Much later, when he had served hard labour, he writes (Oct. 1, 1859) to his brother from Tver: “Towards the middle of December I will send (or bring myself) the corrected _Double_. Believe me, brother, that the correction, provided with a preface, will be worth a _new novel_. They will at last see what _The Double_ is like. I hope I shall make them even too deeply interested. In a word, I challenge them all. And, finally, if I do not correct _The Double_ now, when shall I do it? Why should I lose a superb idea, the greatest type, in its social importance, which I was the first to discover, and of which I was the prophet?” The gigantic individualism of the hero of _The Life_, stressed more than once by the author, is to be heard in Dostoevsky’s characteristic admission to Apollon Maikov: “Everywhere and in everything I reach the furthest limit; I have passed beyond the boundaries of all life” (Aug. 16, 1867). Certain eccentricities in the character of the hero of _The Life_ are worth attention. He loved to “surprise everybody by unexpectedly rude pranks”; “behaved like a monster”; “offended an old woman.” Something of the kind, certain collapses in his spiritual life and in his relation to people, were to be found in Dostoevsky. Thus on his own admission he was rude to the officer who taught algebra in the College of Engineering (1838). In his letter to his brother (1847) he gives himself the following characteristics: “I have such a bad repulsive character.... For you and yours I am ready to give my life, but at times, when my heart is melting with love, you can’t get a kind word from me. My nerves do not obey me at such times.... How often I have been rude to Emily Fedorovna,[111] the noblest of women, a thousand times better than myself; I remembered how I used sometimes to be deliberately cross with Fedya whom at the same time I loved even better than yourself....” Footnote 111: The wife of Michael Dostoevsky. There flared up at times in the hero of _The Life_ “a feeling of destructiveness,” and the same feeling showed itself in Dostoevsky’s view of the world when he was a boy. “Up till now I did not know what wounded vanity meant,” he wrote on Oct. 31, 1838. “I should blush if that feeling possessed me ... but—do you know?—I should like to crush the whole world at one go.” Those plunges into “abysses” and the voluptuousness of the hero of _The Life_ have their counterpart in certain details which Dostoevsky himself relates of his youth. “Good-bye,” he ended his letter to his brother of Nov. 16, 1845; “the little Minnies, Claras, Mariannes, etc., are enchanting, but they cost a terrible amount of money. The other day Turgenev and Belinsky scolded me terrifically for my disorderly life.”