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Updated: May 19, 2025
How could a retrospect in the words of the young man only of course Dostoevsky had no choice in the matter, such a method was ruled out but supposing the story had admitted it, how could a retrospect have given Raskolnikov thus bodily into the reader's possession?
Indeed, the rare endeavours of Frenchmen seriously to cultivate alien methods and points of view more often than not end in disaster. Shortly before the war a school of particularly intelligent and open-minded writers discovered, what we in England are only too familiar with, the æsthetic possibilities of charity and the beauty of being good. Dostoevsky began it.
Murry boldly faces the difficulty and attempts the definition. To him Dostoevsky's work is "the record of a great mind seeking for a way of life; it is more than a record of struggle, it is the struggle itself." Dostoevsky himself is a man of genius "lifted out of the living world," and unable to descend to it again. Mr.
In his past there had been the strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky; long letters and copies written in a bad, unintelligible hand-writing, but with great feeling, endless misunderstandings, explanations, disappointments, then debts, a second mortgage, the allowance to his wife, the monthly borrowing of money and all this for no benefit to any one, either himself or others.
Ultimately they are the creations, not of a man who desired to be, but of a spirit which sought to know. They are the imaginations of a God-tormented mind. ... Because they are possessed they are no longer men and women. This is all in a measure true. Dostoevsky was no realist. Nor, on the other hand, was he a novelist of horrors for horrors' sake.
Certainly the lust of cruelty the lust of destruction for destruction's sake is the most conspicuous of the deadly sins in Dostoevsky's men and women. He may not be a "cruel author." Mr. J. Middleton Murry, in his very able "critical study," Dostoevsky, denies the charge indignantly. But it is the sensational drama of a cruel world that most persistently haunts his imagination.
Murry will have it that the actions in the novels take place in a "timeless" world, largely because Dostoevsky has the habit of crowding an impossible rout of incidents into a single day. But surely the Greeks took the same license with events.
Scenes that in an ordinary novel would take place with two or three figures on the stage are represented in Dostoevsky as taking place before a howling, seething mob. "A dozen men have broken in," a maid announces in one place in The Idiot, "and they are all drunk." "Show them all in at once," she is bidden. Dostoevsky is always ready to show them all in at once.
Dostoevsky needed no lucid prospect round his strange crew; all he sought was a blaze of light on the extraordinary theatre of their consciousness. He intensified it by shutting off the least glimmer of natural day.
There is in Dostoevsky a suggestion of Caliban trying to discover some better god than Setebos. At the same time one would be going a great deal too far in accepting the description of himself as "a child of unbelief." The ultimate attitude of Dostoevsky is as Christian as the Apostle Peter's, "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief!"
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