[27] I permit myself to quote from my "Russian Rambles" Count L. N. Tolstóy's opinion, in which he succinctly expressed to me the view of this second party: "There are three requisites which go to make a perfect writer. First, he must have something worth saying. Second, he must have a proper way of saying it. Third, he must have sincerity. Dickens had all three of these qualities. Thackeray had not much to say; he had a great deal of art in saying it, but he had not enough sincerity. Dostoévsky possessed all three requisites. Nekrásoff knew well how to express himself, but he did not possess the first quality; he forced himself to say something—whatever would catch the public at the moment, of which he was a very keen judge, as he wrote to suit the popular taste, believing not at all in what he said. He had none of the third requisite."
[28] A verst is about two-thirds of a mile.
[29] The player on the Little Russian twelve-stringed guitar, the Kóbza, literally translated.
[30] I saw him, a majestic old man, surrounded by an adoring throng of students and young men, at one of the requiem services for M. E. Saltykóff (Shtchedrín), in the Kazán Cathedral, St. Petersburg, in April, 1889.
CHAPTER XI
DOSTOÉVSKY
All the writers of the '40's of the nineteenth century had their individual peculiarities. But in this respect, Feódor Mikháilovitch Dostoévsky (1821-1880) was even more sharply separated from all the rest by his characteristics, which almost removed him from the ranks of the writers of the epoch, and gave him a special place in literature.
The chief cause of this distinction lies in the fact that while most of the other writers sprang from the country regions, being members of the landed gentry class, Dostoévsky represents the plebeian, toiling class of society, a nervously choleric son of the town; and in the second place, while the majority of them were well-to-do, Dostoévsky alone in the company belonged to the class of educated strugglers with poverty, which had recently made its reappearance.
His father was staff physician in the Márya Hospital in Moscow, and he was the second son in a family of seven children. The whole family lived in two rooms, an ante-room and kitchen, which comprised the quarters allotted to the post by the government. Here strictly religious and patriarchal customs reigned, mitigated by the high cultivation of the head of the family.