While Dostoevsky's personality is separably bound up with his work, profitable appreciation of the latter can be considerably amplified with knowledge of the important facts of his life and the conditions with which he struggled. I will record the more essential facts of his life as I have gathered them, and try to explain the causes that have made for the distinction in his work from that of all other writers. He was born in a charity-hospital in Moscow, in 1821. His father was an army-surgeon, his mother a store-keeper's daughter. I like to think that he derived his expressive powers, or rather the nebulæ out of which they subsequently developed, from his mother, perhaps partly because of my theory that men of acute genius ultimately do transcend the difference of sex in the quality of their personalities as well as in that of their work. Like most imaginative youths who come into contact with fine art, Dostoevsky was stimulated to literary expression by his study of classical and contemporaneous European literature. He had lived twenty-three years when he graduated from a St. Petersburg school of military engineering. His first novel, _Poor Folk_, was published three years later, and served to focus upon him the attention of the critics. In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested, with members of a radical organization, on governmental charges of sedition. The terrible suffering he sustained while awaiting his execution (he was first confined in prison for eight months) have been set forth in striking passages of his novels, _The Idiot_ and _Letters from a Dead House_. The sentence of death was finally, and very unexpectedly, commuted to one of imprisonment in Siberia for four years. At the expiration of this period he served perforce as a private soldier in the Russian army for three more years. When he was permitted to return to St. Petersburg he was accompanied by his first wife, whom he had loved and married while in exile. Dostoevsky's interminable suffering from epileptic seizures (it has been suggested that these fits originated in a beating administered to him by his father when Fyodor was a boy); his poverty, and the constant accumulation of debt; the terrific haste with which he found it necessary to write his most profound books--all have made it natural to him, in dwelling upon any physiological aspect of his characters, to be as unconvincing as the eremite attempting an analysis of conditions of sex life.