Fired with the enthusiasm of young St. Petersburg intellectuals for radical social change, Dostoevsky was arrested and condemned to death as a member of the Petrachevsky Circle, a group that met more to discuss current political trends than to foster insurrection. As the twenty-one members stood blindfolded before the firing squad, their sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor and six years of military service in Siberia whether the entire ploy was a cruel hoax on the part of the tyrannical Tsar Nicholas I or a genuine act of mercy remains a mystery; regardless, the nightmarish experience left deep psychological scars. Dostoevsky depicted the event and its consequences most graphically in The Idiot and Memoirs from the House of Death.