reports were eventually carried to the police, and on the 23rd of April 1849 Dostoievsky and his brother, with thirty other suspected personages, were arrested. After a short examination by the secret police they were lodged in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul at St Petersburg, in which confinement Feodor wrote his story A Little Hero. On the 22nd of December 1849 the accused were all condemned to death and conveyed in vans to a large scaffold in the Simonovsky Place. As the soldiers were preparing to carry out the sentence, the prisoners were informed that their penalty was commuted to exile in Siberia. The novelist’s sentence was, four years in Siberia and enforced military service in the ranks for life. On Christmas eve 1849 he commenced the long journey to Omsk, and remained in Siberia, “like a man buried alive, nailed down in his coffin,” for four terrible years. His Siberian experiences are graphically narrated in a volume to which he gave the name of Recollections of a Dead-House (1858). It was known in an English translation as Buried Alive in Siberia (1881; another version, 1888). His release only subjected him to fresh indignities as a common soldier at Semipalatinsk; but in 1858, through the intercession of an old schoolfellow, General Todleben, he was made an under-officer; and in 1859, upon the accession of Alexander II., he was finally recalled from exile. In 1858 he had married a widow, Madame Isaiev, but she died at St Petersburg in 1867 after a somewhat stormy married life.
After herding for years with the worst criminals, Dostoievsky obtained an exceptional insight into the dark and seamy side of Russian life. He formed new conceptions of human life, of the balance of good and evil in man, and of the Russian character. Psychological studies have seldom, if ever, found a more intense form of expression than that embodied by Dostoievsky in his novel called Crime and Punishment. The hero Raskolnikov is a poor student, who is led on to commit a murder partly by self-conceit, partly by the contemplation of the abject misery around him. Unsurpassed in poignancy in the whole of modern literature is the sensation of compassion evoked by the scene between the self-tormented Raskolnikov and the humble street-walker, Sonia, whom he loves, and from whom, having confessed his crime, he derives the idea of expiation. Raskolnikov finally gives himself up to the police and is exiled to Siberia, whither Sonia follows him. The book gave currency to a number of ideas, not in any sense new, but specially characteristic of Dostoievsky: the theory, for instance, that in every life, however fallen and degraded, there are ecstatic moments of self-devotion; the doctrine of purification by suffering, and by suffering alone; and the ideal of a Russian people forming a social state at some future period bound together by no obligation save mutual love and the magic of kindness. In this visionary prospect, as well as in his objection to the use of physical force, Dostoievsky anticipated in a remarkable manner some of the conspicuous tenets of his great successor Tolstoy. The book electrified the reading public in Russia upon its appearance in 1866, and its fame was confirmed when it appeared in Paris in 1867. To his remarkable faculty of awakening reverberations of melancholy and compassion, as shown in his early work, Dostoievsky had added, by the admission of all, a rare mastery over the emotions of terror and pity. But such mastery was not long to remain unimpaired. Crime and Punishment was written when he was at the zenith of his power. His remaining works exhibit frequently a marvellous tragic and analytic power, but they are unequal, and deficient in measure and in balance. The chief of them are: The Injured and the Insulted, The Demons (1867), The Idiot (1869), The Adult (1875), The Brothers Karamzov (1881).
From 1865, when he settled in St Petersburg, Dostoievsky was absorbed in a succession of journalistic enterprises, in the Slavophil interest, and suffered severe pecuniary losses. He had to leave Russia, in order to escape his creditors, and to seek refuge in Germany and Italy. He was further harassed by troubles with his wife, and his work was interrupted by epileptic fits and other physical ailments. It was under such conditions as these that his most enduring works were created. He managed finally to return to Russia early in the seventies, and was for some time director of The Russian World. From 1876 he published a kind of review, entitled Carnet d’un écrivain, to the pages of which he committed many strange autobiographical facts and reflections. The last eight years of his life were spent in comparative prosperity at St Petersburg, where he died on the 9th of February 1881.
His life had been irremediably seared by his Siberian experiences. He looked prematurely old; his face bore an expression of accumulated sorrow; in disposition he had become distrustful, taciturn, contemptuous—his favourite theme the superiority of the Russian peasant over every other class; as an artist, though uncultured, he had ever been subtle and sympathetic, but latterly he was tortured by tragic visions and morbidly preoccupied by exceptional and perverted types. M. de Vogüé, in his admirable Ecrivains russes, has worked out with some success a parallel between the later years of Dostoievsky and those of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Siberia effectually convinced the novelist of the impotence of Nihilism in such a country as Russia; but though he was assailed by ardent Liberals for the reactionary trend of his later writings, Dostoievsky became, towards the end of his life, an extremely popular figure, and his funeral, on the 12th of February 1881, was the occasion of one of the most remarkable demonstrations of public feeling ever witnessed in the Russian capital. The death of the Russian novelist was not mentioned in the London press; it is only since 1885, when Crime and Punishment first appeared, in English, that his name has become at all familiar in England, mainly through French translations.
A complete edition of his novels was issued at St Petersburg in fourteen volumes (1882–1883). Two critical studies by Tchij and Zelinsky appeared at Moscow in 1885, and a German life by Hoffmann at Vienna in 1899. (T. Se.)
DOUAI, a town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Nord, 20 m. S. of Lille on the Northern railway between that city and Cambrai. Pop. (1906) town, 21,679; commune, 33,247. Douai is situated in a marshy plain on the banks of the Scarpe which intersects the town from south to north, and supplies water to a canal skirting it on the west. The old fortifications, of which the Porte de Valenciennes (15th century) is the chief survival, have been demolished to make room for boulevards and public gardens. The industrial towns of Dorignies, Sin-le-Noble and Aniche are practically suburbs of Douai. Of the churches, that of Notre-Dame (12th and 14th centuries) is remarkable for the possession of a fine altarpiece of the early 16th century, composed of wooden panels painted by Jean Bellegambe, a native of Douai. The principal building of the town is a handsome hôtel de ville, partly of the 15th century, with a lofty belfry. The Palais de Justice (18th century) was formerly the town house (refuge) of the abbey of Marchiennes. Houses of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries are numerous. There is a statue of Madame Desbordes Valmore, the poet (d. 1859), a native of the town. The municipal museum contains a library of over 85,000 volumes as well as 1800 MSS., and a fine collection of sculpture and paintings. Douai is the seat of a court of appeal, a court of assizes and a subprefect, and has a tribunal of first instance, a board of trade-arbitrators, an exchange, a chamber of commerce and a branch of the Bank of France. Its educational institutions include a lycée, training colleges, a school of mines, an artillery school, schools of music, agriculture, drawing, architecture, &c., and a national school for instruction in brewing and other industries connected with agriculture. In addition to other iron and engineering works, Douai has a large cannon foundry and an arsenal; coal-mining and the manufacture of glass and bottles and chemicals are carried on on a large scale in the environs; among the other industries are flax-spinning, rope-making, brewing and the manufacture of farm implements, oil, sugar, soap and leather. Trade, which is largely water-borne, is in grain and agricultural products, coal and building material.
Douai, the site of which was occupied by a castle (Castrum Duacense) as early as the 7th century, belonged in the middle ages to the counts of Flanders, passed in 1384 to the dukes of Burgundy, and so in 1477 with the rest of the Netherlands to Spain. In 1667 it was captured by Louis XIV., and was ultimately ceded to France by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Historically Douai is mainly important as the centre of the political and religious propaganda of the exiled English Roman Catholics.
