Dostoevsky’s deposition was written shortly after his arrest on April 23, 1849, while he was being held in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. It is one of the most important documents that he ever wrote. Aside from his letters, there are very few firsthand statements by Dostoevsky about what he thought and believed. As he note’s in his deposition, he was by nature a secretive person and rarely opened himself to others; all students of his work are aware of how difficult it is to make assertions about him that do not instantly have to be qualified. The existence of a document in which he sets out to tell the truth about himself—or, at least, to convince others that he was telling the truth—is thus of unique importance.

He had been arrested in the roundup of the Petrashevsky circle, a group which had met weekly for some years at the home of Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky for social-political discussion. Petrashevsky was a young man of good family, educated at Pushkin’s old school, the exclusive Alexander Lyceum, who had also acquired a law degree and worked as a translator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But his real passion was for social reform, and he was known as an ardent Fourierist whose gatherings were suspected to be a center of political subversion. Those taken into custody were held incommunicado for five days after their arrest, and on April 28 they began to be called in