I am not writing Dostoevsky’s biography, I am merely drawing his likeness from the elements of his _Correspondence_, so I have discussed only the difficulties engendered by his very constitution. I think I am justified in including amongst them his chronic poverty, so intimately connected with him and which would seem to have met some secret need of his being.... But everything goes against him; at the outset of his career, in spite of his delicacy in childhood, he is pronounced fit for military service, whereas his brother, Michael, more robust in health, is rejected. Straying into a group of political suspects, he is arrested, condemned to death, then respited and sent to Siberia to expiate his offence. He spends ten years there: four in prison, six at Semipalatinsk in a regiment of the line. While there he married; perhaps not very much “in love” according to our usual interpretation of the phrase, but out of a kind of burning compassion, out of pity or softened feeling, out of a need for sacrificing himself and a natural propensity for assuming burdens and shirking no issue. His wife was the widow of a prisoner, Issaïev, and the mother of a growing boy (a good-for-nothing, almost mentally defective), who there and then became dependent upon Dostoevsky. In a letter to his friend Wrangel, after his wife’s death, he wrote: “Ah, dear friend, she loved me deeply, and I returned her love; yet, we did not live happily together. I shall tell you all about it when I see you. Let me say just this, although we were unhappy (by reason of her difficult character--she was hypochondriac, and full of a sick woman’s whims), we could not cease to love each other. Indeed, the unhappier we became, the more closely we drew together. Strange though it may seem, it’s true!”--“If you question me about myself, what can I say? I have family cares, and they press heavily. But I believe my day is not done, and I am determined not to die,” he says elsewhere. After his brother Michael’s death, he has to support his family too. As soon as he puts some money aside--which means the possibility of some respite--he starts newspapers and reviews,[19] at once financing and editing the publications. “Energetic measures were imperative. I started publications with three different presses, and I have spared neither money, health, nor efforts. I ran everything single-handed. I revised proofs, kept in touch with the authors and with the Censorship, found the necessary money. I was up till six in the morning, and took only five hours sleep. I at last managed to put the review on its feet, but too late.” As a matter of fact, this review _did_ collapse. “But the worst of it,” he continues, “was, that working like a galley-slave at these concerns, I could not write anything for the review: not a line from _my_ pen. My name was never in the public’s eye, and not only in the provinces, but in Petersburg even, it was not known that I was the editor.”