Dostoevsky was sentenced to be shot and reprieved at the last moment.
In December 1849 the first three prisoners already faced the firing squad when the sentence was commuted to hard labour. He later retold the scene in The Idiot.
More amazing facts
- 1848 The Communist Manifesto and the California Gold Rush began within weeks of each other: gold was found at Sutter's Mill on 24 January 1848, and Marx and Engels's manifesto came out in London that February.
- 1848 · 1860 Phineas Gage carried around the iron rod that had gone through his head.
- 1849 · 1850 Chopin's heart lies apart from his body, in Warsaw, in a jar of alcohol, probably cognac.
- 1849 Abraham Lincoln is the only US president to hold a patent.
- 1850 · 1861 China's Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) overlapped with the American Civil War and cost an estimated 20–30 million lives — many times more.
- 1850 · 1856 The father of genetics failed his exam to become a science teacher, more than once.