Dmitry Grigorovich, 1876.

WHAT WAS CERTAINLY NOT an hallucination was his terribly painful illness – epilepsy – the first symptoms of which now appeared, though it has been asserted that it came to him later in Siberia. But a friend of his assured me that at this time Dostoyevsky often used to fall down in the street, foaming at the mouth. Yes, we may be certain that from that time up to his death he was but a frail bundle of nerves, with a woman’s soul in a Russian peasant’s body; self-centered, shy, full of hallucinations, yet possessing a heart readily overflowing with floods of compassion for the submerged.

Hard work alone pleased and consoled him. In his correspondence he describes the outlines of his forthcoming novels with outbursts of childish delight. Later he recalls these first experiences by placing them in the mouth of a character (drawn from himself), an author who figures in Humbled and Outraged. He writes –

If I have ever been happy it was certainly not in the first moments when intoxicated with success, but it was when I had not as yet shown my manuscript to any one, during those long nights passed in happy dreams filled with enthusiastic hope, with my whole soul in my work; when I lived alone with my vision, with the people created by myself, whom I loved as my own kith and kin, people who seemed to have a real existence, sharing their joys sorrows, and actually shedding tears for the misfortunes which befell the hero of my own creation.

This sentiment shows up strikingly in his first book, Poor Folk, which contains the germ of all his others to follow. Dostoyevsky was twenty-one when he wrote it.

Nikolay Nekrasov.

Towards the end of his life, in his Notebooks of a Scribe, he gave us an account of the fine history of its first appearance. The poor young engineer did not know a soul in the literary world and did not know what to do with his manuscript. One of his comrades – Grigorovich by name, who holds an honoured place in literature, and who confirms the truth of this anecdote – took the manuscript to Nekrasoff, the poet of the “disinherited.” As three o’clock in the morning Dostoyevsky heard some one knocking at his door. It was Grigorovich, who had returned, bringing Nekrasoff with him. The poet threw himself into the arms of the unknown author with signs of deepest emotion. He had spent all night reading the novel, and had been completely upset. Nekrasoff also belonged to that distrustful and shy class of beings to which nearly every Russian writer at this time belonged. These naturally closed hearts, brought into sudden contact by an irresistible impulse, opened out to each other sat the first shock and with the generous warmth of youth. Dawn found these three ardent spirits still in excited converse and henceforth inseparably bound together in a communion of hope and dreams of Art and Poesy.

Directly on leaving his protégé, Nekrasoff went straight to Belinsky, the Russian oracle, the critic whose name alone was sufficient to make the beginner shake in his shoes. “A new Gogol has been born unto us!” shouted the poet ass he burst into his friend’s rooms. “Gogols spring up like mushrooms nowadays,” returned the critic in his most frigid manner, but took hold of the manuscript as if it had been a piece of poisoned bread.

Vissarion Belinsky in 1843.

It is of course well known that in every land the great critics take hold of manuscripts in this self-same manner. But the perusal of the manuscript had the same magic effect on Belinsky. When the author, trembling with anxiety, presented himself before the judge, Belinsky excitedly addressed him thus:

“Young man, have you understood all the truth of what you have written? No, with your twenty years you could not understand. It is the revelation of inborn art, a gift from above. Be true to this gift, and you will be a great writer.”

A few months later Poor Folk appeared in a periodical, and the verdict of the critic was ratified by the whole of Russia.