"With Vasily Perov’s 1872 portrait, suddenly here we are, face to face with Dostoevsky: he crouches low on the canvas, his thin frame huddled in a great brown overcoat, his gaze withdrawn and distant, his fingers tightly laced. As the light shines on his boyish forehead, his wispy hair and beard and withdrawn gaze, the sense of exhaustion yet inner focus is haunting. He had been living in hardship for thirty years, ever since his arrest as a twenty-eight-year-old in 1849 for being a member of the radical Petrashevsky Circle, an event that had doomed him to Siberian labor camp and forced army service, to damaged health and wounded spirits. Yet he had continued writing, his will unbroken."