During his four years in prison, Dostoevsky was left without news of his family. On February 22, 1854, he wrote to his brother the first of the Siberian letters preserved to us--and an admirable letter it was: “At last I can talk with you somewhat more explicitly, and, I believe, in a more reasonable manner. But before I write another line I _must_ ask you: tell me, for God’s sake, why you have never written me a single syllable till now? Could I have expected this from you? Believe me, in my lonely and isolated state, I sometimes fell into utter despair, for I believed that you were no longer alive; through whole nights I would brood upon what was to become of your children, and I cursed my fate because I could not help them....”[21]--“Can you possibly have been forbidden to write to me? Because writing _is_ actually permitted! All the political prisoners have several letters each year.... But I think I have guessed the true cause of your silence: it is your natural apathy.” “Tell my brother”, he wrote later to Wrangel, “that I fold him in my arms, that I ask his forgiveness for all the pain I’ve caused him, and kneel at his feet”;[22] and to his brother himself, on August 21, 1855: “Dear brother, when in my letter of last October, I repeated my complaints at your silence, you answered that these had made very painful reading for you. Oh, Mysha! for the love of God, bear me no ill-will: remember my loneliness. I am like a pebble cast aside. I’ve always been of a gloomy, sickly, susceptible disposition: remember all that, and forgive me if my reproaches were unjust and my fancies absurd. I am myself thoroughly convinced I was in the wrong.” Mme. Hoffmann was right, no doubt, and Western readers will protest in face of such humility and contrition. Our literature, too often tinged with Castillian pride, has so thoroughly taught us to see nobility of character in the non-forgiveness of injury and insult! But what will he have to say, the Western-European reader when he reads this: “You write that everybody loves the Tsar. I venerate him.”? And Dostoevsky was still in Siberia when he wrote these words. Irony, perchance? No. In letter after letter he takes up the theme: “The Emperor is infinitely generous and kind.” And this is what he says when, after ten years’ imprisonment, he solicits permission to return to Petersburg and a place for his stepson, Paul, at the Gymnasium: “I have been thinking if one request is refused, maybe the other will be granted, and if the Emperor does not think fit to allow me to live in Petersburg, perhaps he will agree to find an opening for Paul, so that his refusal will not be absolute.”