ter of Dostoevsky's works is determined by the fact that he
was a child of the town. In their form they possess none of that elegant
regularity, of that classical finish and clear-cut outline, which
impress us in the works of Turgeneff and Gontcharoff. On the contrary,
they surprise us by their awkwardness, their prolixity, their lack of
severe finish, which requires abundant leisure. It is evident that they
were written in haste, by a man who was eternally in want, embarrassed
with debts, and incapable of making the two ends meet financially. At
the same time one is struck by the entire absence in Dostoevsky's works
of those artistic elements in which the works of the other authors of
the '40's are rich. They contain no enchanting pictures of nature, no
soul-stirring love scenes, meetings, kisses, the bewitching feminine
types which turn the reader's head, for which Turgeneff and Tolstoy are
famous. Dostoevsky even ridicules Turgeneff for his feminine portraits,
in "Devils," under the character of the writer Karmazinoff, with his
passion for depicting kisses not as they take place with all mankind,
but with gorse or some such weed growing round about, which one must
look up in a botany, while the sky must not fail to be of a purplish
hue, which, of course, no mortal ever beheld, and the tree under which
the interesting pair is seated must infallibly be orange-colored, and so
forth.

Dostoevsky's subjects also present a sharp difference from those of his
contemporaries, whose subjects are characterized by extreme simplicity
and absence of complication, only a few actors being brought on the
stage--not more than two, three, or four--and the entire plot being, as
a rule, confined to the rivalry of two lovers, and to the question upon
which of them the heroine will bestow her love. It is quite the contrary
with Dostoevsky. His plots are complicated and entangled, he introduces
a throng of acting personages. In reading his romances, one seems to
hear the roar of the crowd, and the life of a town is unrolled before
one, with all its bustle, its incessantly complicated and unexpected
encounters, and relations of people one to another. Like a true child of
the town, Dostoevsky does not confine himself to fashionable
drawing-rooms, or to the educated classes; he is fond of introducing the
reader to the dens of poverty and vice, which he invests, also, with
their own peculiar, gloomy poetry. In his pictures of low life, he more