far in Russia revolutionary matters have succeeded one another, if anything, with greater rapidity than they did in France, and that what seems to be the unmistakable dawn of revolution to the historian may very well appear to be a false dawn to the contemporary observer; and that, whatever happens, nothing can ever shut the little window which Prince Mirsky opened. CHAPTER XI DOSTOIEVSKY’S ANNIVERSARY ST. PETERSBURG, _February 24th_. They are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the death of Dostoievski, and this fact has brought back to my mind, with great vividness, a conversation I had with the officers of the battery at Jen-tzen-tung last September, and which I have already noted in my diary. We were sitting in the ante-room of the small Chinese house which formed our quarters. This ante-room, which had paper windows and no doors, a floor of mud, and a table composed of boards laid upon two small tressels, formed our dining-room. We had just finished dinner, and were drinking tea out of pewter cups. Across the courtyard from the part of the dwelling where the Chinese herded together, we could hear the monotonous song of a Chinaman or a Mongol singing over and over to himself the same strophe, which rose by the intervals of a scale more subtle than ours and sank again to die away in the vibrations of one prolonged note, to the accompaniment of a single-stringed instrument. The conversation had languished. Somebody was absorbed in a patience, we were talking of books and novels in a vague, desultory fashion, when suddenly Hliebnikov, a young Cossack officer, said: “Who is the greatest writer in the world?” Vague answers were made as to the comparative merits of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Molière, but Hliebnikov impatiently waived all this talk aside. Then turning to me he said: “He knows; there is one writer greater than all of them, and that is Dostoievski.” “Dostoievski!” said the doctor. “Dostoievski’s work is like a clinical laboratory or a dissecting-room. There is no sore spot in the human soul into which he does not poke his dirty finger. His characters are either mad or abnormal. His books are those of a madman, and can only be appreciated by people who are half mad themselves.”