Petrashevsky circle

The Petrashevsky Circle was a Russian literary discussion group of progressive-minded commoner-intellectuals in St. Petersburg in the 1840s. It was organized by Mikhail Petrashevsky, a follower of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Among the members were writers, teachers, students, minor government officials, and army officers. While differing in political views, most of them were opponents of the and Russian serfdom. Like that of the Lyubomudry group founded earlier in the century, the purpose of the circle was to discuss Western philosophy and literature that was officially banned by the Imperial government of Tsar Nicholas I. Among those connected to the circle were the writers Dostoyevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin, and the poets Aleksey Pleshcheyev, Apollon Maikov, and Taras Shevchenko.

Nicholas I, alarmed at the prospect of the revolutions of 1848 spreading to Russia, saw great danger in organisations like the Petrashevsky Circle. In 1849, members of the Circle were arrested and imprisoned. A large group of prisoners, Dostoyevsky among them, were sent to Semyonov Place for execution. As they stood in the square waiting to be shot, a messenger interrupted the proceedings with notice of a reprieve. As part of a pre-planned intentional deception, the Tsar had prepared a letter to general-adjutant Sumarokov, commuting the death sentences to incarceration. Some of the prisoners were sent to Siberia, others to prisons. Dostoyevsky's eight-year sentence was later reduced to four years by Nicholas I.

In the early 1840s, Petrashevsky had attended Viktor Poroshin's lectures on socialist systems at the University of St Petersburg. He was particularly impressed by the utopian ideas of Charles Fourier, and "devoted himself to propagating his new faith". He began accumulating a large library of forbidden books and invited friends to visit for the purpose of discussing the new ideas. By 1845 the circle had grown considerably, and Petrashevsky became a well-known figure in Petersburg social and intellectual life. Dostoevsky began attending the Petrashevsky 'Fridays' in 1847, at the time seeing the discussions as ordinary social occasions with nothing particularly conspiratorial about them. There was a wide diversity of points of view, from atheistic socialists influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach to deeply religious poets and literary artists, but all held in common a desire for greater freedom in Russian social life and a passionate opposition to the enslaved status of the Russian peasantry. Tsar Nicholas had made it clear that he too opposed the enslavement, and for this reason there was not much sense of political conspiracy in the circle at that time. This changed following the 1848 revolutions in Europe, when it became apparent that the kinds of social transformation occurring there were going to be aggressively stifled by the ruling classes in Russia. Membership of the circle increased, but discussions became more serious, formal and secretive. Petrashevsky, who had always tended to flaunt his iconoclasm, had for some time been a person of interest to the secret police, but they now decided to place him under close surveillance. An agent, Antonelli, was deployed in Petrashevsky's department in January 1849, ingratiated himself, began attending the meetings of the circle, and reported back to his superiors.

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