The life of Dostoyévskiy was extremely sad. In the year 1849, four years after he had won his first success with _Poor People_, he became mixed up in the affairs of some Fourierists (members of the circles of Petrashévskiy), who used to meet together to read the works of Fourier, commenting on them, and talking about the necessity of a Socialistic movement in Russia. At one of these gatherings Dostoyévskiy read, and copied later on, a certain letter from Byelínskiy to Gógol, in which the great critic spoke in rather sharp language about the Russian Church and the State; he also took part in a meeting at which the starting of a secret printing office was discussed. He was arrested, tried (of course with closed doors), and, with several others, was condemned to death. In December, 1849, he was taken to a public square, placed on the scaffold, under a gibbet, to listen there to a profusedly-worded death-sentence, and only at the last moment came a messenger from Nicholas I., bringing a pardon. Three days later he was transported to Siberia and locked up in a hard-labour prison at Omsk. There he remained for four years, when owing to some influence at St. Petersburg he was liberated, only to be made a soldier. During his detention in the hard-labour prison he was submitted, for some minor offence, to the terrible punishment of the cat-o’-nine-tails, and from that time dates his disease--epilepsy--which he never quite got rid of during all his life. The coronation amnesty of Alexander II. did not improve Dostoyévskiy’s fate. Not until 1859--four years after the advent of Alexander II. to the throne--was the great writer pardoned and allowed to return to Russia. He died in 1883. Dostoyévskiy was a rapid writer, and even before his arrest he had published ten novels, of which _The Double_ was already a forerunner of his later psycho-pathological novels, and _Nétochka Nezvánova_ showed a rapidly maturing literary talent of the highest quality. On his return from Siberia he began publishing a series of novels which produced a deep impression on the reading public. He opened the series by a great novel, _The Downtrodden and Offended_, which was soon followed by _Memoirs from a Dead-House_, in which he described his hard-labour experience. Then came an extremely sensational novel, _Crime and Punishment_, which lately was widely read all over Europe and America. _The Brothers Karamázoff_, which is considered his most elaborate work, is even more sensational, while _The Youth_, _The Idiot_, _The Devils_ are a series of shorter novels devoted to the same psycho-pathological problems.