Three months earlier, on November 19th, 1855, Lieutenant Tolstoy had arrived in St Petersburg by train. He remained there for most of the next six months. While Moscow's thinkers focused primarily on the war, St Petersburg's intellectuals seemed more concerned with political reform.

Although the Neva remained frozen throughout most of Tolstoy's stay, the spirit of the capital and Russia itself seemed to be experiencing a thaw after the frozen immobility of Nicholas's final years. Signs of renewed life were sprouting up everywhere. New journals were begun. Previously forbidden works were now printed. As Tolstoy later wrote: “Everyone tried to discover still new questions, everyone tried to resolve them; people wrote, read and spoke about projects; everyone wished to correct, destroy and change things, and all Russians, as if a single person, found themselves in an indescribable state of enthusiasm.”

Tolstoy came to the capital to meet the leading literary men of his day. One of the most prominent was Ivan Turgenev, the author of A Sportsman's Sketches, a work applauded for its humane depiction of the Russian peasants. Turgenev had just recently completed a draft of a novel, based in part on the life of a friend, Michael Bakunin, a radical currently in prison. Almost immediately after arriving at the train station, Tolstoy headed for the large first floor apartment of Turgenev. It was just off the Nevsky Prospect near the Anichkov Palace, where the widow of Nicholas I now resided.

At the end of 1875, a young Russian the same age as Sophia Perovskaya found himself alone in the Egyptian desert.He was wearing a top hat and a long black coat. He was taller than average, pale and thin. But his dark blue eyes were what people noticed. Beneath his thick, dark brows, they seemed both penetrating and mysterious. The young man was Vladimir Soloviev, the son of the historian.

Although as a young teenager he had rejected the religious beliefs of his parents and become an atheist and a nihilist, he by now had given up such views. He still sought the transformation of society, but now by the workings of both God and man. Only gradually had he worked out this religiously oriented philosophy. At sixteen, he entered Moscow University, where his sober hardworking father continued to serve as dean of the Historical-Philological faculty and then, after 1871, as rector of the university. But the learning that was most important to the young Vladimir was not that dictated by his professors, but by his own inner search for truth.

From his preference for reading Darwin, the nihilist Pisarev and the German materialist Büchner, he passed on to the philosophers Spinoza, Feuerbach,Mill, Kant and, especially, Comte and Schopenhauer. The latter helped lead him to other German philosophers such as Hegel and Schelling.He also became interested in Eastern religions and in mystical writings.

Several days after the fall of Sevastopol Alexander II, his mother, wife and four sons were on a train to Moscow. From there he would go south to encourage his troops. Soldiers and soldiering had always been important to him. Since childhood, he had loved military activities such as parades and war games, and he had become a full general while still in his mid-twenties. In addition, it appeared that Alexander had decided to demonstrate that his rule reflected not just power but also the mutual love of tsar and people for each other. The Tsar's family had left the baby,Maria, back in Tsarskoe Selo, one of the Tsar's summer residences near St Petersburg. It was early morning when they had departed, and now as they approached Moscow, a little over four hundred miles away, it was late evening.Although it was a long day's journey, it must have still seemed a great improvement over the carriage trip necessary before this line, Russia's first major one, had been completed just four years earlier.

The spring and summer had been difficult for the new Tsar. Although conscientious and provided with considerable experience by his father, Alexander II lacked a creative and agile mind. His thinking seemed almost as traditional as that of his reactionary father, and as uninspired. He also lacked vigor and real enthusiasm for his work. When he was young his tutors had discerned that he was easily discouraged by difficulties.

Despite the intentions of Alexander III, his “guarantee” to Pobedonostsev was not fully carried out. Even the “Autocrat of all the Russias” could not completely control unforeseen circumstances. One such circumstance was the discovery that one of the two females sentenced to death was pregnant. As a result, Gesya Helfman's sentence was changed to life imprisonment.“All six”would therefore not be hanged. And how about the other five? Mikhailov and Rysakov petitioned the Tsar for a reprieve; the other three did not. The Tsar turned down the two petitioning prisoners. But even then no one could be absolutely sure what would occur. Had not the famous Dostoevsky thought that he was going to be executed until almost at the very last moment, with the firing squad already in place, a reprieve was announced?

The executions were scheduled for Friday, April 3rd. On Thursday, Rysakov wrote still one more letter in an attempt to save his life. He offered to help the police catch some of the revolutionaries still not apprehended. Once again, he was turned down. That same evening, Rysakov and Mikhailov each confessed their sins to a priest. Kibalchich went as far as talking to one; but Sophia and Zhelyabov each refused the opportunity. The prisoners were allowed no other visitors. Sophia lay down that Thursday night at 11:00 in her cell in the House of Preventive Detention, but she was not alone. Night and day, a gendarme officer and a gendarme soldier were present.

During the late 1850s, Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev lived like the wealthy nobles they were. Turgenev owned a few thousand serfs, more than did ninetynine per cent of the nobles in Russia, and even Tolstoy, with his few hundred, had more than at least eighty per cent of the nobles. Thus, they could afford, as only a small percentage of their class could, to divide their time between their estates, stays in Moscow and St Petersburg and travel abroad. They also tried to keep up with the latest news regarding plans for the emancipation of the serfs, a goal with which both men were more sympathetic than were most nobles.

Tolstoy had several properties, but the chief one was Yasnaya Polyana, which had once belonged to his maternal grandfather, Prince Nicholas Volkonsky. Tolstoy had been born there in a big columned house, which was later sold and dismantled to pay for his gambling debts. The estate was a hundred and thirty miles south of Moscow and consisted of about three thousand acres. The house where Tolstoy now lived had once been one of two smaller buildings on either side of the larger home. It was surrounded by woods and fields, birch and lime alleys, ponds and plants, flowers and fruit trees. It also contained huts for his serfs and their families and, near the edge of the estate, the small Voronka River, where a bathhouse stood.

The bloody struggle between revolutionaries and the government did not end with the deaths of Sophia Perovskaya and her four companions. During Alexander III's reign (1881–94), however, the Tsar seemed to have the upper hand. His increasingly reactionary policies temporarily stifled the radicals, and the spirit of Pobedonostsev seemed triumphant.He continued to be an important minister for the next quarter century. By the time he was replaced as Procurator of the Holy Synod in 1905,Nicholas II was Tsar.As a twelve-year-old boy, he had witnessed the painful death of Alexander II, his grandfather. The scene left a lasting impression on him, and he became as reactionary as his father, although not as strong-willed.

Crippled but not crushed, the radical spirit survived. In 1887, Alexander Ulyanov was executed for plotting against the Tsar, but his younger brother, subsequently best known by his revolutionary name of Lenin, came to power thirty years later and inaugurated seven decades of communist rule. Of course, the future of the Russian Empire was determined not just by its rulers, thinkers and revolutionaries, but by thousands of other causes as well, from the realities of geography to those of international relations.

In 1883, Ivan Turgenev died a painful death from cancer.At his funeral a now moribund People's Will distributed one of his poems mistakenly thought to have been a tribute to Sophia Perovskaya. A voice in the poem referred to its heroine as “Saint.”

During the period that Alexander II was in the Balkans, a man who especially epitomized the alienated intellectuals' agonizing quest to serve the common people was slowly dying of cancer. He was the poet and editor Nicholas Nekrasov.

The decade following that infamous night at the English Club, when he had read his poem of praise to Count Michael Muraviev (the Hangman) had been a difficult but productive time for Nekrasov. He was often in poor health, and poems with titles such as “I Shall Soon Die” (1867) and “Despondency” (1874) reflect the bleak mood that often struck him. In 1871 he turned fifty. As his hair continued to recede and along with his goatee showed signs of graying, he thought more and more of the past.

He could never forget his “fateful blunder” at the English Club, and although he lashed back at the many hypocritical voices that had mocked him for his performance that night, he never could quite forgive himself. He continued to live two lives, that of a wealthy landowner with a penchant for hunting, gambling, gastronomy, servants and carriages, and that of a radical editor and poet. He was almost like one of Dostoevsky's fictional split personalities, and like some of them, he often berated himself for his sins. The radical poet in him did not much care for the wealthy landowner.

Although he had taken over and remade the Notes of the Fatherland into the most successful radical journal of its day, the running of it was often an agonizing job.

Between the Muravievs and the Perovskys, two important Russian clans, interesting relations had existed in the past and would continue in the future. The Muravievs were an outstanding example of how relatives in Russia were often on opposite sides of the political fence. Not only was the mother of the radical Bakunin a Muraviev, but in 1825 several Muravievs were implicated in the Decembrist revolt. On the other hand, even more Muravievs were important generals or officials. One of these,Michael Muraviev, who was now Minister of State Properties, once summed up the diversity nicely when he stated that he was “not one of the Muravyovs [Muravievs] who get hanged, but one of those who do the hanging.”

The first Perovskys were a notable group and were children of Alexei Razumovsky, a Minister of Education under Catherine II, and his mistress Maria Sobolevskaya. Under Imperial Order the children were legitimized and given the name Perovsky. Vasily and Lev, both born in the early 1790s, became the most famous. They took part in the wars against Napoleon and were influenced by the post-war reformist hopes that led some to the Decembrist conspiracy. But the two brothers stopped short of such radicalism, and by 1825 Vasily was an aide to the Tsar and stood with Nicholas I facing the revolting troops on the Senate Square on that cold December afternoon when the Tsar finally turned his cannon on them.

Several months after the replacement of Perovsky, an attractive twenty-year-old woman walked up the steps to Dostoevsky's apartment. It was about 11:30 in the morning, and the young woman's name was Anna Snitkina. She had gray eyes, a broad forehead and a firm chin. Although she was a bit apprehensive about the coming encounter, her face normally reflected a certain resoluteness. For a woman so young, she was well educated and possessed an unusual degree of common sense mixed with intelligence. She had completed a secondary education and had also enrolled in a Pedagogical Institute recently opened for women, but she dropped out after a year to help care for her dying father. She still, however, had time to take a stenography class at night. It was due to this training that she was now on her way to begin working for a novelist whose works she had read and enjoyed.

Most recently she had read the first parts of his Crime and Punishment, which had been appearing serially that year in Katkov's The Russian Messenger. In fact, the big stone corner building in which she now found herself, with its many small apartments, reminded her of the one lived in by Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoevsky's new novel.

Indeed,much of the story was set in the writer's own neighborhood, not far from the Haymarket Square and about a mile south of the Winter Palace. In his novel he wrote of Sonia, a good-hearted woman forced into prostitution by poverty and the irresponsibility of her alcoholic father, Mr Marmeladov.

Less than five months after the death of Nekrasov, Dostoevsky was crushed by the death of someone much closer to him, his two-year-old son Alyosha. One May morning in 1878, shortly before the family was to leave the capital for their summer retreat at Staraya Russa,Anna noticed that her little Alyosha's oval face began to twitch. She called the children's doctor,who came over, gave her a prescription, and assured her that the twitching would soon cease. But since it continued, she awoke Dostoevsky, and they decided to seek out a specialist in nervous disorders. The specialist promised to come as soon as possible and arrived early in the afternoon. By that time the infant was unconscious, and his little body convulsed sporadically in spasms. The doctor told Dostoevsky, but not Anna, that the boy was near death. Dostoevsky knelt down next to the couch where they had placed Alyosha. Anna knelt beside him, not knowing what the doctor had told her husband. About an hour later, after the convulsions had begun to occur less frequently, the infant stopped breathing. His father kissed him, made the sign of the cross over him three times, and let out his grief in sobs and tears. Anna and the other children, their eight-year-old daughter Lyubov and the six-year-old Fedor, also cried.

A few days later, after a church service, the family stood in the Great Okhta Cemetery on a beautiful May day and watched Alyosha's little white coffin being lowered into the ground.

Shortly after the Tsar's return from the Crimea, Sophia Perovskaya was on the streets watching his movement about the capital. She was one of the leaders of the People's Will, and she and her friends were again plotting to kill him. Her job and that of a small group aiding her was to detect any pattern in the Tsar's activities as his carriage sped around the city.

For a long time she had been against assassinations. After being released from prison in 1874 and spending some time with her mother in the Crimea, she had worked as a doctor's apprentice in the Simbirsk Province and then attended a course for doctors' assistants in Simferopol, where her father had once been vice-governor. After graduating, she was put in charge of arranging a couple of barracks for wounded soldiers who would be brought to Simferopol as a result of the hostilities just begun against the Ottoman Empire. But before any arrived, she was ordered to the capital to take part in the Trial of the 193, most of whose defendants had been arrested three years earlier for engaging in revolutionary propaganda. At the time of Zasulich's shooting of General Trepov, which occurred the day after Sophia's own acquittal, she still believed that the weapons of the revolutionaries should be words and not guns. Yet tales which she heard of mistreatment of prisoners angered her, and her opposition to actions such as those of Zasulich began to soften.

The year 1866 was an eventful one for Alexander II. First, a man named Karakozov tried to assassinate him, and then he experienced sexual intimacy with a beloved young woman still in her late teens.

As the year began, the Tsar's subjects again were discontented. During the Polish rebellion the Russian public had enthusiastically cheered him, and many intellectuals supported his repression of the Poles. But the crisis was now over, and the public was concerned with other matters. The diary of the government official Nikitenko is illustrative of the mood of the times. He complains of the radical ideas expressed in The Contemporary, but also of government censorship policies. He fears that Russia is on the brink of anarchy, due in part to the lack of respect for authority, but he is also critical of a government which seems both weak and arbitrary, and which is apparently indifferent to public concerns.

Yet the educated public hardly spoke with a unified voice.While Nekrasov's The Contemporary attacked the government from the left, Katkov's increasingly conservative and outspoken newspaper, The Moscow Gazette, criticized government ministers and policies for being too liberal.

Dissatisfaction was compounded by the continuing economic problems of the empire. Alexander wished to modernize and strengthen Russia, especially to build up its railways. But how was he to pay the cost? And, despite occasional cautious words, he desired the continuing expansion of Russia's empire in places such as Central Asia, one reason that military spending continued to eat up about one-third of the government's budget.

During the week that the dead Emperor's body lay in state in the cathedral, Sub-lieutenant Leo Tolstoy was stationed more than a thousand miles to the south. He was in the Crimea, near the besieged city of Sevastopol. Here nature was already beginning to display its crocuses, snowdrops and hyacinths; and larks, linnets and brilliant goldfinches were twittering and singing their songs. On March 1st, the lieutenant wrote in his diary: “The Emperor died on February 18th, and now we are to take the oath to the new Emperor. Great changes await Russia. It is necessary to work and be manly to take part in these important moments of Russia's life.”

No doubt he was exhorting himself as he often did. His mother had died when he was almost two and his father, Count Nicholas Tolstoy, when he was almost nine. Kindly relatives completed the upbringing of the five Tolstoy children, but from an early age Leo exhorted and chastised himself as if he were his own parent.He was always setting goals for himself.When he was nineteen, for example, and about to leave Kazan University before obtaining a degree, he set out a two-year educational plan for himself.He would study the following: “the entire course of judicial science needed for the final exam at the university … practical medicine and part of its theory … French, Russian, German, English, Italian and Latin … agriculture … history, geography and statistics … mathematics … music and painting … the natural sciences.”2 In addition, he intended to write a dissertation, as well as compositions on all the subjects which he studied.

On the same Sunday when many in the capital discovered the court's verdict and sentence, they also heard rumors about a provocative speech given the night before which dared to recommend mercy for the assassins. The speaker was Vladimir Soloviev. In a large hall of the capital's Credit Society, before some eight hundred people, he had given a lecture entitled “A Critique of Contemporary Education and the Crisis in the World Process.” Among the audience were many students and sitting in the front were Sophia Tolstaya and her niece, Sophia Khitrovo, with whom Soloviev was still in love.

Since the previous fall, Soloviev had been lecturing as a private docent at both St Petersburg University and the Higher Courses for Women, established in the capital in 1878 – women were not permitted to enroll in the universities. His reputation among the students seemed to increase with each lecture. He welcomed their questions and objections, and especially enjoyed answering the students who were sympathetic with the revolutionary left. In a lecture at the Higher Courses for Women following the arrest of Sophia Perovskaya, Soloviev had publicly stated that the path of revolutionary violence was the wrong way, that it was impossible to bring about truth and justice by force, that it would only lead to despotism.

On the Thursday when the trial of the assassins began, he gave the first of two speeches at the Credit Society lecture hall. But compared to the one he gave two nights later, the first one did not cause much controversy.

The morning after Zhelyabov's arrest, the Tsar, Katia and their eight-year-old son, Gogo, attended a two-hour Lenten service in the chapel of the Winter Palace. The Tsarevich and other members of the royal family were also present. Later, sometime after breakfasting with Katia, the Tsar heard the welcome news that the terrorist leader Zhelyabov had been arrested. Alexander seemed in good spirits that day, the danger of assassination seemed to be receding.

On that same Saturday, after Zhelyabov had failed to come back to their apartment the previous night, Sophia Perovskaya also discovered that her companion was now imprisoned. In addition, she learned that on that very morning the police had checked out the cheese shop, but had not discovered the tunnel. She and the other remaining free members of the executive committee decided to go ahead with plans to assassinate the Tsar on the following day.

In a flat on the corner of the Voznesensky Prospect and the Catherine Canal, where they met that afternoon, the other revolutionaries accepted Sophia's request that she be allowed to take Zhelyabov's place directing the bomb throwers. They were, however, only to spring into action if plans to set off the mine under the street failed. Following the meeting, she and one of the other revolutionaries returned to Sophia's apartment to retrieve anything of importance left behind.Now that Zhelyabov had been arrested, it was no longer safe for her to remain there.

A few weeks after arriving in Geneva, the Dostoevskys attended a session of the Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom, which had been called together amidst the fears of a possible Franco-Prussian war. What a contrast it offered to the military review presented by Napoleon III to Alexander II and William of Prussia at Longchamp just a few months earlier! Instead of monarchs reviewing troops, its leading luminaries were revolutionaries condemning militarism and war.

The most famous of them was Garibaldi, the romantic fighter for Italian independence and unity and a symbol of hope for oppressed nationalities throughout Europe and even beyond. On the day on which he entered Geneva, the Dostoevskys were among the large crowd that waited along the wide and straight Rue du Mont Blanc, down which Garibaldi was scheduled to ride en route to his hotel near the northern side of the Mont Blanc Bridge. Flags and bunting decorated some of the hotels and other buildings along the street. Finally, a cannon shot was heard and the whistle of the locomotive. After some time Garibaldi appeared amidst a large procession of guilds, societies and organizations that had marched to meet him and accompany him to his hotel. The groups had their colorful flags and banners, and some bands played. The sun had already begun to set over Lake Geneva.

Garibaldi rode in an open carriage drawn by four magnificent horses. Both of the Dostoevskys, who were in separate places among the crowd, thought that he had a kindly, sympathetic face.