nd
unending levels. The Russian novelist who counts on this effect has
it ready to his hand. If he is to render an impression of space that
widens and widens, a hint is enough; the mere association of his
picture with the thought of those illimitable plains might alone
enlarge it to the utmost of his need. The imagination of distance is
everywhere, not only in a free prospect, where sight is lost, but on
any river-bank, where the course of the stream lies across a
continent, or on the edge of a wood, whence the forest stretches round
the curve of the globe. To isolate a patch of that huge field and to
cut it off from the encompassing air might indeed seem to be the
greater difficulty; how can the eye be held to a point when the very
name of Russia is extent without measure? At our end of Europe, where
space is more precious, life is divided and specialized and
differentiated, but over there such economies are unnecessary; there
is no need to define one's own world and to live within it when there
is a single world large enough for all. The horizon of a Russian story
would naturally be vague and vast, it might seem.

It might seem so, at least, if the fiction of Dostoevsky were not
there with an example exactly opposed to the manner of Tolstoy. The
serene and impartial day that arches from verge to verge in War and
Peace, the blackness that hems in the ominous circle of the Brothers
Karamazov--it is a perfect contrast. Dostoevsky needed no lucid
prospect round his strange crew; all he sought was a blaze of light on
the extraordinary theatre of their consciousness. He intensified it
by shutting off the least glimmer of natural day. The illumination
that falls upon his page is like the glare of a furnace-mouth; it
searches the depths of the inner struggles and turmoils in which his
drama is enacted, relieving it with sharp and fantastic shadows. That
is all it requires, and therefore the curtain of darkness is drawn
thickly over the rest of the world. Who can tell, in Dostoevsky's grim
town-scenery, what there is at the end of the street, what lies round
the next corner? Night stops the view--or rather no ordinary, earthly
night, but a sudden opacity, a fog that cannot be pierced or breathed.
With Tolstoy nobody doubts that an ample vision opens in every
direction. It may be left untold, but his men and women have only to
lift their eyes to see it.

How is it contrived? The mere multiplication of names and households
in