We read of the high-strung Dostoyevsky who for no reason at all was sentenced to death, brought to the gibbet, pardoned there, condemned to hard labor, imprisoned, exiled, deprived of literary work, beaten with the cat-o'-nine-tails, tortured in a thousand ways, year after year, till he became a mental and physical wreck. In all the history of the human race, from the day that primitive man roamed the untamed forests, and stubbing his naked toe against a root, fell down to worship it, to placate it, to appease it, until the scientific time that a biologist like Haeckel absolutely denied the existence of god and soul,—there has been nothing more horribly cruel than the czarish treatment which the Russian government meted out to the gifted youth who produced a work in his early twenties that caused Nekrasov to cry out to Belinsky, "A new Gogol is born to us!"[56]
We read of Plescheev, one of Russia's foremost poets, who was sent as a soldier to the Orenburg region, and endured persecution for years.
We read of Mikhail Mikhailov—one of the most valued contributors to the Sovremennik. (The Contemporary), a wonderful periodical numbering among its contributors, Chernishevsky, Dobrolubov, Tolstoy, Nekrasov—who was condemned to hard labor in Siberia where he soon died.
We read of Ostrovsky, the Father of the Russian Drama, who was placed under police supervision as a suspect.
We read of the loving Levitov—"a pure flower of the Russian steppes"—who while a student was exiled to the far north, and later removed to Vologda where he was forced to live in complete isolation from everything intellectual and in awful poverty verging on starvation.
We read of Petropavlovsky who was early exiled to the Siberian government of Tobolsk, where he was kept many years and from which he was released only to die soon after from consumption.
We read of Saltykoff (Schedrin), the greatest of satirists, who was exiled for several years in the miserable provincial town of Vyatka.
We read of Belinsky, the greatest of critics, who fortunately died young enuf to escape the fortress. When he was dying an agent of the state-police would call from time to time to ascertain if he were still alive. Had he recovered he would have been transfered to Peter and Paul.
We read of the persecution of Palm and Potyekhin; of the years that Melshin, Korolenko, Zasodimsky, Elpatievsky, etc, spent in exile. By this time a terrible truth dawns upon the startled mind: In Romanoff's Russia, scarcely one single writer of worth has escaped imprisonment or banishment.[57] And these prophets who have been thus persecuted were not despicable rhymers like Alfred Austin, or duke-and-duchess novelists like Harold MacGrath. They were great-brained men whose mission was to uplift a nation. Had the Catherines, Nicholases, and Alexanders been less powerful, Russia would not now be the foulest blot on our skull-strewn earth.[58]
