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Updated: May 23, 2025
Dostoevski's books are full of disconnected but painfully oppressive incidents. Raskolnikov's character cannot be described nor appraised; one must follow him all the way through the long novel. He is once more the Rudin type utterly irresolute, with a mind teeming with ideas and surging with ambition.
The greatness of Dostoevski's heart is shown in the fact that although his comrades were detestable characters, he did not hate them. His calm account of their unblushing knavery is entirely free from either vindictive malice or superior contempt.
Makar assumes that it is a description of himself. "Why, I hardly dare show myself in the streets! Everything is so accurately described that one's very gait is recognisable." Dostoevski's consuming ambition for literary fame is well indicated in his first book. "If anything be well written, Varinka, it is literature. I learned this the day before yesterday.
Indeed, his fame in England and in America may be said still to depend almost entirely on this one book. It was translated into French, German, and English in the eighties, and has been dramatised in France and in America. While it is assuredly a great work, and one that nobody except a genius could have written, I do not think it is Dostoevski's most characteristic novel, nor his best.
It is not nearly so well written as Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis;" but one cannot escape the suspicion that this latter masterpiece was a brilliant pose. Dostoevski's "House of the Dead" is marked by that naive Russian simplicity that goes not to the reader's head but to his heart. It is at the farthest remove from a well-constructed novel; it is indeed simply an irregular, incoherent notebook.
Kropotkin seems to imply that the wave of enthusiasm for Dostoevski is a phase that has already passed, rather than a new and increasing demonstration, as Mr. Baring would have us believe. Dostoevski's first book, "Poor Folk," appeared when he was only twenty-five years old: it made an instant success, and gave the young author an enviable reputation.
He has at times that combination of the absolutely real with the absolutely fantastic that is so characteristic of Gogol: one of his best stories, "The Black Monk," might have been written by the author of "The Cloak" and "The Portrait." He is like Dostoevski in his uncompromising depiction of utter degradation; but he has little of Dostoevski's glowing sympathy and heartpower.
Of all the courtesans who have illustrated the Christian religion on the stage and in fiction, the greatest is Dostoevski's Sonia. Her amazing sincerity and deep simplicity make us ashamed of any tribute of tears we may have given to the familiar sentimental type. She does not know what the word "sentiment" means; but the awful sacrifice of her daily life is the great modern illustration of Love.
This novel was immediately followed by another within the same year, "Stepanchikovo Village," translated into English with the title "The Friend of the Family." This has for its hero one of the most remarkable of Dostoevski's characters, and yet one who infallibly reminds us of Dickens's Pecksniff.
One of the most characteristic of Dostoevski's novels, characteristic in its occasional passages of wonderful beauty and pathos, characteristic in its utter formlessness and long stretches of uninspired dulness, is "Downtrodden and Oppressed." Here the author gives us the life he knew best by actual experience and the life best suited to his natural gifts of sympathetic interpretation.
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