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Updated: May 3, 2025
The renderings have the same qualities of idiomatic speech and subtly rendered nuance which is always to be found in this translator's work, and although both of these volumes represent the minor work of Dostoievsky, his minor work is finer than our major work, and characterized by a passionate curiosity about the human soul and a deep insight into its mysteries.
Zola could have tackled it nicely. Gorky might have made a stab at it. Dostoievsky would have handled it with relish. But for oneself the thing is too vast. One cannot wangle it. It intimidates.
Thus far Sanine is his masterpiece. Two decades ago, more or less, John M. Robertson published several volumes chiefly concerned with the gentle art of criticism. Mr. Robertson introduced to the English-reading world the critical theories of Emile Hennequin, whose essays on Poe, Dostoïevsky, and Turgenieff may be remembered.
If Dostoievsky astounds us by his insight into the abnormalities of "normal" men, he is still more startling when he deals with women.
Then there was a Polish count who found his way to the Tocsin a most deplorable aristocratic debris, who might have stepped straight out of the pages of Dostoievsky. I never set eyes on a more depressed-looking mortal than Count Voblinsky. He looked as though he bore on his bent shoulders the weight of all the ill-spent lives in Christendom.
"Limehouse Nights," "A Munster Twilight," and "The Echo of Voices" make this year so memorable in fiction that later years may well prove disappointing. These two new volumes continue the complete English edition of Dostoievsky which is being translated by Constance Garnett.
Another merit of these letters is the light they shed on the true character of Tolstoy, who is shown in his proper environment, neither a prophet nor a heaven-storming reformer. Dostoïevsky invented the phrase: "land-proprietor literature," to describe the fiction of both Tolstoy and Turgenieff.
"I love to hear singing to a street organ; I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings, when all the passers-by have pale, green, sickly faces, or when wet snow is falling straight down; the night is windless ... and the street lamps shine through it," said Raskolnikov. Here is the essential Dostoïevsky.
But the "sacred malady" had, in the case of Dostoïevsky, its compensations. Through this fissure in the walls of his neurotic soul he peered and saw its strange perturbations, divined their origins in the very roots of his being, and recorded as did Poe, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche the fluctuations of his sick will.
In the case of Flaubert, of De Maupassant, of Dostoievsky, of Poe, and a score of others, though the organic system was more or less flawed, the work remains touched with that universal quality that gives artistic permanence even to perceptions born of the abnormal." Mr. Newman might have added other names to his list, those of Michael Angelo and Beethoven and Swinburne.
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