As for his own mental condition, Dostoïevsky gives us a picture of it in Injury and Insult: "As soon as it grew dusk I gradually fell into that state of mind which so often overmasters me at night since I've been ill, and which I shall call mystic fear. It is a crushing anxiety about something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which does not actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realised, at this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable, horrible misshapen fact." This "frenzied anguish" is a familiar stigma of epilepsy. Its presence denotes the approach of an attack.
But the "sacred malady" had, in the case of Dostoïevsky, its compensations. Through this fissure in the walls of his neurotic soul he peered and saw its strange perturbations, divined their origins in the very roots of his being, and recorded--as did Poe, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche--the fluctuations of his sick will. With this Russian, his Hamlet-like introspection becomes vertigo, and life itself fades into a dream compounded of febrile melancholy or blood lust. It was not without warrant that he allows Rogoszin, in The Idiot, to murder Nastasia Philipovna, because of her physical charms. The aura of the man foredoomed to morbid crime is unmistakable.
The letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoïevsky came as a revelation to his admirers. We think of him as overflowing with sentiment for his fellow man, a socialist, one who "went to the people" long before Tolstoy dreamed of the adventure, a man four years in prison in Siberia, and six more in that bleak country under official inspection; truly, a martyr to his country, an epileptic and a genius. You may be disappointed to learn from these telltale documents--translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne--that the Russian writer while in exile avoided his fellow convicts, was very unpopular with them, and that throughout his correspondence there are numerous contemptuous references to socialism and "going to the people." He preferred solitude, he asserts more than once, to the company of common folk or mediocre persons. He gives Tolstoy at his true rating, but is cruel to Turgenieff--who never wished him harm. The Dostoïevsky caricature portrait of Turgenieff--infinitely the superior artist of the two--in The Possessed is absurd. Turgenieff forgave, but Dostoïevsky never forgave Turgenieff for this forgiveness. Another merit of these letters is the light they shed on the true character of Tolstoy, who is shown in his proper environment, neither a prophet nor a heaven-storming reformer. Dostoïevsky invented the phrase: "land-proprietor literature," to describe the fiction of both Tolstoy and Turgenieff. He was abjectly poor, gambled when he got the chance (which was seldom), hated Western Europe, France and Germany in particular, but admired the novels of George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Charles Dickens. He tells us much of his painful methods of writing ("what do I want with fame when I'm writing for daily bread?" he bitterly asks his brother), and the overshadowing necessity that compelled him to turn in "copy" when he lacked food, fire, friends. No wonder this private correspondence shows us anything but a lover of mankind, no matter how suffused in humanitarianism are his books, with their drabs, tramps, criminals, and drunkards. Turgenieff divined in him Sadistic predispositions; he was certainly a morbid man; while Tolstoy wrote of him: "It never entered my head to compare myself with him.... I am weeping now over the news of his death ... and I never saw the man." Dostoïevsky was a profound influence on the art and life of Tolstoy.