Some great writers have been driven to their craft with gale force passion due to some extraordinary event. In Dostoevsky's case, it was a near death experience so terrifying it would color his writing throughout his career.
It wasn't his first seizure at the age of nine; it wasn't the death of his mother or his violently alcoholic father two years later, but rather, after he had begun his brilliant literary career Fyodor Dostoevsky and others in the liberal intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle, were imprisoned and then one day everything changed: they were condemned to be shot at seven o'clock in the morning of December 22, 1849.
Dostoevsky was marched out naked in the cold with twenty others and they were read the fatal words, "Sentenced to be shot!" After twenty minutes in the cold he embraced two of his friends in a final farewell. He wrote of his "last" moment, "I kept staring at a church with a gilt dome reflecting the sunbeams and I suddenly felt as if these beams came from the region where I myself was going to be in a few minutes."
But shockingly an officer ran into the square and announced that Tsar Nicholas I "in his infinite mercy" had commuted the death sentence to prison terms in Siberia. So Dostoevsky survived it but his colleagues didn't fare so well, as one became insane, some had frostbite, and others contracted fatal diseases or had nervous breakdowns.
The lives of writers today aren't nearly as challenging or strife-ridden. Most sit at their comfortable desk, in a comfortable chair churning out manufactured tales according to established formulas. This is a loss, a loss for the world, for those who take a risk and venture out to experiment with words or ideas are little appreciated and even snubbed.
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