thological cast. His young girls discuss unpleasant matters. Even
Frank Wedekind is anticipated in his Spring's Awakening by the Russian
in The Brothers Karamazov: "How can Katarina have a baby if she isn't
married?" cries one of the youngsters, a question which is the very
nub of the Wedekind play. "Two parallel lines may meet in eternity,"
which sounds like Ibsen's query: "Two and two may make five on the
planet Jupiter." He was deeply pious, nevertheless a questioner. His
books are full of theological wranglings. Consider the "prose-poem" of
the Grand Inquisitor and the second coming of Christ. Or such an idea
as the "craving for community of worship is the chief misery of man,
of all humanity from the beginning of time." We recognise Nietzsche in
Dostoievsky's "the old morality of the old slave man," and a genuine
poet in "the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the
stars." His naive conception of eternity as "a chamber something like
a bathhouse, long neglected, and with spider's webs in its corners"
reminds us of Nietzsche when he describes his doctrine of the Eternal
Recurrence. The Russian has told us in memorable phrases of the
blinding, intense happiness, a cerebral spasm, which lasts the
fraction of a second at the beginning of an epileptic attack. For it
he declares, for that brief moment during which paradise is disclosed,
he would sacrifice a lifetime. Little wonder in the interim of a cold,
grey, miserable existence he suffered from what he calls "mystic
fear," the fear of fear, such as Maeterlinck shows us in The Intruder.
As for the socialists he says their motto is: "Don't dare to believe
in God, don't dare to have property, fraternity or death, two millions
of heads!"

The foundational theme of his work is an overwhelming love for
mankind, a plea for solidarity which too often degenerates into sickly
sentimentalism. He imitated Dickens, George Sand, and Victor Hugo--the
Hugo of Les Miserables. He hated Turgenieff and caricatured him in The
Possessed. It is true that in dialogue he has had few superiors; his
men and women talk as they would talk in life and only in special
instances are mouthpieces for the author's ideas--in this quite
different from so many of Tolstoy's characters. Merejkowski has said
without fear of contradiction that Dostoievsky is like the great
dramatists of antiquity in his "art of gradual tension, accumulation,
increase, and alarming concentration of dramatic action