ON FEBRUARY 10, 1881, some of Dostoyevsky’s friends informed me of the fact that he had died the evening before after a short illness. We went to his house to join in the service of “Prayers for the Dead,” which in the Russian Church begins the moment one of her children closes his eyes and continues up to the time of burial. Dostoyevsky’s house was in a small street in one of the poorer parts of St. Petersburg. We found a compact crowd round the entrance and on the stairs. With great difficulty we pushed our way through into the study, in which the writer was having his first rests. It was a small room strewn with papers, and filled with people crowding round the coffin.

It stood on a small table in the only corner of the room not taken possession of by these unknown invaders. For the first time I saw on that face a look of peacefulness, from which every trace of suffering had passed away…. His features had a painless, calm look, and seemed at last to be having a pleasant dream among a “mountain of roses,” which, however, was gradually disappearing at the hands of the people, who each took one to keep as a sacred relic. The crowd was getting larger every moment. The women were in tears, and the men noisily and roughly pushing their way, anxious to have a last look. The air was stifling. The room, like all rooms in winter, in Russia, was hermetically sealed.

All of a sudden the numerous candles began to sputter and went out. There only remained the uncertain light given by the small lamp hanging before the holy images of the Saints. At the same moment, favoured by the darkness, there was a rush from the stairs, bringing more people into the room. It seemed as if the whole crowd from the street was coming up. Those in front were pushed onto the coffin, which leant over. The unfortunate widow and her two children standing between the table and the wall threw themselves over the corpse to keep it in position, at the same time uttering frightful cries. For some minutes we expected that the dead man trampled under foot. He was being swayed by this wave of loving and brutal humanity which, impelled from below, was near crushing him. – At that moment I rapidly recalled to mind all that the man had done in life, his cruel power, his own feelings of terror, as also his compassion, and reflected on his exact relation to the world he wished to portray. All these unknowns before me took the names and features familiar to me. Imagination had depicted them in his books, reality had brought me in contact with them and this horrible scene so often described. Dostoyevsky’s characters came to torment him unto the very end. They brought him now their clumsy and rough pity, careless as to whether it profaned the object of their compassion or not. This scandalous homage was exactly what he would have wished.

Two days later we beheld this same scene, but on a larger scale and more complete. February 12, 1881, is a date well remembered in Russia, for excepting possibly that of Scobeleff’s no funeral had in that country been so imposing and of such significance. It would be difficult for me to say which of the two was the grander, that of the hero of action or that of the hero of Russian thought. Since early morning the whole town had turned out on to the Nyevski Perspect. A hundred thousand people lined the streets by which the procession had to pass on its long journey to the Monastery of Saint Alexander Nyevsky. The mourners who followed the coffin were estimated at twenty thousand. The Government was anxious, for it feared a public demonstration. It was known that some of the turbulent spirits had planned to monopolize the corpse; and the students, who wished to carry the Siberian convict’s chains in rear of the coffin, had to be forcibly restrained. The more timid minds protested that such a revolutionary pageantry should be forbidden altogether.

It will be remembered that this happened at the time of great nihilistic activity, a month only before the Tsar lost his life and the many daring attempts made to assassinate Loris-Melikoff. All Russia was in a ferment, and the least thing might have brought about an explosion. Loris-Melikoff decided it was wiser to respect the popular sentiment than to stifle it. He was right. The evil designs of a few were drowned in the tears of the multitude. By one of those unforeseen and unexpected fusions of the elements fires by a national idea of which Russia knows the secret, one saw all parties, all adversaries, all the disjointed rags of the Empire, reunited by this death into a “communion of enthusiasm.”