I forgot to tell you that the last fifty roubles had been stolen by a patient of Riesenkampf’s, whom Dostoevsky, in a sudden manifestation of friendliness, had shown into his room. Riesenkampf and Dostoevsky parted in March, 1844, without much apparent improvement in the latter’s ways. In 1846, he published _Poor Folk_. This book had sudden and considerable success. Dostoevsky’s manner of speaking about his success is significant of the man. We read in a contemporary letter: “It dazes me: I am not living. I haven’t time to think.... A precarious reputation has been built up around me, and I don’t know how long the damnable thing will last.”[33] In 1849, along with a group of suspects, he is taken by the police. This is the affair known as the Petrachevsky Plot. It is difficult to say what exactly were at this time Dostoevsky’s political and social opinions. From this frequenting of suspected individuals we are to infer a great measure of intellectual curiosity and a certain generous warm-heartedness which ran him into unconsidered risks. But we have no authority for believing that Dostoevsky ever was what can be termed an anarchist, a being threatening the safety of the state. Numerous passages in his letters and in the _Journal of an Author_ show him as entertaining quite the opposite ideas, and the whole of _The Possessed_ is, as it were, a speech for the prosecution against anarchism. At any rate, taken he was amongst these suspects meeting round Petrachevsky. He was thrown into prison, sent to trial, and heard himself condemned to death. It was only at the eleventh hour that the death sentence was commuted and he was exiled to Siberia. All this is already familiar to you. In these causeries I should like to speak only of what you could not find elsewhere; but, for the sake of such as are unfamiliar with them, I shall read to you some passages from his letters dealing with his sentence and his life in the penal settlement. I consider them very self-revealing. In them we shall see, through the portrayal of his sufferings, appear again and again the optimism that supported him all his days. This is what he wrote, on July 18, 1849, from the fortress where he lay awaiting the verdict. “Human beings have an incredible amount of endurance and will to live; I should never have expected to find so much in myself; now I know from experience that it is there.”[34] Then in August, weighed down by ill-health: “To lose courage is to sin ... work, ever more work, _con amore_, therein lies real happiness.”[35] And again, on September 14, 1849: “I had expected worse. And I know now that I have in me such reserves of vitality that it would be difficult to exhaust.”[36] I shall read almost the whole of his short letter dated December 22.