Domesticity gone awry.Īll this is recognizable and homespun. Even Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal sadist who kept boys’ body parts in his kitchen refrigerator, is not so very anomalous in the context of what can happen in ordinary neighborhoods: a little girl imprisoned in an underground cage children tormented, starved, beaten to death newborns bludgeoned battered women, slain wives, mutilated husbands. “Our” crime has usually been local-the stalker, the burglar, the mugger lurking in a doorway. They belong to our civilization they are the darker signals of home. They shake us up without disorienting us. Street crime, drunken crime, drug-inspired crime, crimes of passion and greed and revenge, crimes against children, gangster crime, white-collar crime, break-ins, car thefts, holdups-these are familiar, and to a degree nearly expected. It was a work almost in the nature of double jeopardy: as if Fyodor Dostoyevsky in middle age-defender of the czar, enemy of revolutionary socialism-were convicting and punishing his younger self yet again for the theories that the mature novelist had come to abhor.Ī new type of crime is on the American mind-foreign, remote, metaphysical, even literary, and radically different from what we are used to. Another, fifteen years afterward, wrote “Crime and Punishment,” an impassioned assault on exactly the kind of radical faith that had brought its author to face the Czar’s riflemen that day. Instead of being shot, the criminals were to be transported in shackles to a Siberian penal colony. Although the condemned were unaware of it, the execution was staged, and the reprieve was designed to demonstrate the merciful heart of the Czar. A galloping horseman announced a reprieve. At just that moment, there was a signal-a roll of drums-and the rifles were lowered.

The sun was beginning to brighten the firing squad took aim.

The first three were handed white gowns and shapeless caps and ordered to put them on then they were tied to posts. A priest carrying a cross and a Bible accompanied them. Several were professed atheists all were radicals. They were mostly educated men, idealists in pursuit of a just society. They were all insurgents against the despotism of Czar Nicholas I.

Soon after dawn on a very cold winter morning in 1849, fifteen Russian criminals were led, in groups of three, before a firing squad.

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