THE WORK IS A masterpiece of desolation, deserving as an epigraph the words written by Dyevushkin of one of his companions in misery, on being struck by another blow of misfortune: “His tears were streaming, but not perhaps on account of his last misfortune, but for nothing in particular, in ordinary course, as his eyes were at all times brimful with tears!”

The work is a masterpiece of tenderness; jutting out of the heart in one steady stream. Dostoyevsky in this work has given us an insight into his inner nature – his morbid sensitiveness, his need of sympathy and affection, his bitter conception of life, his ferocious pride.

As in Dyevushkin’s simulated letter, his own letters at this period speak of the intolerable annoyance his “shabby greatcoat” occasioned him.

To enable one to share the surprise felt by Nekrasoff and Belinsky, and to understand the originality of this creation, the moment of its literary conception must be borne in mind. The Tales of a Hunter (by Turgeneff) only appeared five years later. It is quite true that Gogol had supplied the theme in his Greatcoat, but Dostoyevsky substituted a suggestive emotion to what his master merely imagined.

He continued to write essays in the same strain, but with less success. His restless talent made him examine other directions – even comedy. A farce of his bears the singular title: The Wife of another and the Husband Under the Bed. The jesting is course and heavy, for good nature was what the author failed in most. He possessed the shrewdness of the philosopher, a niceness of heart, but he knew nothing of the delicacy suited to the “mirth of the soul.”

Fate not charges itself to thrust him back into his proper course, and that with the rudeness she sometimes displays in her manner of indicating her intentions. We now come to the terrible trial which gives this man a peculiarly tragic position among all writers.

[1] Complete Works, 14 vols. Edited by Brothers Panteleyeff. St. Petersburg, 1883.

Note: This is part one of a five-part series. The remaining parts will be published this year in the New Series. This text was first published as an extended chapter in an English-language translation by Col. Herbert Anthony Sawyer in The Russian Novel (Chapman & Hall, 1913). It has been manually transcribed exclusively for the New Series, with very minor edits to track usage.

Eugène-Melchior, vicomte de Vogüé.

THE FIRST FRENCH EDITION of Le roman russe appeared in 1886 and was perhaps one of the most influential books of literary comment of the 19th century, bringing Russian fiction to the attention of French, then English, readers who were previously unaware of it. Le roman russe, wrote historian Owen Chadwick, “was so critical, and yet so constructive, so personal and yet so objective, so penetrating without being astringent, so prosaic and yet so haunting, that even after so many decades you cannot read it without wanting to go back to read the Russian novelists for themselves. If we say that Vogüé ‘popularized’ Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, that would be true. But the description is very inadequate both to explain what the book achieved and the way it achieved that effect.” Vogüé was a friend of de Maupassant and other contemporary literary celebrities, a contributor to the Revue des deux mondes and a friend of F. Brunetière’s.

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