de, without "nuance,"
without humor or irony, he compels our attention by the clear-cut,
monumental images he projects, by the purple and scarlet splendor of
his imperial dreams.

His philosophy, though lacking in the deep and tragic imagination of
Nietzsche, has something of the Nietzschean intellectual fury. He
teaches a shameless and antinomian hedonism, narrower, less humane,
but more fervid and emotional, than that taught by Remy de Gourmont.

In "The Triumph of Death" we find a fierce smoldering voluptuousness,
expressed with a hard and brutal realism which recalls the frescoes on
the walls of ancient Pompeii. In "The Flame of Life" we have in superb
rhetoric the most colored and ardent description of Venice to be found
in all literature. Perhaps the finest passage he ever wrote is that
account of the speech of the Master of Life in the Doge's Palace with
its incomparable eulogy upon Veronese and its allusion to Pisanello's
head of Sigismondo Malatesta.

42. DOSTOIEVSKY. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. THE IDIOT. THE BROTHERS
KARAMAZOV. THE INSULTED AND INJURED. THE POSSESSED. _Translated by
Constance Garnett and published by Macmillan. Other translations in
Everyman's Library_.

Dostoievsky is the greatest and most racial of all Russian writers. He
is the subtlest psychologist in fiction. As an artist he has a dark
and sombre intensity and an imaginative vehemence only surpassed by
Shakespeare. As a philosopher he anticipates Nietzsche in the
direction of his insight, though in his conclusions he is
diametrically opposite. He teaches that out of weakness, abnormality,
perversity, foolishness, desperation, abandonment, and a morbid
pleasure in humiliation, it is possible to arrive at high and
unutterable levels of spiritual ecstasy. His ideal is sanctity--not
morality--and his revelations of the impassioned and insane motives of
human nature--its instinct towards self-destruction for instance--will
never be surpassed for their terrible and convincing truth.

The strange Slavophil dream of the regeneration of the world by the
power of the Russian soul and the magic of the "White Christ who comes
out of Russia" could not be more arrestingly expressed than in these
passionate and extraordinary works of art.

47. TURGENIEV. VIRGIN SOIL. A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES. _Translated by
Constance Garnett. And "Lisa" in Everyman's Library_.

Turgeniev is by far the most "artistic" as he is the most
disillusioned and ironica