Ippolit Myshkin

He aroused suspicion because it would have been highly unusual for so prominent a prisoner to be moved with just a single escort, and he was told that he would have to get written authorisation from the provincial governor, in Yakutsk.

He was accompanied on the road by three armed Cossacks, but broke free, wounded one of them in an exchange of shots, and hid out in the Siberian forest for a week, before he was captured.

[2] After several months of solitary confinement in a prison in Irkutsk, Myshkin was taken under heavy guard to Saint Petersburg, where he was a defendant at the Trial of the 193.

It can be brought about only through a revolution, because the power of the state prevents any peaceful means being used for this end...[3]He continued speaking, despite being ordered by the President of the court to be quiet.

During his funeral serviced in the prison church in Irkutsk, Myshkin made an impromptu speech, praising the dead man and quoting lines by the poet Nikolay Nekrasov.

As our supper was brought to us, we heard a crash of metal dishes falling to the floor, sounds of scuffling, and a nervous, half-strangled voice crying, "Don't beat me!

[7]Myshkin had apparently staged the incident expecting to be executed, but hoping that it would stir up resistance by other prisoners and that he would be given a public trial in which he could draw attention to conditions in the fortress.