Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/320

286 own insignificance. Yet what would appear basely undignified on the surface of his emotions is magically transformed into a picture of a great soul—great in its love and its humility.

"Are you aware that you have discovered a sublime side in servility, the most abject of all instincts?" was Bielinsky's first question on that memorable night, after he had read the manuscript of "Poor Folks." This was the miracle worked by Dostoyevsky's penetrating pity. It made him see so deep into the human heart that he was able to discover the divine element hidden in all genuine emotions.

After the publication of his first novel there came a long break in the literary career of Dostoyevsky. That was the time of the great tragedy of his life, the one which became the source of the prophetic inspiration of his later works. In the lifetime of Dante the people of Florence used to say when they met him in the streets, "This is the man who has been to Hell." What was true in an imaginative sense as applied to Dante might be said more directly of Dostoyevsky in connection with what happened to him after he had so brilliantly started as a novelist. He had actually been in hell—in a hell upon earth, and the miracle is that he returned from it with a message of all-forgiving love.

Dostoyevsky was interested, as a young man, in social problems, yet chiefly in the humane side of them. He was haunted from the beginning of his conscious life with schemes and dreams of universal happiness for mankind, and was naturally attracted by the teachings of such idealistic social reformers as Fourier and Robert Owen. He joined a group of friends in a sort of debating society with the purpose of studying and discussing some works on social questions. The members of the group did not aim at any political propaganda, yet at that time all interest for social reform was regarded as criminal by the authorities. And what made the situation still more serious was the supposed circulation of Bielinsky's letter to Gogol, a letter accusing Gogol of reactionary tendencies and exposing a few liberal opinions. Dostoyevsky was actually not guilty even of what seems now such a trifling charge as having circulated a liberal pamphlet. Yet he was tried, together with the other members of the group, and was sentenced to death. In 1849, Dostoyevsky was brought to the scaffold, saw the car with the coffin prepared for his body, had his eyes bandaged, and lived through the agony of those minutes which he thought to be his last. A few moments before the execution, arrived the message of the amnesty and of the commutation of the death penalty into a sentence to four years of hard labor in the Siberian mines.

Dostoyevsky never forgot the scene on the Semenovsky Square. It was in all probability the primary cause of the epileptic fits from which he suffered all his life. The fits developed into a dironic disease during the years of Siberia, which again, as all that Dostoyevsky suffered in his body and mind, became a source of inspiration to his genius.

Dostoyevsky spent seven years in the exile to Siberia. He worked part of the time in the mines, and was then transferred