“Send me the Koran, and Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_, and if you have the chance of sending me anything not officially, then be sure to send Hegel, but particularly Hegel’s _History of Philosophy_. Upon that depends my whole future. For God’s sake, exert yourself to get me transferred to the Caucasus; try to find out from well-informed sources whether I shall be permitted to print my works, and in what way I should seek this sanction. I intend to try for permission in two or three years. I beg you to sustain me so long. Without money I shall be destroyed by military life. So please!... “Now I mean to write novels and plays. But I must still read a great deal. Don’t forget me. “Once again farewell. “F. D.”[41] This letter, like so many others, remained unanswered. It is evident that Dostoevsky was left without news from his family during his whole term of imprisonment. Are we to suppose, on his brother’s part, prudence, fear of compromising himself, or maybe indifference? I cannot tell. Mme. Hoffmann, in her biography, inclines to the last-mentioned supposition. The first we know of Dostoevsky’s letters subsequent to his release and enlistment in the 7th Siberian Line Regiment is dated March 27, 1854. It does not appear in the French edition of his correspondence. In this letter we read as follows: “Send me--not newspapers, but European histories. Economists--Church Fathers--as many of the classics as possible. Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Pliny, Flavius, Plutarch, Diodorus, etc., in French translations. And the Koran and a German Dictionary. Not all at once, of course, but as much as you can. Send me Pissaren’s _Physics_ too, and a manual of physiology, any one, in French if better than in Russian. All in the cheapest editions. Not in one consignment, but slowly, one book after another. I shall be grateful for every little thing you can do for me. Do realize how urgently I need this intellectual food!...” “Now you know my chief occupations,” he writes a little later. “Really I have none but these connected with my duty. No outside events, no disturbances in my life, no mishaps. But what is happening in soul, heart, and mind, what has sprung up, ripened or been blighted, what has been cast aside with the tares, _that_ cannot be told and written down on a scrap of paper. Here I live in isolation; I shrink out of sight, as usual. Moreover, for five years I lived with an escort, and there are times when it is pure bliss for me to be alone. On the whole, prison has destroyed many things in me and created new. For example, I’ve already spoken about my illness: strange attacks resembling epilepsy. And yet not epilepsy. Some day I shall give you particulars.”[42] In the last of these causeries we shall come back to this terrible question of his illness. In a letter dated November 6 of the same year we find: