atever may be
Tourgeniev's general inferiority (and I do not admit it), he was a great
artist and a complete artist. And he was a realist. There is all earth and
heaven between the two Charlottes. One was an artist, the other was an
excellent Christian body who produced stories that have far less relation
to life than Frith's "Derby Day" has to the actual fact and poetry of
Epsom. If Mr. Baring had bracketed Tourgeniev with Charlotte Bronte and
Dostoievsky with the lonely Emily, I should have credited him with a
subtle originality.

About half of the book is given to a straightforward, detailed, homely
account of Dostoievsky, his character, genius, and works. It was very much
wanted in English. I thought I had read all the chief works of the five
great Russian novelists, but last year I came across one of Dostoievsky's,
"The Brothers Karamazov," of which I had not heard. It was a French
translation, in two thick volumes. I thought it contained some of the
greatest scenes that I had ever encountered in fiction, and I at once
classed it with Stendhal's "Chartreuse de Parme" and Dostoievsky's "Crime
and Punishment" as one of the supreme marvels of the world. Nevertheless,
certain aspects of it puzzled me. When I mentioned it to friends I was
told that I had gone daft about it, and that it was not a major work.
Happening to meet Mrs. Garnett, the never-to-be-sufficiently-thanked
translator of Tourgeniev and of Tolstoy, I made inquiries from her about
it, and she said: "It is his masterpiece." We were then separated by a
ruthless host, with my difficulties unsolved. I now learn from Mr. Baring
that the French translation is bad and incomplete, and that the original
work, vast as it is, is only a preliminary fragment of a truly enormous
novel which death prevented Dostoievsky from finishing. Death, this is yet
another proof of your astonishing clumsiness! The scene with the old monk
at the beginning of "The Brothers Karamazov" is in the very grandest
heroical manner. There is nothing in either English or French prose
literature to hold a candle to it. And really I do not exaggerate! There
is probably nothing in Russian literature to match it, outside
Dostoievsky. It ranks, in my mind, with the scene towards the beginning of
"Crime and Punishment," when in the inn the drunken father relates his
daughter's "shame." These pages are unique. They reach the highest and
most terrible pathos that the novelist's art has ever reached. A