DOSTOEVSKY.--Dostoevsky, with a tragic genius as great as that of Tolstoy, may be said to have been more restricted because he exclusively delineated the unhappy, the miserable, and those defeated in life. He knew them personally because, after being arrested in 1849 at the age of fifty for the crime of belonging to a secret society, he spent years in the convict prisons of Siberia. Those miseries he describes in the most exact terms and with heart-rending eloquence in _Buried Alive: Ten Years in Siberia_, and in the remarkable novel entitled _Crime and Punishment_. He has lent invaluable aid in the propagation of two sentiments which have created some stir in the West and which, assuredly, we desire to foster: namely, "the religion of human suffering" and the cult of "expiation." CHAPTER XXI POLISH LITERATURE At an Early Date Western Influence sufficiently Potent. Sixteenth Century Brilliant; Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries highly Cultured; Nineteenth Century Notably Original. WESTERN INFLUENCE--Widely different from Russian literature, much more Western, based more on Greek and Latin culture, Polish literature holds high rank in the histories of European literature. Christians from the tenth century, the Poles knew from this epoch religious songs written by monks, in the vulgar tongue. To this is due the possession of the _Bogarodzica_, a religious and bellicose song dedicated to the Virgin mother of God, which is even now comprehensible, so little has the Polish language changed. All through the Middle Ages, literary historians can only find chronicles written sometimes in Latin, sometimes in the native language. Under the influence of the universities, and also of the parliamentary rule, the language acquired alike more consistency and more authority in the fifteenth century, whilst the sixteenth was the golden literary epoch of the Poles. There were poets, and even great poets, as well as orators and historians. Such was Kochanowski, very much a Western, who lived some time in Italy, also seven years in France, and was a friend of Ronsard. His writings were epical, lyrical, tragical, satirical, and especially elegiacal. He is a classic in Poland. Grochowski left a volume of diversified poems, hymns on various texts of Thomas à Kempis, _The Nights_ of Thorn, etc. Martin Bielski, who was an historian too, but in Latin, left two political satires on the condition of Poland, and his son Joachim wrote a history of his native land in Polish.