Although he had been (at the time of writing this) four years released from prison, he delayed still six years longer before returning to Europe to publish his works. When he began his labors for the press, he did not unite himself to the liberal party, but, erratic as usual, he turned to the Sclavophiles,--the blind lovers of old usages and customs, the bitter enemies of the civilization of the Occident. Fate was not yet weary in persecuting him. After the death of his wife and brother he was obliged to flee the country on account of his creditors. His sorrows were not exactly of the sublime nature of Puchkine's and the melancholy poet's; they were on the contrary very prosaic,--lack of money, combined with terrible fits of epilepsy. To understand the mortifications of poverty to a proud and sensitive man, one must read Dostoiëwsky's correspondence,--so like Balzac's in its incessant complaints against pecuniary affairs. He exclaims, "The details of my poverty are shameful. I cannot relate them. Sometimes I spend the whole night walking my room like a caged beast, tearing my hair in despair. I must have such or such a sum to-morrow, without fail!" Gloomy and ill, he wandered through Germany, France, and Italy, caring nothing for the wonders of civilization, and impressed by no sights except the guillotine. He wrote during this time his three principal novels, whose very names are nightmares,--"Possessed with Devils," "The Idiot," and "Crime and Punishment." I know by experience the diabolical power of Dostoiëwsky's psychological analysis. His books make one ill, although one appear to be well. No wonder that they exercise a perturbing influence on Russian imaginations, which are only too prone to hallucination and mental ecstasy. I will briefly mention his best and most widely known book, "Crime and Punishment," of which the following is the argument: A student commits a crime, and then voluntarily confesses it to the magistrate. This seems neither more nor less than an ordinary notice in the newspaper, but what an analysis is conveyed by means of it! It is horrible to think that the sentiments so studiously wrought out can be human, and that we all carry the germs of them hidden in some corner of the soul; and not only human, but possessed even by a person of great intellectual culture, like the hero, whose crime is the result of great reading reduced to horrible sophisms. Those two Parisian students who, after saturating their minds with Darwin and Haeckel, cut a woman to pieces with their histories, must have been prototypes of Rodion Romanovitch, the hero of this novel of Dostoiëwsky. This young man is not only clever, but possesses really refined sentiments; one of the motives that lead to his crime is that one of his sisters, the most dearly loved, may have to marry an unworthy man in order to insure the welfare of the family. Such a _sale_ as this poor girl's marriage would