Dostoevsky was no partisan. Dreading party feeling and the dissensions it creates, he wrote: “My thoughts are chiefly concerned with what constitutes our community of ideas, the common ground whereon we all might meet, irrespective of tendency.” Profoundly convinced that “in Russian thought lay reconciliation for Europe’s antagonisms”, “veteran European Russian” as he termed himself, he devoted the whole strength of his being to the Russian unity which was to confound party and faction in one great love of country and of humanity. “Yes, I, too, hold your opinion that in Russia, by the very nature of her mission, Europe will be consummated. This has long been plain to me,” so he wrote from Siberia. Elsewhere he describes Russia as “a nation awaiting her mission,” “fit to lead the common interests of entire humanity.” And if, by virtue of a conviction which, perchance, was no more than premature, he deceived himself as to the importance of the Russian people (which is by no means _my_ opinion), it was not infatuated jingoism, but his intuition and the deep understanding he had, simply because he himself was a Russian, of the beliefs and party passions dividing Europe. Speaking of Pushkin, he credits himself with the poet’s “gift of world-wide sympathy,” adding, “It is this very faculty, his in common with all our people, which makes him truly national.” He considers the Russian soul as “a meeting-ground whereon all European aims may be reconciled,” exclaiming, “Where is the true Russian who does not first and foremost think of Europe?” and uttering even these strange words, “the Russian wanderer has need of world-wide happiness in order to find peace himself.” Persuaded that “Russia’s future activity must be in the highest degree pan-human,” and that “maybe the Russian idea will be the synthesis of all the ideas developed with such courage and persistence in the various European nationalities,” his gaze is constantly directed outside Russia. His political and social judgments of France and of Germany are, to us, perhaps the most interesting passages of his correspondence. He travelled abroad, lingering in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, attracted in the first instance by his desire to know them, detained ultimately for months on end by the eternal question of money, either having an insufficiency of funds to continue his journey or fearing debts he has left behind in Russia, and the possibility of tasting imprisonment again. “With my health in the state it is,” he wrote when he was forty-nine, “I could not stand even six months’ confinement, nor, what is more, could I work.”