g pleasure that means an expiation paid, a
burden lightened. Use the word "degenerate" if you will. But in this
sense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woven
the stuff whereof men are made.

Certainly the Russian soul has its peculiarities, and these
peculiarities we feel in Dostoievsky as nowhere else. He, not Tolstoi
or Turgenieff, is the typical Slav writer. But the chief peculiarity of
the Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all men
feel. And this is why Dostoievsky is not only a Russian writer but a
universal writer. From the French point of view he may seem
wanting in lucidity and irony; from the English point of view he
may seem antinomian and non-moral. But he has one advantage
over both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no Western writer,
except, perhaps, Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever approached it.
He writes with human nerves upon parchment made of human tissue,
and "abyssum evocat abyssum," from the darkness wherein he
moves.

Among other things, Dostoievsky's insight is proved by the
profound separation he indicates between "morality" and "religion."
To many of us it comes with something of a shock to find harlots
and murderers and robbers and drunkards and seducers and idiots
expressing genuine and passionate religious faith, and discussing
with desperate interest religious questions. But it is _our_
psychology that is shallow and inhuman, not his, and the presence of
real religious feeling in a nature obsessed with the maddest lusts is a
phenomenon of universal experience. It may, indeed, be said that
what is most characteristically Russian in his point of view--he has
told us so himself--is the substitution of what might be called
"sanctity" for what is usually termed "morality," as an ideal of life.
The "Christianity" of which Dostoievsky has the key is nothing if
not an ecstatic invasion of regions where ordinary moral laws, based
upon prudence and self-preservation, disappear, and give place to
something else. The secret of it, beyond repentance and remorse, lies
in the transforming power of "love;" lies, in fact, in "vision" purged
by pity and terror; but its precise nature is rather to be felt than
described.

It is in connection with this Christianity of his, a Christianity
completely different from what we are accustomed to, that we find
the explanation of his extraordinary interest in the "weak" as
opposed to the "strong." The association betwee