The Greek Orthodox religion, no doubt, is only encouraging a national inclination by tolerating, nay, approving, public confession. The notion of confession, not murmured low into priestly ears, but made openly, before any and all, comes up again and again, almost with the quality of an obsession, in Dostoevsky’s novels. When Raskolnikov has confessed his crime to Sonia, in _Crime and Punishment_, she advises him, as the one means of unburdening his soul, at once to prostrate himself in the public street and cry aloud, “I have the blood of a fellow-being on my hands.” Most of Dostoevsky’s characters are seized at certain moments--and almost invariably in unexpected and ill-advised fashion--with the urgent desire to make confession, to ask pardon of some fellow-creature who often has not a notion what it is all about, the desire to place themselves in a posture of inferiority to the person addressed. You remember, I am sure, the extraordinary scene in _The Idiot_, in the course of an evening party at Nastasya Filippovna’s house. To pass the time someone suggested in place of parlour games or charades that each guest should confess the vilest act he ever committed; and the wonderful part is that the suggestion was not scouted, and that each one present commenced his or her confession, with varying degree of sincerity, no doubt, but almost without a vestige of shame. And more curious still, an anecdote from Dostoevsky’s own life, which I have from a Russian in his intimate circle. I was imprudent enough to tell it to several individuals and already it has been made use of; but in the form I found it retailed, it was fast approaching unrecognizability. Hence my anxiety to give the exact facts here.