on the weaker herd and exploiting the strength, the
weakness, and the one-sidedness of its ideals, a herd which was
necessarily weak owing to that very one-sidedness. In order to bind
his disciples with a permanent bond, Verkhovensky exploits the _idee
fixe_ of suicide and the superman, which is held by one of his dupes,
to induce him to commit a crime before he kills himself, and thus make
away with another member of the committee who is represented as being
a spy. Once this is done, the whole committee will be jointly
responsible, and bound to him by the ties of blood and fear. But
Verkhovensky is not the hero of the book. The hero is Stavrogin, whom
Verkhovensky regards as his trump card, because of the strength of his
character, which leads him to commit the most outrageous
extravagances, and at the same time to remain as cold as ice; but
Verkhovensky's whole design is shattered on Stavrogin's character, all
the murders already mentioned are committed, the whole scheme comes to
nothing, the conspirators are discovered, and Peter escapes abroad.

When _Devils_ appeared in 1871, it was looked upon as a gross
exaggeration, but real life in subsequent years was to produce
characters and events of the same kind, which were more startling than
Dostoyevsky's fiction. The book is the least well-constructed of
Dostoyevsky's; the narrative is disconnected, and the events,
incidents, and characters so crowded together, that the general effect
is confused; on the other hand, it contains isolated scenes which
Dostoyevsky never surpassed; and in its strength and in its
limitations it is perhaps his most characteristic work.

From 1873-80 Dostoyevsky went back to journalism, and wrote his _Diary
of a Writer_, in which he commented on current events. In 1880, he
united all conflicting and hostile parties and shades of public
opinion, by the speech he made at the unveiling of Pushkin's memorial,
in one common bond of enthusiasm. At the end of the seventies, he
returned to a work already begun, _The Brothers Karamazov_, which,
although it remains the longest of his books, was never finished. It
is the story of three brothers, Dimitri, Ivan, and Alyosha; their
father is a cynical sensualist. The eldest brother is an
undisciplined, passionate character, who expiates his passions by
suffering; the second brother is a materialist, the tragedy of whose
inner life forms a greater part of the book; the third brother,
Alyosha, is a lover