The Brothers Karamazov - Translated From the Russian #271234

One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied and never regained his sanity. The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on Dostoyevsky's mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began the Dead House, and some years of service in a disciplinary battalion.