Censure.

[27] I permit myself to quote from my "Russian Rambles" Count L. N.
Tolstoy'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. Dostoevsky possessed all three requisites. Nekrasoff 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 Kobza,
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.
Saltykoff (Shtchedrin), in the Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg, in
April, 1889.

CHAPTER XI

DOSTOEVSKY

All the writers of the '40's of the nineteenth century had their
individual peculiarities. But in this respect, Feodor Mikhailovitch
Dostoevsky (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, Dostoevsky 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, Dostoevsky 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 Marya 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.

In 1837 Feodo