the expression of such an opinion
would have met with an incredulous smile amongst the majority of
English readers of Russian literature, for Dostoyevsky was practically
unknown save for his _Crime and Punishment_, and to have compared him
with Turgenev would have seemed sacrilegious. Now when Dostoyevsky is
one of the shibboleths of our _intelligentsia_, one can boldly say,
without fear of being misunderstood, that, as a creator and a force in
literature, Dostoyevsky is in another plane than that of Turgenev, and
as far greater than him as Leonardo da Vinci is greater than Vandyke,
or as Wagner is greater than Gounod, while some Russians consider him
even infinitely greater than Tolstoy. Let us say he is his equal and
complement. He is in any case, in almost every respect, his
antithesis. Tolstoy was the incarnation of health, and is above all
things and pre-eminently the painter of the sane and the earthly.
Dostoyevsky was an epileptic, the painter of the abnormal, of
criminals, madmen, degenerates, mystics. Tolstoy led an even,
uneventful life, spending the greater part of it in his own country
house, in the midst of a large family. Dostoyevsky was condemned to
death, served a sentence of four years' hard labour in a convict
settlement in Siberia, and besides this spent six years in exile; when
he returned and started a newspaper, it was prohibited by the
Censorship; a second newspaper which he started came to grief; he
underwent financial ruin; his first wife, his brother, and his best
friend died; he was driven abroad by debt, harassed by the authorities
on the one hand, and attacked by the liberals on the other; abused and
misunderstood, almost starving and never well, working under
overwhelming difficulties, always pressed for time, and ill requited
for his toil. That was Dostoyevsky's life.

Tolstoy was a heretic; at first a materialist, and then a seeker after
a religion of his own; Dostoyevsky was a practising believer, a
vehement apostle of orthodoxy, and died fortified by the Sacraments of
the Church. Tolstoy with his broad unreligious opinions was
narrow-minded. Dostoyevsky with his definite religious opinions was
the most broad-minded man who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the
supernatural, and was alien to all mysticism. Dostoyevsky seems to get
nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, than any other
writer. In Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element of the Russian
character predominated; in Dostoye