ABSTRACT
Following the mock execution, Dostoevsky was allowed to see Mikhail one last time. In this meeting, he seemed calmer than his brother, who had been released from confinement shortly after the arrests, he even spoke of looking forward to the future. The prisoners were prepared for the trip, ten-pound irons were fixed to their legs and he, Durov, and one other left Petersburg on Christmas Eve for the two-thousand-mile trek to Siberia by horse-drawn sled. An important encounter with a group of women, the Decemberist wives, occurred shortly before their arrival at the prison. In December of 1825, a group of army officers had staged an abortive revolt against the tsar. Most of the members of the Decemberist Insurrection were exiled to Siberia for life, and many of their wives followed them there and shared their hard lot. It was three of these women who met with Dostoevsky and the other political exiles, gave them food, clothes, advice on how to get along in prison, and a Bible with a ten-ruble note secreted inside. For Dostoevsky, the kindness of these self-sacrificing women fit his image of the loving mother. He later corresponded with one of them, Madame Fonvizina, and kept the Bible as a treasured object.
