A dozen years ago in Holland, talking about Dostoievski with my friend Frederik van Eeden, I remarked that I had made several attempts, but had never been able to read one of his novels through. Van Eeden replied that Dostoievski was the world’s greatest novelist; and that is high praise, because van Eeden is a great novelist himself. Now, under the strain of the war, my old friend has turned into a Catholic mystic; and so I understand his passion for the dark Russian, another of those over-burdened spirits who despair of the human intellect, and seek refuge in that most powerful auto-suggestion known as God. Feodor Dostoievski was born in a hospital, his father being a poor surgeon with a big family. As a child he knew cold and hunger, and was living in a garret when he wrote his first novel, “Poor People,” at the age of twenty-four. It is a picture of two suffering, will-less creatures; and so genuine, so completely “lived,” that it made an instant impression. Its author was drawn into literary circles--which in those days meant also revolutionary circles. In his feeble way he took up the ideas of Fourier; he attended some radical gatherings, and went so far as to identify himself with a printing press. The group were arrested, and Dostoievski lay in a dungeon for many months, and finally with twenty companions was brought out upon a public square before a scaffold and prepared for death. At the last moment there came a reprieve from the tsar, but meantime one of the victims had gone insane. The shock to Dostoievski’s mind was such that he comes back to the incident again and again in his books. He was sent to Siberia at hard labor; herded with common felons, beaten and tormented--in short, receiving exactly the same treatment now meted out to social idealists by the states of California and Washington, and recently by the United States government at Leavenworth. After a few years the tsar pardoned Dostoievski and impressed him into the army; he was allowed to come back to Russia after ten years, and wrote the story of his experiences in a book called “Memoirs of a Dead-House.” Dostoievski now took up the life of a hack writer. He had a large following, but somebody else got the money; he was always in debt, his wife and children starving and freezing. He wrote at terrific speed and never stopped to revise. He was ill all the time, suffering an attack of epilepsy every ten days. All this is in his writing; his characters are drunkards, criminals, epileptics, idiots, and neurotics of every type. He enters into their souls, and makes every moment of their lives, every mood of their unhappy beings real to us.