A Matter of Life and Death
Published on: 27 February, 2015
By: David Torkington
When he was only twenty eight, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was, condemned to death. It was the spring of 1849. He was condemned for reading ‘subversive literature and frequenting suspect gatherings of anarchists’. There was nothing in these charges, but at the time the Tsar, like other monarchs, who had survived the aftermath of…