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Updated: May 23, 2025
Then if any one continued to doubt Dostoevski's greatness as a novelist, he could no longer doubt his greatness as a man. The criminal psychology of this novel and the scenes at the trial are more interesting than those in "Crime and Punishment," for the prisoner is a much more interesting man than Raskolnikov, and by an exceedingly clever trick the reader is completely deceived.
The heroine of "Rudin," of "Smoke," of "On the Eve," the sinister Maria of "Torrents of Spring," the immortal Lisa of "A House of Gentlefolk," the girl in Dostoevski's "Poor Folk;" Dunia and Sonia, in "Crime and Punishment" many others might be called to mind.
Such men really overcome the world. He is not the only Idiot in fiction who is able to teach the wise, as every one knows who remembers his "David Copperfield." How Betsy Trotwood would have loved Dostoevski's hero! Dickens and Dostoevski were perhaps the biggest-hearted of all novelists, and their respect for children and harmless men is notable.
What a wonderful thing literature is, which, consisting but of printed words, is able to invigorate, to instruct, the hearts of men!" So many writers have made false starts in literature that Dostoevski's instinct for the right path at the very outset is something notable. His entire literary career was to be spent in portraying the despised and rejected.
I have read many dull books, but it is hard to recall a novel where the steady, monotonous dulness of page after page is quite so oppressive. For it is not only dull; it is stupid. Dostoevski's last work, "The Karamazov Brothers," was the result of ten years' reflection, study, and labour, and he died without completing it.
Two years later came another book of tremendous and irregular power "The Idiot." With the exception of "The Karamazov Brothers," this is the most peculiarly characteristic of all Dostoevski's works. It is almost insufferably long; it reads as though it had never been revised; it abounds in irrelevancies and superfluous characters.
To this stricture the poor fellow rejoined, "Ah, but those fellows have their income assured, they are never compelled to publish at a fixed date, while I, why, I am only a cabhorse!" Although Dostoevski's sins against art were black and many, it was a supreme compliment to the Novel as an art-form that such a man should have chosen it as the channel of his ideas.
But if the shop-worn phrase "human document" can ever be fittingly applied, no better instance can be found than this. It is a revelation of Dostoevski's all-embracing sympathy. He shows no bitterness, no spirit of revenge, toward the government that sent him into penal servitude; he merely describes what happened there.
Although the ghastly details of this double murder are given with definite realism, Dostoevski's interest is wholly in the criminal psychology of the affair, in the analysis of Raskolnikov's mind before, during, and chiefly after the murder; for it is the mind, and not the bodily sensations that constitute the chosen field of our novelist.
No one but Dostoevski would ever have conceived of such a character, or have imagined such ideas. If one reads "Poor Folk," "Crime and Punishment," "Memoirs of the House of the Dead," "The Idiot," and "The Karamazov Brothers," one will have a complete idea of Dostoevski's genius and of his faults as a writer, and will see clearly his attitude toward life.
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