SINCE ROUSSEAU NO ONE had gone further than Dostoyevsky in exposing the faults of men of letters, as regards their easily offended self-esteem, their susceptibilities, jealousies and rancours. But none knew better than he how to win the generality of men or the masses by showing them a heart beating only for themselves. This writer, so disagreeable in society, was the idol of a great part of the Russian youth. Not only did they feverishly look forward to the publication of his novels, or his newspaper, but they came to him as to a spiritual preceptor, for a word of good advices and for help when in moral difficulty. During the last year of his life, his time was mostly spent in labouriously and conscientiously answering the mass of letters with which he was inundated, and which brought him the echoes of unknown sufferings.

One must have lived in Russia and at the time of the “great tribulation” to be able to understand the ascendancy that man had over the “poor folk,” consisting of that class which is between the “masses” and the “middle-class” in quest of a new ideal. Turgeneff’s literary and artistic talent had undergone an eclipse which was most unjust. Tolstoy’s philosophy addressed itself only to intellectual people. Dostoyevsky took hold of the heart, and his part in the guidance of that movement was undoubtedly the greatest.

At the inauguration of Pushkin’s monument, in 1880, at time which was the “Grand Assize” of Russian literature, our romancer’s popularity was greater than that of all his rivals. When he spoke, the people sobbed, and carried him in triumph on their shoulders. The students rushed his platform to get a better view of him, even to touch him, and one of those young man fainted from emotion on getting quite close to him. This flood of enthusiasm carried him to high that had he lived a few years longer it would have placed him in a very awkward position. In the official hierarchy of that Empire, as in Trajan’s garden, there is no room for premature and too quickly growing plants; nor for a Giant Goethe or a King Voltaire. The late convict, in spite of the perfect orthodoxy of his politics, risked being compromised and brought under suspicion by his fanatical partisans. His greatness and his dangerousness were only realized the day of his death. However repugnant it is to me to end my study, already gloomy, with a mournful scene, I must give an account of this man’s apotheosis and of the impression we all felt at the time, for it will serve better than any long explanation, and will at a glance enable the reader to see the position which that man actually held in that country.