ABSTRACT
I ONE is tempted to regard as symbolic the fact that Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky was born, on October 30th 1821, in a Moscow hospital for the poor, where his father was employed as a physician. As the Dostoevsky family occupied a flat in the hospital buildings, some of the boy's earliest impressions were those of pain, poverty and disease. In spite of the patriarchal atmosphere prevailing in his family, the old Dostoevsky-an offspring of the impoverished gentry-was of an irritable disposition, miserly and addicted to drink. He had a miserable end. Having bought a small farm in the Tula district, he treated his few serfs so badly that in the end they murdered him, in 1838.
