But what struck me most about her was that she looked so wretched and unhappy. Such hopeless despair was written all over her face that to see that little creature already experiencing so much damnation and despair was to the highest degree unnatural and terribly painful. She kept shaking her dishevelled head from side to side, as though debating some highly important question with herself, waving her little hands about and gesticulating wildly, and then, suddenly, clapping them together and pressing them to her bosom. I went back and gave her sixpence. She seized the small silver coin, gave me a wild look of startled surprise, and suddenly began running in the opposite direction as fast as her little legs would carry her, as though terrified that I should take the money away from her …”

Dostoevsky never forgot the little girl in the Haymarket. Fourteen years later he was to use her as a symbol of the pitiful and as an object of mercy in one of the most imaginative of his “philosophic tales,” The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.

Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg from his first trip abroad in August, 1862. His periodical Vremya was still flourishing, but its success was beginning to worry the authorities who finally suppressed it in May, 1863.* In August of the same year Dostoevsky went abroad again (he was beginning to be drawn there by the gaming tables, his passion for gambling becoming more and more irresistible). On his return in January, 1864, he and his elder brother Mikhail embarked on their second journalistic venture which was to end in disaster. They were planning to publish another monthly, but met with disappointment at the very start. Dostoevsky wanted it to be called Pravda (“Truth”), but the authorities thought the title too provocative. After a few more suggestions, it was at last agreed to call it Epokha (“Epoch”), and the first number appeared on March 21, 1864. It lasted only one year. One disaster after another overwhelmed Dostoevsky. His wife died in Moscow on April 15, 1864, and, worst blow of all, his brother Mikhail, the business manager of the paper, died in July of the same year. The death of his brother brought about the closing of the journal, involving Dostoevsky in a debt of over 15,000 roubles, which he was repaying almost to the end of his life. This was the beginning of the financial disasters which drove Dostoevsky to seek refuge from his creditors abroad, where the fascination of the roulette table only involved him more deeply.*

It was in the first and the second issues of Epokha that Dostoevsky published the most concentrated and profound of his reflections on the destiny of man—Notes from the Underground. Dostoevsky himself used to say that as a philosopher he was “weak.”† And, no doubt, it was only as a creative artist, that is, through the mind and heart of the characters he created, that he could reach out beyond the borderlines of conscious thought into the darkest recesses of the human personality and, at the same time, provide the deepest analysis of human nature and human destiny that any creative writer before or after him was ever able to achieve. In these Notes Dostoevsky discusses the workings of the intellect and inevitably meets the challenge of the scientific determinism of his day. No one saw more clearly and from the very outset the limitations of the scientific approach to the ethical problems of mankind. He understood the lure of material prosperity which the developing powers of science were beginning to present to mankind, and the unlimited resources open to exploitation. The whole of this splendid vision he sums up under the symbol of a Crystal Palace, which recurs again and again in his writings. The use of this symbol by Dostoevsky is interesting as showing his immediate recognition of the significance of the Exhibition of 1851 in London, housed in Paxton’s Palace, the fame of which had spread to the farthest corners of Europe. He saw in this the sign of an advent of a new epoch which threatened by a new temptation to undermine all the cultural values of European life, and which he later expounded so explicitly in the story of “The Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov. Within the compass of a few short chapters, the bewilderment of the self-conscious intellect grappling with the ultimate problems is portrayed with brutal frankness in the first part of the Notes from the Underground. No regard for self-respect, charity, or pride is allowed to impede the deliberate dissection until the inescapable truth has been stated. Dostoevsky rejects one after another the palliatives so dear to the romantic humanitarian and forces on him the acknowledgment of his own guilt and ineffectiveness. This, indeed, appears very clearly from the way Dostoevsky dismisses Nekrassov’s poem with which he introduces the second part of the Notes; for his two etceteras are in themselves sufficient to dispose of Nekrassov’s plea for the “fallen woman” with utter contempt; he then proceeds to elucidate his thesis by an appeal to uncompromising realism.

The parallelism between White Nights and Notes from the Underground has been noted earlier. In both the hero is a dreamer of dreams; but while the story in White Nights moves along smoothly and pleasantly on the surface of human thought and emotion, in the Notes from the Underground it penetrates deep into the human heart and mind, so deep indeed that the main subject of the story transcends the personal fortunes of the anonymous hero and assumes a universal significance; it is all mankind and not individual man that is the real subject of the discourse.

The two last stories in this volume belong to Dostoevsky’s last years. He died on February 9, 1881, from a burst artery in his lungs, aggravated by an attack of epilepsy, an illness from which he had suffered all his life. A Gentle Creature was published in 1876, in the November number of A Writer’s Diary, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man in the April number of the next year.

A Gentle Creature filled the whole of the November issue of Dostoevsky’s monthly.