I CAN STILL SEE Dostoyevsky entering a friend’s room the first day The Brothers Karamazoff was published, carrying the volumes under his arm, saying with pride: “They weigh five pounds!” The unhappy man had actually weighed his novel and he was actually proud of what should have dismayed him!
I really intended to limit my task to calling attention to this writer – so famous over yonder, almost unknown here – and to pointing out the three great portions of his work that best set forth the different qualities of his talent. These are Poor Folk, The House of the Dead, and Crime and Punishment.

Bruce Myers as the Grand Inquisitor in Peter Brook's 2008 production.

The comments I have made will no doubt allow the reader to form his own judgment on the merits of his work as a whole. It is difficult to do so when viewed from the standpoint of our ideas of morality and taste. It is first necessary to look upon Dostoyevsky as a phenomenon belonging to another world, a powerful but incomplete, intense and original monster. The shudder we feel on meeting some of his characters may raise the question whether we are not face to face with a genius. But a literary genius, we know, must be gifted with the two essential attributes of proportion and universality. The former is the art of adjusting, of selecting, and of condensing one’s thoughts, and in a few lightning flashes setting forth the whole of the meaning underlying them. By universality I mean the faculty of being able to grasp things as a whole and to present all their different manifestations in a manner adapted to each other. Even in Russia one can find light, happiness, flowers and joys. Dostoyevsky only saw the one half, judging by his having written but two kinds of books – sad books and terrifying books. He is like a traveler who has been all over the world, seen everything, but has traveled only by night. He is an incomparable psychologist, but only as a student of dismal and mangled souls. He is a clever dramatist, but only amongst scenes of terror and compassion.

No one has brought realism forward so ably. See, for instance, the account of Marmeladoff, in Crime and Punishment, with its portraits of the convicts and the picture of their existence. No one has dared to be so fantastical. And look at the personality of the Idiot. He no doubt painted the realities of life truthfully and harshly, but his pious dreams carried him away and aloft beyond those realities, in a superhuman effort towards a novel rendering of the Gospel. If you wish, it may be called “mystic realism.” Human nature, from whatever point of view it may be looked at, comprises both the compassionate heart of a Sister of Mercy and the spirit of a Great Inquisitor. To me he seemed to be living in another world. Neither Dostoyevsky nor his heroes belong to ours, but rather to that fraction of the Russian peoples drawn from the East.

I see him better suited to the times of great cruelties and of great religious devotion, hesitating between a Saint Vincent de Paul and a Laubardemont, outstripping the dormer in reclaiming waifs and strays, lingering behind the former so as not to miss one spark at the burning stake.

According to the special and peculiar excesses of his talent which touch us most, he may with justice be called a philosopher, an apostle, a madman, a consoler of the afflicted, or the murderer of peaceful minds, the Jeremiah of a convict prison, or the Shakespeare of an asylum – all those appellations are merited; taken separately, not one suffices.

Perhaps we ought to say of him what he himself in a passage of Crime and Punishment said of the whole race: – “The Russian is a great man; vast as his country, terribly inclined to all that is fantastic and chaotic. It is a great misfortune to be great without a talent of a special kind.” I concur. But I also agree with the judgment I heard passed on the book by an expert of modern psychology: “This opens out unknown horizons affecting spirits differing from ours. He reveals to us a new world, with natures more powerful for good or evil, stronger to will and to suffer.”

Note: This is part four of a five-part series. The remaining part 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 Sawyerin The Russian Novel (Chapman & Hall, 1913). It has been manually transcribed exclusively for the New Series, with very minor edits to track usage. To obtain the unedited text, please see the copyright page for instructions. Please note The Fortnightly Review and fortnightlyreview.co.uk in citations based on this transcription.