This, said Dostoievsky, was the happiest moment of his life. The book was published in Nekrasov’s newspaper, and was highly praised on all sides. He thus at once made a name in literature. But as though Fate wished to lose no time in proving to him that his life would be a series of unending struggles, his second story, _The Double_, was a failure, and his friends turned from him, feeling that they had made a mistake. From that time onward, his literary career was a desperate battle, not only with poverty but also with public opinion, and with political as well as with literary critics. Dostoievsky suffered all his life from epilepsy. It has been said that this disease was brought on by his imprisonment. This is not true: the complaint began in his childhood, and one of his biographers gives a hint of its origin: “It dates back,” he writes, “to his earliest youth, and is connected with a _tragic event_ in their family life.” This sentence affords us an ominous glimpse into the early years of Dostoievsky, for it must indeed have been a tragic event which caused him to suffer from epileptic fits throughout his life. In 1849 came the most important event in Dostoievsky’s life. From 1840 to 1847 there was in St. Petersburg a group of young men who met together to read and discuss the Liberal writers such as Fourier, Louis Blanc and Prudhon. Towards 1847 these circles widened, and included officers and journalists: they formed a club under the leadership of Petrachevsky, a former student, the author of a Dictionary of Foreign Terms. The club consisted, on the one hand, of certain men, followers of the Decembrists of 1825, who aimed at the emancipation of the serfs and the establishment of a Liberal Constitution; and, on the other hand, of men who were predecessors of the Nihilists, and who looked forward to a social revolution. The special function of Dostoievsky in this club was to preach the Slavophil doctrine, according to which Russia, sociologically speaking, needed no Western models, because in her workmen’s guilds and her system of mutual reciprocity for the payment of taxes, she already possessed the means of realising a superior form of social organisation.