ABSTRACT
Broken beneath the burden of Dostoeffsky's destiny, he still has strength to raise pious hands as testimony to the greatness and holiness of life. Such an amazing power for transfiguring experiences cuts the ground from beneath the feet of destiny and deprives it of its dominion. Dostoeffsky is so consummate in his skill as a transmuter, he is so dexterous in changing what should have been a humiliation into an exaltation, that destiny's bludgeonings can only serve to develop his powers. Tolstoy's life was, therefore, didactic, a treatise on good conduct: Dostoeffsky's life was a work of art, a tragedy, the fulfilment of a destiny. The secret of Dostoeffsky's greatness lies in his limitless, restless, conscious, and defenceless surrender to his duplex destiny; this amor fati is the wellspring of his creative ecstasy. Dostoeffsky confided the control of his destiny into the hands of fate herself, and thereby he triumphed over temporal chances.
