7s. 6d. net.)—It may seem surprising that such a well-known
book as this, which was published in France in 1886, should never before have been translated into English. But we must remember how much slower has been the growth among English readers than among French of an interest in the subject it deals with—Russian fiction. Turgeneff, no doubt, has long been admired, and Tolstoy's reputation is now firmly established here; but we are only just beginning to make the acquaintance of Dostoyevsky, who was perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most characteristically Russian, genius of the three. It would have been natural to expect Dostoyevsky to appeal more readily to the English than the French mind, for there is something in the overwhelming flood of his imagination that is akin to that of our writers in the Elizabethan age, and that seems alien to the more formal beauties of French litera- ture. Indeed, some of the Vicomte de Vogiie's shocked protests against the shapelessness and lack of restraint in Dostoyevsky remind us not a little of Voltaire's criticisms of Shakespeare's tragedies. But admirers of Dostoyevsky will forgive the Vicomte much for his description of the crowd pressing into the author's death-chamber—a scene which might well have come from one of the dead man's own novels.
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