rrassing situations; into situations and among
people where he will look a fool--in order to avenge himself upon
the spectators of his "folly" by going deeper and deeper into it.

If Dostoievsky astounds us by his insight into the abnormalities of
"normal" men, he is still more startling when he deals with women.
There are certain scenes--the scene between Aglaia and Nastasya in
"The Idiot;" the scene between Sonia and the mother and sister of
Raskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment;" the scene in "The
Possessed" where Liza leaves Stavrogin on the morning after the fire;
and the scene where the woman, loved by the mad Karamazov
brothers, tears her nerves and theirs to pieces, in outrageous
obliquity--which brand themselves upon the mind as reaching the
uttermost limit of devasting vision.

In reviewing the final impression left upon one by the reading of
Dostoievsky one must confess to many curious reactions. He
certainly has the power of making all other novelists seem dull in
comparison; dull--or artistic and rhetorical. Perhaps the most marked
effect he has is to leave one with the feeling of a universe _with
many doors;_ with many doors, and not a few terrifyingly dark
passages; but a universe the opposite of "closed" or "explained."
Though not a single one of his books ends "happily," the final
impression is the reverse of hopeless. His very mania for tragedy,
his Dionysic embracing of it, precludes any premature despair.
Perhaps a profound deepening of one's sense of the mysterious
_perversity_ of all human fate is the thing that lingers, a perversity
which is itself a kind of redemption, for it implies arbitrariness and
waywardness, and these things mean power and pleasure, even in
the midst of suffering.

He is the best possible antidote for the peculiar and paralysing
fatalism of our time, a fatalism which makes so much of
"environment" and so little of "character," and which tends to endow
mere worldly and material success with a sort of divine prerogative.
A generation that allows itself to be even _interested_ in such types
as the "strong," efficient craftsmen of modern industry and finance
is a generation that can well afford a few moral shocks at the hands
of Dostoievsky's "degenerates." The world he reveals is, after all, in
spite of the Russian names, the world of ordinary human obliquity.
The thing for which we have to thank him is that it is made so rich
and deep, so full of fathomless pits and unen