." His books
are veritably tragic. In Russian music alone may be found a parallel
to his poignant pathos and gloomy imaginings and shuddering climaxes.
What is more wonderful than Chapter I of The Idiot with its
adumbration of the entire plot and characterisation of the book, or
Chapter XV and its dramatic surprises.

His cardinal doctrine of non-resistance is illustrated in the
following anecdote. One evening while walking in St. Petersburg,
evidently in meditation a beggar asked for alms. Dostoievsky did not
answer. Enraged by his apparent indifference, the man gave him such a
violent blow that he was knocked off his legs. On arising he picked up
his hat, dusted his clothes, and walked away; but a policeman who saw
the attack came running toward the beggar and took him to the lock-up.
Despite his protest Dostoievsky accompanied them. He refused to make a
charge, for he argued that he was not sure the prisoner was the
culpable one; it was dark and he had not seen his face. Besides, he
might have been sick in his mind; only a sick person would attack in
such a manner. Sick, cried the examining magistrate, that drunken
good-for-nothing sick! A little rest in jail would do him good. You
are wrong, contradicted the accused, I am not drunk but hungry. When a
man has eaten, he doesn't believe that another is starving. True,
answered Dostoievsky, this poor chap was crazy with hunger. I shan't
make a complaint. Nevertheless the ruffian was sentenced to a month's
imprisonment. Dostoievsky gave him three roubles before he left. Now
this kind man was, strange as it may seem, an anti-Semite. His diary
revealed the fact after his death. In life he kept this prejudice to
himself. I always think of Dostoievsky as a man in shabby clothes
mounting at twilight an obscure staircase in some St. Petersburg
hovel, the moon shining dimly through the dirty window-panes, and
cobwebs and gloom abounding. "I love to hear singing to a street
organ; I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings, when all the
passers-by have pale, green, sickly faces, or when wet snow is falling
straight down; the night is windless ... and the street lamps shine
through it," said Raskolnikov. Here is the essential Dostoievsky.

And his tenacious love of life is exemplified in Raskolnikov's musing:
"Where is it I've read that some one condemned to death says or thinks
an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on
such a narrow ledge that h