In 1849, renowned Russian thinker and novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky was sentenced to execution for his subversive political beliefs. As he awaited his turn in front of the firing squad, Tsar Nicholas I sent a message commuting the writer's sentence to a period of exile in Siberia. He spent the next four years there engaged in hard labor. Dostoyevsky's gripping novel The House of the Dead is based largely on his own experiences in a Siberian labor camp.