has thrown them--through this faculty Dostoyévskiy has certainly won a unique position among the writers of modern times, and he will be read--not for the artistic finish of his writings but for the good thoughts which are scattered through them, for their real reproduction of slum life in the great cities--and for the infinite sympathy which a being like Sónya can inspire in the reader. NEKRÁSOFF With Nekrásoff we come to a poet whose work has been the subject of a lively controversy in Russian Literature. He was born in 1821--his father being a poor army officer who married a Polish lady for love. This lady must have been most remarkable, because in his poems Nekrásoff continually refers to his mother in accents of love and respect, such as perhaps have no parallel in any other poet. His mother, however, died very early, and their large family, which consisted of thirteen brothers and sisters, must have been in great straits. No sooner had Nicholas Nekrásoff, the future poet, attained his sixteenth year, than he left the provincial town where the family were staying and went to St. Petersburg, to enter the University, where he joined the philological department. Most Russian students live very poorly--mostly by lessons, or entering as tutors in families where they are paid very little, but have at least lodgings and food. But Nekrásoff experienced simply black misery: “For full three years,” he said at a later period, “I felt continually hungry every day.” “It often happened that I entered one of the great restaurants where people may go to read newspapers, even without ordering anything to eat, and while I read my paper I would draw the bread plate towards myself and eat the bread, and that was my only food.” At last he fell ill, and during his convalescence the old soldier from whom he rented a tiny room, and to whom he had already run into debt, one cold November night refused to admit his lodger to his room. Nekrásoff would have had to spend the night out of doors, but a passing beggar took pity on him and took him to some slums on the outskirts of the town, to a “doss-house,” where the young poet found also the possibility of earning fifteen farthings for some petition that he wrote for one of the inmates. Such was the youth of Nekrásoff; but during it he had the opportunity of making acquaintance with the poorest and lowest classes of St. Petersburg, and the love towards them which he acquired during these peregrinations he retained all his life. Later on, by means of relentless work, and by editing all sorts of almanacks, he improved his material conditions. He became a regular contributor to the chief review of the time, for which Turguéneff, Dostoyévskiy, Hérzen, and all our best writers wrote, and in 1846 he even became the owner of this review, _The Contemporary_, which for the next fifteen years played so important a part in Russian literature. In _The Contemporary_ he came,