III
It is under such circumstances that Dostoevsky's novels were composed. An existence such as his would have broken the spirit of a Berserker, but Dostoevsky (to use his own expression) had the "vitality of a cat." We admire Charles Lamb, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott for their gallant struggle with destiny; but what are the tragic episodes in their life's drama as compared with the lifelong tragedy of the Russian writer?
Yet, through twenty-five years of distress and disease, his literary activity continued unrelaxed. One novel succeeded another, all of them overloaded with human documents, some of them a thousand pages long, a thousand pages to be slowly pondered over during the interminable Russian winter evenings. And all those novels strike the same keynote of human misery. A martyr himself, he is the voice of Russian martyrs. The mere titles of his books—"Poor Folk," "The Insulted and Injured," "The Idiot," "The Possessed"—reveal the dreary monotony of the subject matter!
Yet Dostoevsky had not abandoned hope, for the depths of misery and degradation are
