dy to show them all in at once.

It is one of the triumphs of his genius that, however many persons he
introduces, he never allows them to be confused into a hopeless chaos.
His story finds its way unimpeded through the mob. On two opposite pages
of _The Idiot_ one finds the following characters brought in by name:
General Epanchin, Prince S., Adelaida Ivanovna, Lizaveta Prokofyevna,
Yevgeny Pavlovitch Radomsky, Princess Byelokonsky, Aglaia, Prince
Myshkin, Kolya Ivolgin, Ippolit, Varya, Ferdyshchenko, Nastasya
Filippovna, Nina Alexandrovna, Ganya, Ptitsyn, and General Ivolgin. And
yet practically all of them remain separate and created beings. That is
characteristic at once of Dostoevsky's mastery and his monstrous
profusion.

But the secret of Dostoevsky's appeal is something more than the
multitude and thrill of his incidents and characters. So incongruous,
indeed, is the sensational framework of his stories with the immense and
sombre genius that broods over them that Mr. Murry is inclined to regard
the incidents as a sort of wild spiritual algebra rather than as events
occurring on the plane of reality. "Dostoevsky," he declares, "is not a
novelist. What he is is more difficult to define."

Mr. Murry boldly faces the difficulty and attempts the definition. To
him Dostoevsky's work is "the record of a great mind seeking for a way
of life; it is more than a record of struggle, it is the struggle
itself." Dostoevsky himself is a man of genius "lifted out of the living
world," and unable to descend to it again. Mr. Murry confesses that at
times, as he reads him, he is "seized by a supersensual terror."

For an awful moment I seem to see things with the eye of eternity,
and have a vision of suns grown cold, and hear the echo of voices
calling without sound across the waste and frozen universe. And
those voices take shape in certain unforgettable fragments of
dialogue that have been spoken by one spirit to another in some
ugly, mean tavern, set in surrounding darkness.

Dostoevsky's people, it is suggested, "are not so much men and women as
disembodied spirits who have for the moment put on mortality."

They have no physical being. Ultimately they are the creations, not
of a man who desired to be, but of a spirit which sought to know.
They are the imaginations of a God-tormented mind. ... Because they
are possessed they are no longer men and women.

This is all in