e he obstinately upheld his own religious
views. The result of this was, that the members of the circle began to
regard him as behind the times. He became more and more interested in
socialism, and soon went to live with his new friends in quarters where
the principles of association ruled. He then entered the Duroff circle
of Fourierists, the most moderate of all the Petrashevsky circles, which
a good authority declares to have entertained no purely revolutionary
ideas whatever. They rebelled against the maintenance of the strict
censorship then in force, serfdom, and administrative abuses, but paid
little attention to the question of a change in the form of government,
and attributed no importance to political upheavals. Dostoevsky himself
was, in general, very far from cherishing any revolutionary designs; he
enthusiastically declaimed Pushkin's verses about slavery falling "at
the wave of the Tzar's hand," and insisted that no socialistic theories
had the slightest importance for Russians, since in the commune, and the
working unions (_artel_), and mutual guarantee system there had long
existed in their land more solid and normal foundations than all the
dreams of Saint Simon and his school, and that life in a community and
phalanstery seemed to him more terrible and repulsive than that of any
galley-slave.

Notwithstanding this, in May, 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested, along with
the other followers of Petrashevsky, confined in the fortress, and
condemned by court-martial on the charge of having "taken part in
discussions concerning the severity of the censorship, and in one
assembly, in March, 1849, had read a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol,
received from Pleshtcheeff in Moscow, and had then read it aloud in the
assemblies at Duroff's, and had given copies of it to Mombelli to copy.
In the assemblies at Duroff's he had listened to the reading of
articles, knew of the intention to set up a printing-press, and at
Spyeshneff's had listened to the reading of 'A Soldier's Conversation.'"

All the Petrashevskyians were condemned to be shot, and the sentence was
read to them on January 3, 1850, on the scaffold, where they stood
stripped, in the freezing cold, for twenty minutes, in momentary
expectation of their execution. But the death sentence was mitigated in
different degrees by the Emperor, Dostoevsky's sentence being commuted
to exile with hard labor for four years, and then service as a common
soldier in the ranks.