actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realised, at
this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable,
horrible misshapen fact." This "frenzied anguish" is a familiar stigma
of epilepsy. Its presence denotes the approach of an attack.

But the "sacred malady" had, in the case of Dostoievsky, its
compensations. Through this fissure in the walls of his neurotic soul
he peered and saw its strange perturbations, divined their origins in
the very roots of his being, and recorded--as did Poe, Baudelaire, and
Nietzsche--the fluctuations of his sick will. With this Russian, his
Hamlet-like introspection becomes vertigo, and life itself fades into
a dream compounded of febrile melancholy or blood lust. It was not
without warrant that he allows Rogoszin, in The Idiot, to murder
Nastasia Philipovna, because of her physical charms. The aura of the
man foredoomed to morbid crime is unmistakable.

The letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoievsky came as a revelation
to his admirers. We think of him as overflowing with sentiment for
his fellow man, a socialist, one who "went to the people" long before
Tolstoy dreamed of the adventure, a man four years in prison in
Siberia, and six more in that bleak country under official inspection;
truly, a martyr to his country, an epileptic and a genius. You may be
disappointed to learn from these telltale documents--translated by
Ethel Colburn Mayne--that the Russian writer while in exile avoided
his fellow convicts, was very unpopular with them, and that throughout
his correspondence there are numerous contemptuous references to
socialism and "going to the people." He preferred solitude, he asserts
more than once, to the company of common folk or mediocre persons. He
gives Tolstoy at his true rating, but is cruel to Turgenieff--who
never wished him harm. The Dostoievsky caricature portrait of
Turgenieff--infinitely the superior artist of the two--in The
Possessed is absurd. Turgenieff forgave, but Dostoievsky never forgave
Turgenieff for this forgiveness. Another merit of these letters is the
light they shed on the true character of Tolstoy, who is shown in his
proper environment, neither a prophet nor a heaven-storming reformer.
Dostoievsky invented the phrase: "land-proprietor literature," to
describe the fiction of both Tolstoy and Turgenieff. He was abjectly
poor, gambled when he got the chance (which was seldom), hated Western
Europe, France and Germany in part