Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Possessed (The Devils) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He came back from abroad and was brilliant in the capacity of lecturer at the university, towards the end of the forties. He only had time to deliver a few lectures, I believe theywere about the Arabs; he maintained, too, a brilliant thesis on the political and Hanseaticimportance of the German town Hanau, of which there was promise in the epoch between1413 and 1428, and on the special and obscure reasons why that promise was neverfulfilled. This dissertation was a cruel and skilful thrust at the Slavophils of the day, and atonce made him numerous and irreconcilable enemies among them. Later on-after he hadlost his post as lecturer, however-he published (by way of revenge, so to say, and to showthem what a man they had lost) in a progressive monthly review, which translated Dickensand advocated the views of George Sand, the beginning of a very profound investigationinto the causes, I believe, of the extraordinary moral nobility of certain knights at a certainepoch or something of that nature. Some lofty and exceptionally noble idea was maintained in it, anyway. It was saidafterwards that the continuation was hurriedly forbidden and even that the progressivereview had to suffer for having printed the first part. That may very well have been so, forwhat was not possible in those days? Though, in this case, it is more likely that there wasnothing of the kind, and that the author himself was too lazy to conclude his essay. He cutshort his lectures on the Arabs because, somehow and by someone (probably one of hisreactionary enemies) a letter had been seized giving an account of certain circumstances, inconsequence of which someone had demanded an explanation from him