icular, but admired the novels of
George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Charles Dickens. He tells us much of
his painful methods of writing ("what do I want with fame when I'm
writing for daily bread?" he bitterly asks his brother), and the
overshadowing necessity that compelled him to turn in "copy" when he
lacked food, fire, friends. No wonder this private correspondence
shows us anything but a lover of mankind, no matter how suffused in
humanitarianism are his books, with their drabs, tramps, criminals,
and drunkards. Turgenieff divined in him Sadistic predispositions; he
was certainly a morbid man; while Tolstoy wrote of him: "It never
entered my head to compare myself with him.... I am weeping now over
the news of his death ... and I never saw the man." Dostoievsky was a
profound influence on the art and life of Tolstoy.

It may interest musical persons to learn that it was through the
efforts of Adolphe Henselt, piano virtuoso and composer, that
Dostoievsky was finally allowed to leave Siberia and publish his
writings. Henselt, who was at the time court pianist and teacher of
the Czarina, appealed to her, and thus the ball was set rolling that
ended in the clemency of the Czar. To Henselt, then, Russian
literature is indebted for the "greater Dostoievsky." Why he was ever
sent to Siberia is still a mystery. He had avowed his disbelief in the
teachings of the Petrachevsky group, and only frequented their
meetings because "advanced" European literature was read aloud.
Dostoievsky was never a nihilist, and in his open letter to some St.
Petersburg students he gives them sound advice as to the results of
revolution. Poor man! He knew from harsh experience.

II

Thanks to the Count Melchoir de Voguee, who introduced Tolstoy to the
French in Le Roman Russe (containing studies of Pushkin, Gogol,
Turgenieff, Dostoievsky) literary Paris was for a time saturated in
Russian mysticism, and what the clear-headed Alphonse Daudet called
"Russian pity." It was Count de Voguee, member of the Academy and
Neo-Catholic (as the group headed by Ernest Lavisse elected to style
itself), who compressed all Tolstoy in an epigram as having ("the mind
of an English chemist in the soul of a Hindoo Buddhist") On dirait
l'esprit d'un chimiste anglais dans l'ame d'un buddhiste hindou.

The modulation of a soul, at first stagnant, then plunged into the
gulf of hopelessness, and at last catching a glimpse of light,