The Novelist Reborn in Chains

On December 22, 1849, twenty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky stood in a white execution shroud on the Semyonovsky Parade Ground in St. Petersburg, waiting to die. He and fellow members of the Petrashevsky Circle had been condemned for discussing banned socialist literature. The first three prisoners were bound to stakes. Dostoevsky stood in the next group. Soldiers raised their rifles.

Then a drumroll sounded. A courier arrived bearing orders from Tsar Nicholas I — the execution was staged, a calculated act of psychological terror. The sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in Omsk, Siberia.

The young intellectual who entered that frozen prison camp was an ambitious writer with fashionable radical ideas. The man who emerged in 1854 was someone altogether different. Surrounded by murderers and thieves, Dostoevsky discovered something he had never found among St. Petersburg's literary elite — a living faith in Christ. The only book permitted to prisoners was a New Testament, and he read it until its pages wore thin. The man who walked out of Siberia would go on to write Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov — works saturated with the grace he found in chains.

Paul writes, "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here" (2 Corinthians 5:17). Dostoevsky's old self — his pride, his ideology, his self-reliance — died in that Siberian camp more thoroughly than any firing squad could have accomplished. God does not simply improve us. He makes us new. Whatever prison you find yourself in today — grief, addiction, bitterness, failure — the same Christ who met a condemned novelist in a frozen cell stands ready to make you an entirely new creation.