Published today is Christopher Hitchens’s last piece for Vanity Fair, in which he writes about Charles Dickens (whose 200th would-be birthday will be on February 7, 2012) and the celebration of childhood.
I was surprised to learn from this piece that perhaps Fyodor Dostoyevsky met Charles Dickens:
And then, in late 2002, The Dickensiancarried a little bombshell of a tale: it seemed that in 1862, during Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s visit to London, he had met Dickens. And not only met him but elicited from him the exact admission that we would all have wanted the great man to make. Here is how it goes in English, as summarized by Dostoyevsky in an 1878 letter to a certain Stepan Dimitriyevich Yanovsky. According to this, the two men met at the offices of Dickens’s own personal magazine, All the Year Round.
And here is Hitchens’ take on the supposed encounter:
So it was sweet while it lasted, the rumor of a meeting between two great literary titans: an encounter that one of them didn’t even find interesting enough to put in a letter. It could have happened, but I doubt it. That’s the wonderful thing about the celebration of Charles Dickens: he truly is ranked among our immortals, and it truly doesn’t matter if the legend should sprout and then drop a Dostoyevsky or two.
Hitchens wished to empart one of Dickens’ core beliefs:
It is all there to emphasize the one central and polar and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes inA Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.
There is also another lesson that we can learn from Dickens, writes Hitchens: atoning for ones mistakes. But you’ll have to read the piece to find out what he says about that.
Books I Read 
I love to read tales from the grave and now the immortal Hitchens joins . . . what’s his name: Dickens or Doestoesfsky? (or however you spell that.) So I will hear a silent reply and a quiet dissent and a … At this point you should fill in some poetry. Thanks Eugene. I love your stuff and wish you would tell us how we can find it too. I mean on our own without having to wait for your daily posts.