Decidedly, submissiveness, to this degree, is disconcerting! Nothing here for nihilists, anarchists, or even socialists, to use for their own ends. What! not a cry of revolt? Perhaps it was prudent to show respect for the Tsar, but why no revolt against society, or against the prison-cell from which he emerged an aged man? Just listen to what he says about his prison, in a letter to Michael dated February 22, 1856: “What has happened to my soul and my beliefs, my intellect and my affections in the space of these four years, I shall not tell you! The tale would be too long. The unbroken meditation, wherein I found refuge from the bitterness of reality, has surely not been vain. I now have hopes and desires which in bygone days I did not even anticipate.” And in another passage: “Do not imagine, I pray you, that I am still as moody and suspicious as I was in my last years in Petersburg. All that has gone for ever. God, too, is leading us.” And not long after, in another letter to S. D. Janovsky in 1872,[23] we come across this extraordinary confession (the italics are Dostoevsky’s!): “You loved me, cared for me, and I was then _sick in mind_ (I realize it now) _before my journey to Siberia_, where I was cured.” Not a word of protest; only gratitude. An unrepaying martyr, indeed! In what faith does he live and move? What are the convictions that lend him strength? Perhaps an examination of his opinions, so far as his letters make them plain, will help us to understand the secret causes, already faintly indicated, of his disfavour and lack of success with the public, and explain why Dostoevsky still lingers on, as if in purgatory, in a middle state between obscurity and fame. II