TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

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  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
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<p>
  A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to
  understand his work.
</p>
<p>
  Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working and
  deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five
  children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in
  reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious
  character.
</p>
<p>
  Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the final
  examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had already
  begun his first work, “Poor Folk.”
 </p>
<p>
  This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was
  received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly
  something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open
  before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he was arrested.
</p>
<p>
  Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky
  was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier
  and Proudhon. He was accused of “taking part in conversations against the
  censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of
  the intention to set up a printing press.” Under Nicholas I. (that “stern
  and just man,” as Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and he was
  condemned to death. After eight months’ imprisonment he was with
  twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. Writing
  to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: “They snapped words over our
  heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned
  to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer
  execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few
  minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I
  contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid
  them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought
  back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our
  lives.” The sentence was commuted to hard labour.
</p>
<p>
  One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and
  never regained his sanity.
</p>
<p>
  The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on
  Dostoevsky’s mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to
  accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in
  his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He
  describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the cruelty
  of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal servitude,
  spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began the
  “Dead House,” and some years of service in a disciplinary battalion.
</p>
<p>
  He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest and
  this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he
  suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times a
  year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was
  allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal—“Vremya,” which
  was forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he
  lost his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty,
  yet he took upon himself the payment of his brother’s debts. He started
  another journal—“The Epoch,” which within a few months was also
  prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother’s family was
  dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is
  said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were
  much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife.
</p>
<p>
  In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to
  Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary demonstrations of
  love and honour.
</p>
<p>
  A few months later Dostoevsky died. He was followed to the grave by a vast
  multitude of mourners, who “gave the hapless man the funeral of a king.”
   He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia.
</p>
<p>
  In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling
  inspired by Dostoevsky: “He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and
  our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than
  we have his insight impresses us as wisdom... that wisdom of the heart
  which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other gifts
  came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became
  great.”
 </p>