milyukov, who came with Mikhail Dostoevsky that day to the Peter and Paul Fortress to say goodbye (in the commandant’s house) to the writer leaving on the stagecoach, corrects this testimony. Warned by the adjutant Maidel that the prisoners would be sent on the stagecoach shortly after the meeting (“in an hour or even earlier”), they waited for the prisoners’ departure at the gates of the Peter and Paul Fortress. “The fortress clock struck nine,” Milyukov writes, differing in the time from Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother, “when two coachman’s sleighs drove out, each with a prisoner and a gendarme.

‘Farewell!’ we shouted.

‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ they replied.”

Dostoevsky writes: “exactly at 12 o’clock” (that is, at midnight), Milyukov recalls: “the chimes struck nine.” The account of the events by an outside observer—Milyukov—seems more trustworthy. The writer, it seems, tries in his later epistolary testimony to sacralize the fateful, turning point moment of his biography: his penal, suffering path begins “exactly at Christmas.”

He would return to Petersburg only at the end of December 1859—exactly ten years later.

Sources:

https://www.gazeta.ru/science/2019/04/23_a_12316363.shtml

https://histrf.ru/read/articles/kak-dostoievskii-nie-ubil-tsaria-k-167-lietiiu-ariesta-pietrashievtsiev

https://worknet-info.ru/read-blog/1786_petrashevcy-kratko-i-ponyatno-samoe-glavnoe.html

http://family-history.ru/material/biography/mesto/dostoyevsky/

Boris Nikolaevich Tikhomirov: ADDRESSES OF DOSTOEVSKY IN ST. PETERSBURG: CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SOURCES AND EXPERTISE OF LOCAL HISTORY PUBLICATIONS