The young Cossack officer did not bother to discuss the question. He went out into the night in disgust. We continued the argument for a short time. “There is not a single character,” said the doctor, “in all Dostoievski’s books who is normal.” The doctor was a cultivated man, and seeing that we differed we agreed to differ, and we talked of other things, but I was left wondering why Hliebnikov was so convinced that Dostoievski was the greatest of all writers, and why he knew I should agree with him. I have been thinking this over ever since, and in a sense I do agree with Hliebnikov. I think that Dostoievski is the greatest writer that has ever lived, if by a great writer is meant a man whose work, message, or whatever you like to call it, can do the greatest good, can afford the greatest consolation to poor humanity. If we mean by the greatest writer the greatest artist, the most powerful magician, who can bid us soar like Shelley or Schubert into the seventh heaven of melody, or submerge us like Wagner beneath heavy seas until we drown with pleasure, or touch and set all the fibres of our associations and our æsthetic appreciation vibrating with incommunicable rapture by the magic of wonderful phrases like Virgil or Keats, or strike into our very heart with a divine sword like Sappho, Catullus, Heine, or Burns, or ravish us by the blend of pathos and nobility of purpose with faultless diction like Leopardi, Gray, and Racine, or bid us understand and feel the whole burden of mankind in a thin thread of notes like Beethoven or in a few simple words like Goethe, or evoke for us the whole pageant of life like Shakespeare to the sound of Renaissance flutes, or all Heaven and Hell like Dante, by “thoughts that breathe and words that burn”? If we are thinking of all these miraculous achievements when we say a great writer or the greatest writer, then we must not name Dostoievski. Dostoievski is not of these; in his own province, that of the novelist, he is as a mere workman, a mere craftsman, one of the worst, inferior to any French or English ephemeral writer of the day you like to mention; but, on the other hand, if we mean by a great writer a man who has given to mankind an inestimable boon, a priceless gift, a consolation, a help to life, which nothing can equal or replace, then Dostoievski is a great writer, and perhaps the greatest writer that has ever lived. I mean that if the Holy Scriptures were destroyed and no trace were left of them in the world, the books where mankind, bereft of its Divine and inestimable treasure, would find the nearest approach to the supreme message of comfort would be the books of Dostoievski.