Interest in the life of the great Russian novelist, Dostoievsky, the centenary of whose birth falls in October of this year, should be stimulated by a very. remarkable biography recently written by one of his daughters. Incidentally, the york appears through the necessity of the writer earning a livelihood, her entire fortune being in the hands of Bolsheviks; and there is a, touch of irony in the fact that Dostoievsky himself was a great exponent of the Russian tionary spirit.
A striking testimony to his importance in the life of Russia is provided in the fact that Dr. Masaryk, President of Czecho-Slovakia, has already devoted two massive volumes to a searching analysis of his work, and even these are merely the prologue to the main treatise which is to deal with the personality of Dostoievsky.
Important as such work may be to the historian and critic, it is searcely likely to make an appeal to the general reader. There is something about the moderns in Russia which is grim and forbidding, at any rate to an English reader. None of them seem to have escaped a vein of deep pessimism, and their widest sympathies are tinctured bitterness. They are never happy except amongst the unhappy. One reads them always with the unpleasant sensation of being present at an operation, of seeing the literary scalpel applied with painful precision to abnormal growths in human nature.
Neitner CHEERFtL Nor Epiryixe.
One is not surprised to learn, then, that the picture of the! Dostoievsky family presented in this biography is neither cheerful nor edifying, that it is "not unlike one of his novels." And here) arises a point which may well he borne in mind by readers of such works as those which Dostoievsky, and his fellows in Russia and elsewhere, have produced. The uncritical reader, fascinated by the skill of the writer and dominated by his genius, may be led to accept an artistic creation as a piece of reality. But, as we see from the present volume, the artist writes, finally, nothing but that which is drawn from his own character and experience. If this be abnormal and distorted, so will be the record. And when the great Russian writer gives us amazing studies in dark pessimism and fantastic psychology he is giving us, not "fife" but himself.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.