ON THE OTHER HAND, Dostoyevsky since then often affirmed, with every show of sincerity, that he would certainly have gone made had he returned to normal life, if this test of endurance, and others to follow, had been spared him.

During his last year of freedom (before going to prison) the obsession of imaginary maladies, trouble with his nerves, and a “mystic fright,” were driving him straight into a state of mental derangement, and we can believe him. He assures us that he was only saved by the sudden change in his manner of life, for it compelled him to brace himself against the misfortunes which had hitherto mastered him. I accept this statement, for the secrets of the soul are unassailable; and it is certain that there is nothing better to cure an imaginary illness than real misfortune. At the same time I am inclined to think that this statement may also have been biased by a sense of false pride. On a careful perusal of all his subsequent work, passages are constantly met with, in which the effects of the mental shock received during those few awful moments are unmistakably in evidence. There is not a single book in which a similar scene of an execution is not reproduced, either as a definite occurrence, or as a vision, described in a manner which absorbs his whole mind in the psychological study of the individual on the point of death. Note the intenseness of such pages, which make one suspect the existence of the hallucinations of a nightmare harboured in some sad corner of his brain.

The Imperial warrant, less severe on the author than on the others, reduced his sentence to four years’ penal servitude; to be followed by service in the ranks of the army, loss of “nobility,” and all civil rights.

The prisoners were forthwith placed in the carts and the procession started for Siberia. On arriving at Tobolsk they spent the night for the last time together before being dispersed.