The Petrashevsky Circle
Dostoevsky faces a firing squad and is spared at the last moment
In 1849 the authorities arrested Mikhail Petrashevsky's circle, which read banned socialist books. On 22 December the condemned, among them the young Fyodor Dostoevsky, were led out to Semyonovsky Square to be shot, and only at the last minute were told the sentence was commuted to hard labour.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Europe
- 1839 Birth of photography: the daguerreotype — 10 years earlier
- 1845–1852 Great Famine in Ireland — 4 years earlier
- 1848–1849 Revolutions of 1848 — 1 year earlier
- 1848 The Communist Manifesto — 1 year earlier
- 1861 Unification of Italy — 12 years later
Middle East
- 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay — 21 years earlier
- 1839 The Edict of Gülhane opens the Tanzimat — 10 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Anglo-Afghan War — 10 years earlier
Africa
- 1830 France invades Algiers — 19 years earlier
- c. 1835–1846 The Great Trek — 14 years earlier
- 1847 Liberia declares independence — 2 years earlier
- 1869 Opening of the Suez Canal — 20 years later
Asia
- c. 1831 Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa — 18 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Opium War — 10 years earlier
- 1850–1864 Taiping Rebellion — 1 year later
- 1853–1854 Commodore Perry's Black Ships — 4 years later
- 1856–1860 Second Opium War — 7 years later
Americas
- 1835 Darwin in the Galápagos — 14 years earlier
- 1838–1839 Trail of Tears — 11 years earlier
- 1846 First public demonstration of ether anaesthesia — 3 years earlier
- 1846–1848 Mexican–American War — 3 years earlier
- 1861–1865 American Civil War — 12 years later
Oceania
- 1851 The Australian gold rushes — 2 years later
Alive at the time
- Charles Darwin (aged 40)
- Abraham Lincoln (aged 40)
- Karl Marx (aged 31)
- Queen Victoria (aged 30)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (aged 28)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 21)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (aged 15)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (aged 9)
- Thomas Edison (aged 2)
- Katsushika Hokusai (aged 89)