The list of authors and books known to the well-read hero of _The Life_ takes us vividly into the childhood and youth of Dostoevsky himself. The New Testament, the Bible, Gogol, Pushkin, Walter Scott, Karamzin, works on history and geography, _Arabian Nights_, etc.—all these are confirmed by Dostoevsky’s own accounts of the early years of his life and in the reminiscences of him by his brother Andrei Mikhailovich. The latter, speaking of their family readings, points out first of all that the father and mother read aloud the usual books to their children: _The History of the Russian State_ by Karamzin, and above all volumes xi. and xii. Karamzin’s _History_ was Fedor Dostoevsky’s table-book, and he always read it when he had nothing new to read. Karamzin’s stories _Poor Lisa_ and _Marfa Possadnitsa_ were also read aloud, also _Letters of a Russian Traveller_. Dostoevsky himself owned to N. N. Strakhov (December 2, 1870): “I grew up on Karamzin”; and in _The Journal of a Writer_ Dostoevsky said that at the age of ten he “already knew almost all the principal episodes of Russian history from Karamzin.” Andrei Mikhailovich Dostoevsky says: “I saw Walter Scott most often in the hands of my brother Fedor.” To a correspondent who asked Dostoevsky to advise him about his daughter’s reading, Dostoevsky wrote in 1880: “When I was twelve, during my summer holiday in the country I read Walter Scott all through. From that reading I took with me into life so many splendid and lofty impressions that they certainly formed a great force in my soul for the struggle against impressions of a tempting, sensual, and corrupting kind.” According to the recollections of Andrei Dostoevsky, Pushkin was read many times and was almost learnt by heart. Gogol, too, was one of his brother’s favourite writers in boyhood. Referring to Dostoevsky’s love for Gogol, A. E. Risenkampf recorded that Dostoevsky as a boy recited to him by heart whole pages from _Dead Souls_. Concerning the New Testament Dostoevsky wrote: “I come from a Russian and religious family. We in our family knew the New Testament almost from early childhood.” As a boy of eight he was greatly impressed by hearing in church the Bible story of Job.[108] Footnote 108: Madame A. G. Dostoevsky made the following note in the margin of the title-page of _Brothers Karamazov_ (seventh edition, p. 308), beside the quotation “A hundred and four sacred stories from the Old and New Testament.” “Fedor Mikhailovich learnt to read from this book.” The book is in the F. M. Dostoevsky Museum. (From unpublished materials.)