Dostoievsky was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman’s daughter. He was born in a charity hospital, the “Maison de Dieu,” at Moscow, in 1821. He was, as he said, a member of a stray family. His father and five children lived in a flat consisting of two rooms and a kitchen. The nursery of the two boys, Michael and Fedor, consisted of a small part of the entrance hall, which was partitioned off. His family belonged to the lowest ranks of the nobility, to that stratum of society which supplied the bureaucracy with its minor public servants. The poverty surrounding his earliest years was to last until the day of his death. Some people are, as far as money is concerned, like a negative pole--money seems to fly away from them, or rather, when it comes to them, to be unable to find any substance it can cleave to. Dostoievsky was one of these people; he never knew how much money he had, and when he had any, however little, he gave it away. He was what the French call a _panier percé_: money went through him as through a sieve. And however much money he had, it was never he but his friends who benefited by it. He received his earliest education at a small school in Moscow, where a schoolmaster who taught Russian inspired him and his brother with a love of literature, of Pushkin’s poetry and other writers, introduced him also to the works of Walter Scott, and took him to see a performance of Schiller’s _Robbers_. When his preliminary studies were ended, he was sent with his brother to a school of military engineers at St. Petersburg. Here his interest in literature, which had been first aroused by coming into contact with Walter Scott’s works, was further developed by his discovery of Balzac, George Sand, and Homer. Dostoievsky developed a passionate love of literature and poetry. His favourite author was Gogol. He left this school in 1843 at the age of twenty-three, with the rank of sub-lieutenant. His first success in literature was his novel, _Poor Folk_ (published in 1846), which he possibly began to write while he was still at school. He sent this work to a review and awaited the result, utterly hopeless of its being accepted. One day, at four o’clock in the morning, just when Dostoievsky was despairing of success and thinking of suicide, Nekrasov the poet, and Grigorovitch the critic, came to him and said: “Do you understand yourself what you have written? To have written such a book you must have possessed the direct inspiration of an artist.”