Recently, however, publicists have gone to the other extreme and asserted that Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and a host of other Russian writers were apostles of the tenets which have since received the name of Bolshevism, and that it was they who prepared the Russian upheaval just as it was the authors of the "Encyclopedia" who prepared the French Revolution. In this sweeping form the statement is misleading. Russian literature during the reigns of the last three Tsars--with few exceptions, like the writings of Leskoff--was unquestionably a vehicle for the spread of revolutionary ideas. But it would be a gross exaggeration to assert that the end deliberately pursued was that form of anarchy which is known to-day as Bolshevism, or, indeed, genuine anarchy in any form. Tolstoy and Gorky may be counted among the forerunners of Bolshevism, but Dostoyevsky, whom I was privileged to know, was one of its keenest antagonists. Nor was it only anarchism that he combated. Like Leskoff, he was an inveterate enemy of political radicalism, and we university students bore him a grudge in consequence. In his masterly delineation[273] of a group of "reformers," in particular of Verkhovensky--whom psychic tendency, intellectual anarchy, and political crime bring under the category of Bolshevists--he foreshadowed the logical conclusion, and likewise the political consummation, of the corrosive doctrines which in those days were associated with the name of Bakunin. In the year 1905-06, when the upshot of the conflict between Tsarism and the revolution was still doubtful, Count Witte and I often admired the marvelous intuition of the great novelist, whose gallery of portraits in the "Devils" seemed to have become suddenly endowed with life, and to be conspiring, shooting, and bomb-throwing in the streets of Moscow, Petersburg, Odessa, and Tiflis. The seeds of social revolution sown by the novelists, essayists, and professional guides of the nation were forced by the wars of 1904 and 1914 into rapid germination. As far back as the year 1892, in a work published over a pseudonym, the present writer described the rotten condition of the Tsardom, and ventured to foretell its speedy collapse.[274] The French historian Michelet wrote with intuition marred by exaggeration and acerbity: "A barbarous force, a law-hating world, Russia sucks and absorbs all the poison of Europe and then gives it off in greater quantity and deadlier intensity. When we admit Russia, we admit the cholera, dissolution, death. That is the meaning of Russian propaganda. Yesterday she said to us, 'I am Christianity.' To-morrow she will say, 'I am socialism.' It is the revolting idea of a demagogy without an idea, a principle, a sentiment, of a people which would march toward the west with the gait of a blind man, having lost its soul and its will and killing at random, of a terrible automaton like a dead body which can still reach and slay.