“A profound and continual consciousness of his own lack of talent, and at the same time the overwhelming desire to prove to himself that he was a man of great independence, had rankled in his heart from boyhood up. He was a young man of violent and envious cravings, who seemed to have been positively born with his nerves overwrought. The violence of his desires he took for strength. This passionate craving to distinguish himself sometimes led him to the brink of most ill-considered actions, but our hero was always at the last moment too sensible to take the final plunge. That drove him to despair.”[4] And this for one of the least important characters in the book! I must add that the others, the chief protagonists, he does not portray, leaving them to limn in their own portrait, never finished, ever changing, in the course of the narrative. His principal characters are always in course of formation, never quite emerging from the shadows. In passing, note how profoundly different he is from Balzac, whose chief care seems ever to be the perfect consistency of his characters. Balzac paints like David; Dostoevsky like Rembrandt, and his portraits are artistically so powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked the depths of thought that lie behind them, and around them, I believe that Dostoevsky would still be the greatest of all novelists. FOOTNOTES [1] _The Idiot_, p. 455. [2] Hoffmann, p. 7, “Es gibt Augenblicke, die richtig gelebt sein wollen.” (_Translator’s note._) [3] _The Idiot_, pp. 461-462. [4] _The Idiot_, p. 464. DOSTOEVSKY IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE (1908) I You are prepared to find a super-man: you lay hold on a fellow mortal, sick, poor, toiling without respite, and strangely lacking in that pseudo-quality he himself criticized so strongly in the French--eloquence. In dealing with a book so bare of all pretension, I shall hold remote every consideration save one, straightforwardness. If some there be who seek in these pages fine writing or intellectual entertainment, I warn them now, it were well to read no further. The text of the letters is often confused, inaccurate, unskilfully put together, and we are grateful to Dostoevsky’s translator for having renounced all idea of introducing a certain artificial elegance or attempting to remedy their characteristic awkwardness.[5]