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Updated: May 23, 2025
One reason why Dostoevski is able to portray with such detail the thoughts and fancies of abnormal persons is because he was so abnormal himself; and because his own life had been filled with such an amazing variety of amazing experiences.
The scene where the two read together the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, and where they talk about God, prayer, and the Christian religion, shows the spiritual force of Dostoevski in its brightest manifestations. At her persuasion, he finally confesses his crime, and is deported to Siberia, where his experiences are copied faithfully from the author's own prison life.
As a result, while one may read some of the novels of Dostoevski with the greatest interest, one is never tempted to re-read them, as one re-reads the novels of Tolstoi and Turgenev, and even those of many secondary novel writers; and the present writer must confess that he had the greatest pain lately in reading through, for instance, "The Brothers Karamazov," and never could pull himself through such a novel as "The Idiot."
Everlastingly short of cash, and everlastingly in raptures over something, Rostislav Bambaev wandered, aimless but exclamatory, over the face of our long-suffering mother-earth." Dostoevski was so angry when he read this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman.
Finally, in reading the works of Tolstoi, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Gorki, Chekhov, Andreev, and others, what is the general impression produced on the mind of a foreigner? It is one of intense gloom. Of all the dark books in fiction, no works sound such depths of suffering and despair as are fathomed by the Russians.
However, one pardons Dostoevski everything, because when he speaks of the ill-treated and the forgotten children of our town civilisation he becomes truly great through his wide, infinite love of mankind of man, even in his worst manifestations." Mr. Baring's book was published in 1910, Kropotkin's in 1905, which seems to make Mr. Baring's attitude point to the past, rather than to the future.
Poverty in early years sometimes makes men rather close and miserly in middle age, as it certainly did in the case of Ibsen, who seemed to think that charity began and ended at home. Not so Dostoevski: he was often victimised, he gave freely and impulsively, and was chronically in debt. He had about as much business instinct as a prize-fighter or an opera singer.
For Dostoevski put into it all the sum of his wisdom, all the ripe fruit of his experience, all his religious aspiration, and in Alosha he created not only the greatest of all his characters, but his personal conception of what the ideal man should be. Alosha is the Idiot, minus idiocy and epilepsy. The women in this book are not nearly so well drawn as the men.
Suffering is the corner-stone of Russian life, as it is of Russian fiction. That is one reason why the Russians produce here and there such splendid characters, and such mighty books. The Russian capacity for suffering is the real text of the great works of Dostoevski, and the reason why his name is so beloved in Russia he understood the hearts of his countrymen.
Dostoevski is fond of interrupting the course of his narratives with dreams, dreams that often have no connection with the plot, so far as there may be said to exist a plot, but dreams of vivid and sharp verisimilitude.
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