sible to omit
any of the long psychological analyses, or dreams, or series of
ratiocinations, without injuring the web of the story and the moral,
as chain armor is spoiled by the rupture of a link. This indeed is one
of the great difficulties which the foreigner encounters in an
attempt to study Dostoevsky: the translators have been daunted by his
prolixity, and have often cut his works down to a mere skeleton of the
original. Moreover, he deals with a sort of Russian society which it
is hard for non-Russians to grasp, and he has no skill whatever in
presenting aristocratic people or society, to which foreigners have
become accustomed in the works of his great contemporaries Turgenieff
and Tolstoy; while he never, despite all his genuine admiration for
the peasants and keen sympathy with them, attempts any purely peasant
tales like Turgenieff's 'Notes of a Sportsman' or Tolstoy's 'Tales for
the People.' Naturally, this is but one reason the more why he should
be studied. His types of hero, and of feminine character, are peculiar
to himself. Perhaps the best way to arrive at his ideal--and at his
own character, _plus_ a certain irritability and tendency to suspicion
of which his friends speak--is to scrutinize the pictures of Prince
Myshkin ('The Idiot'), Ivan ('Humbled and Insulted'), and Alyosha
('The Karamazoff Brothers'). Pure, delicate both physically and
morally, as Dostoevsky himself is described by those who knew him
best; devout, gentle, intensely sympathetic, strongly masculine yet
with a large admixture of the feminine element--such are these three;
such is also, in his way, Raskolnikoff ('Crime and Punishment').
His feminine characters are the precise counterparts of these in
many respects, but are often also quixotic even to boldness and
wrong-headedness, like Aglaya ('The Idiot'), or to shame, like Sonia
('Crime and Punishment'), and the heroine of 'Humbled and Insulted.'
But Dostoevsky could not sympathize with and consequently could not
draw an aristocrat; his frequently recurring type of the dissolute
petty noble or rich merchant is frequently brutal; and his unclassed
women, though possibly quite as true to life as these men, are painful
in their callousness and recklessness. His earliest work, 'Poor
People,' written in the form of letters, is worthy of all the praises
which have been bestowed upon it, simple as is the story of the
poverty-stricken clerk who is almost too humble to draw his breath,
who