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"The Hobbledehoy," translated into French as "Un Adolescent," is, on the whole, Dostoevski's worst novel, which is curious enough, coming at a time when he was doing some of his best work. He wrote this while his mind was busy with a great masterpiece, "The Karamazov Brothers," and in this book we get nothing but the lees. It is a novel of portentous length and utter vacuity.
Sonia is the greatest of all Dostoevski's woman characters. The professional harlot has often been presented on the stage and in the pages of fiction, but after learning to know Sonia, the others seem weakly artificial. This girl, whose father's passion for drink is something worse than madness, goes on the street to save the family from starvation.
These novels are fully as much a contribution to the study of abnormal psychology as they are to the history of fiction. The leading character, the epileptic Idiot, has a magnetic charm that pulls the reader from the first, and from which it is vain to hope to escape. The "lovely goodness" that Stevenson found in Dostoevski's "Downtrodden and Oppressed" shines in this story with a steady radiance.
Turgenev first completely realised it in "Rudin;" he afterwards made it equally clear in "Torrents of Spring," "Smoke," and other novels.* Raskolnikov, in Dostoevski's "Crime and Punishment," is another illustration; he wishes to be a Napoleon, and succeeds only in murdering two old women.
They all used him freely: Tolstoi could hardly have written "The Cossacks" without the inspiration of Gogol, Turgenev must have taken the most beautiful chapter in "Virgin Soil" directly from "Old-fashioned Farmers," and Dostoevski's first book, "Poor Folk," is in many places almost a slavish imitation of "The Cloak" and he freely acknowledged the debt in the course of his story.
Dostoevski's inequalities as a writer are so great that it is no wonder he has been condemned by some critics as a mere journalistic maker of melodrama, while others have exhausted their entire stock of adjectives in his exaltation. His most ardent admirer at this moment is Mr.
That prison was a great training-school for Dostoevski's genius, and instead of casting a black shadow over his subsequent life, it furnished him with the necessary light and heat to produce a succession of great novels. Their production was, however, irregular, and at intervals he continued to write and publish books of no importance.
The Englishman, Astley, is utterly unreal, Paulina is impossible, and the Slavophil attacks on the French are rather pointless. Some of the characters are incomprehensible, but none of them lacks interest. Of all Dostoevski's novels, the one best known outside of Russia is, of course, "Crime and Punishment."
Every single one of his later novels is a footnote to actual circumstance; with any other author, we should say, for example, that his accounts of the thoughts that pass in a murderer's mind immediately before he assassinates his victim were the fantastical emanation of a diseased brain, and could never have taken place; one cannot do that in Dostoevski's case, for one is certain that he is drawing on his Siberian reservoir of fact.
These dream episodes have absolutely no connection with the course of the story they are simply impressionistic sketches. Another favourite device of Dostoevski's is to have one of his characters take a walk, and on this walk undergo some experience that has nothing whatever to do with the course of the action, but is, as it were, a miniature story of its own introduced into the novel.
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