blow given in anger by his father.

Dostoevski was enormously interested in his disease, studied its
symptoms carefully, one might say eagerly, and gave to his friends
minute accounts of exactly how he felt before and after the
convulsions, which tally precisely with the vivid descriptions written
out in his novels. This illness coloured his whole life, profoundly
affected his character, and gave a feverish and hysterical tone to his
books.

Dostoevski had a tremendous capacity for enthusiasm. As a boy, he was
terribly shaken by the death of Pushkin, and he never lost his
admiration for the founder of Russian literature. He read the great
classics of antiquity and of modern Europe with wild excitement, and
wrote burning eulogies in letters to his friends. The flame of his
literary ambition was not quenched by the most abject poverty, nor by
the death of those whom he loved most intensely. After his first wife
died, he suffered agonies of grief, accentuated by wretched health,
public neglect, and total lack of financial resources. But chill
penury could not repress his noble rage. He was always planning and
writing new novels, even when he had no place to lay his head. And the
bodily distress of poverty did not cut him nearly so sharply as its
shame. His letters prove clearly that at times he suffered in the same
way as the pitiable hero of "Poor Folk." That book was indeed a
prophecy of the author's own life.

It is impossible to exaggerate the difficulties under which he wrote
his greatest novels. His wife and children were literally starving. He
could not get money, and was continually harassed by creditors. During
part of the time, while writing in the midst of hunger and freezing