Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophys This. So there's a story from Dostoevsky's

life that's usually one of the first things you hear about him when he start looking into his work.

I personally think the story hits a bit better when he already know a little bit about what he was

going for in his work, which at this point we do, this episode being part four in the series we've

been doing. That said, the story's about the time in Dostoevsky's life that he almost got shot by a

firing squad.

Classic story, I'm sure he used to tell around the campfire to all the kids.

And one version of this story that we have comes from the main character of the book we're

talking about today, another one of the five great novels of Dostoevsky.

It's called The Idiot. We'll talk more about

the book here in a second. But first let's hear this story, though, and understand how some of the

intense experiences that Dostoevsky had in his life led to the conclusions in the rest of his

work, to what he thinks a good life is, to his views on beauty and love, and more specifically

what he means when he says, a now famous quote that's

been associated with this book, The Idiot, what did he mean when he said that he thought that beauty

will save the world? There's been a lot of discussion surrounding this particular quote, and we'll be

a lot closer to understanding it by the end of the episode here today. See, when Dostoevsky's writing

the book, Demons, we just talked about, and when he talks about a revolutionary cell that's planning stuff to potentially bring down the government in the book,

that's not just him sitting around, you know, method acting, what it would be like to be a revolutionary.

No, Dostoevsky, early in his writing career, really was a member of what's now known as the Petrashvsky Circle, meaning he was part of

one of these revolutionary groups, which is part of what gives him so much insight into the

psychology of these kinds of people, multiple of which the characters in the book Demons,

...