the light it
throws on the Russian character, the Russian poor, and the Russian
peasant.

In 1866 came _Crime and Punishment_, which brought Dostoyevsky fame.
This book, Dostoyevsky's _Macbeth_, is so well known in the French and
English translations that it hardly needs any comment. Dostoyevsky
never wrote anything more tremendous than the portrayal of the anguish
that seethes in the soul of Raskolnikov, after he has killed the old
woman, "mechanically forced," as Professor Brueckner says, "into
performing the act, as if he had gone too near machinery in motion,
had been caught by a bit of his clothing and cut to pieces." And not
only is one held spellbound by every shifting hope, fear, and doubt,
and each new pang that Raskolnikov experiences, but the souls of all
the subsidiary characters in the book are revealed to us just as
clearly: the Marmeladov family, the honest Razumikhin, the police
inspector, and the atmosphere of the submerged tenth in St.
Petersburg--the steaming smell of the city in the summer. There is an
episode when Raskolnikov kneels before Sonia, the prostitute, and says
to her: "It is not before you I am kneeling, but before all the
suffering of mankind." That is what Dostoyevsky does himself in this
and in all his books; but in none of them is the suffering of all
mankind conjured up before us in more living colours, and in none of
them is his act of homage in kneeling before it more impressive.

This book was written before the words "psychological novel" had been
invented; but how all the psychological novels which were written
years later by Bourget and others pale before this record written in
blood and tears! _Crime and Punishment_ was followed by _The Idiot_
(1868). The idiot is Mwyshkin, who has been alluded to already, the
wise fool, an epileptic, in whom irony and arrogance and egoism have
been annihilated; and whose very simplicity causes him to pass
unscathed through a den of evil, a world of liars, scoundrels, and
thieves, none of whom can escape the influence of his radiant
personality. He is the same with every one he meets, and with his
unsuspicious sincerity he combines the intuition of utter goodness, so
that he can see through people and read their minds. In this
character, Dostoyevsky has put all his sweetness; it is not a portrait
of himself, but it is a portrait of what he would have liked to be,
and reflects all that is best in him. In contrast to Mwyshkin,
Rogozhin, the m