Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/321

Rh to a Siberian regiment as a private. In 1856 he was restored in his civil rights and promoted to the rank of an office. In 1859 he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg and to settle there. It was then only that he was able to resume his literary work after the long years of enforced silence. He resumed it, however, in a very changed spirit. The time spent "tra la perduta gente" in the mines, in close communion with the worst criminals, and following that the hard military service as a common soldier, the humiliations to which he was subjected, the solitary thoughts and the nervous fits made a deep impression on his mind but did not break his spirit. On the contrary, his experiences brought him nearer to the soul of the Russian people. "The years of hard labor have taught me the essential truth," wrote Dostoyevsky after his return, "the truth hidden in the soul of the Russian people. It is there in spite of the fact that the masses of our peasants consist of drunkards and thieves." He returned from Siberia with the fortifying conviction that the knowledge of the Russian masses has deepened his insight into his own soul, and he strongly believed ever since that the Russian intellectuals will gain everything if they trust the wisdom of the common people, the light revealed by the endurance—the wisdom of the "Russian Christ." Before his exile Dostoyevsky was naturally inclined to see and to cherish the warm glow of love in humble and humiliated souls. After his hard experiences and trials he was ever anxious to discover the divine spark, the religious truth in souls possessed by the temptations of evil.

And even the harmful effect of the Siberian trials on the health of Dostoyevsky, his epileptic fits, "the sacred disease," as they were sometimes called, became an additional power of his genius. They opened to him visionary horizons which a more balanced mind would not have perceived. Dostoyevsky's favorite hero, Prince Myshkin, "the Idiot," is an epileptic, and Dostoyevsky describes in his name the strange ecstasy of just one moment before the unconsciousness brought about by an epileptic fit—the feeling of perfect harmony with the universe, a sensation as if time did no more exist, and all life was blended in complete unity. Dostoyevsky has many times experienced such a state of ecstasy. He considered it a foretaste of the ultimate divine absorption of the human soul in God, and he did not think too high the price of pain he had to pay for his mystic visions of harmony. He knew that all that is divine must arise from the bottom of deepest agony. He had discovered this truth in the soul of the Russian people.

The great productive epoch of Dostoyevsky's life began in the year 1860. All his great novels—most of them works of exceptional length—as well as a number of short stories, were written in the course of the following twenty years up to his death in 1881. He also was very active in other ways. He edited during a couple of years an important literary review, he spent several years abroad, and travelled a great deal in France, Germany, Italy, and England. He had a great admiration for the