Dostoievsky
Crime and Punishment. The Idiot.
The Brothers Karamazov. The Insulted and Injured. The Possessed. Translated by Constance Garnett and published by Macmillan. Other translations in Everyman's Library.
Dostoievsky is the greatest and most racial of all Russian writers. He is the subtlest psychologist in fiction. As an artist he has a dark and sombre intensity and an imaginative vehemence only surpassed by Shakespeare. As a philosopher he anticipates Nietzsche in the direction of his insight, though in his conclusions he is diametrically opposite. He teaches that out of weakness, abnormality, perversity, foolishness, desperation, abandonment, and a morbid pleasure in humiliation, it is possible to arrive at high and unutterable levels of spiritual ecstasy. His ideal is sanctity not morality - and his revelations of the impassioned and insane motives of human nature - its instinct towards self-destruction for instance - will never be surpassed for their terrible and convincing truth. The strange Slavophil dream of the regeneration of the world by the power of the Russian soul and the magic of the "White Christ who comes out of Russia" could not be more arrestingly expressed than in these passionate and extraordinary works of art.