half
cracked and an epileptic, but is one of the most lovable young men in
fiction. Thinking of him, you recall what Nietzsche wrote of Christ:
"One regrets that a Dostoievsky did not live in the neighbourhood of
this most interesting decadent, I mean some one who knew just how to
perceive the thrilling charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the
sickly, and the childish." Here is a "moral landscape of the dark
Russian soul," and an exemplification in the Prince Myshkin of The
Idiot, who is evidently an attempt to portray a latter-day Christ.

Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, like Rogozhin in The Idiot,
Stavrogin in The Possessed were supermen before Nietzsche, but all
half mad. A famous alienist has declared that three-fourths of
Dostoievsky's characters are quite mad. This is an exaggeration,
though there are many about whom the aura of madness and melancholy
hovers. Dostoievsky himself was epileptic; poverty and epilepsy were
his companions through a life crowded with unhappiness. (Born 1822,
died 1881.) He was four years in Siberia, condemned though innocent as
a member of the Petrachevsky group. He tells us that the experience
calmed his nerves. His recollections of his Dead House are harrowing,
and make the literature of prison life, whether written by Hugo, Zola,
Tolstoy, or others, like the literary exercise of an amateur. It is
this sense of reality, of life growing like grass over one's head,
that renders the novels of Dostoievsky "human documents." Calling
himself a "proletarian of letters" this tender-hearted man denied
being a psychologist--which pre-eminently he was: "They call me a
psychologist; it is not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense
of the word, _i. e._, I depict all the soul's depths."

If he has shown us the soul of the madman, drunkard, libertine, the
street-walker, he has also exposed the psychology of the gambler.

He knew. He was a desperate gambler and in Baden actually starved in
company with his devoted wife. These experiences may be found depicted
in The Gambler.

He has been called the "Bossuet of the detraques," but I prefer that
other and more appropriate title, the Dante of the North. His novels
are infernos. How well Nietzsche studied him; they were fellow spirits
in suffering. All Dostoievsky is in his phrase: "There are no ugly
women"--put in the mouth of the senile, debauched Karamazov, a
companion portrait to Balzac's Baron Hulot. His love for women has a
pa