Dostoevski is fond of interrupting the course of his narratives with dreams,--dreams that often have no connection with the plot, so far as there may be said to exist a plot,--but dreams of vivid and sharp verisimilitude. Whether these dreams were interjected to deceive the reader, or merely to indulge the novelist's whimsical fancy, is hard to divine; but one always wakes with surprise to find that it is all a dream. A few hours before Svidrigailov commits suicide he has an extraordinary dream of the cold, wet, friendless little girl, whom he places tenderly in a warm bed, and whose childish eyes suddenly give him the leer of a French harlot. Both he and the reader are amazed to find that this is only a dream, so terribly real has it seemed. Then Raskolnikov's awful dream, so minutely circumstanced, of the cruel peasants maltreating a horse, their drunken laughter and vicious conversation, their fury that they cannot kill the mare with one blow, and the wretched animal's slow death makes a picture that I have long tried in vain to forget. These dream episodes have absolutely no connection with the course of the story--they are simply impressionistic sketches. Another favourite device of Dostoevski's is to have one of his characters take a walk, and on this walk undergo some experience that has nothing whatever to do with the course of the action, but is, as it were, a miniature story of its own introduced into the novel. One often remembers these while forgetting many vital constructive features. That picture of the pretty young girl, fifteen or sixteen years old, staggering about in the heat of the early afternoon, completely drunk, while a fat libertine slowly approaches her, like a vulture after its prey, stirs Raskolnikov to rage and then to reflection--but the reader remembers it long after it has passed from the hero's mind. Dostoevski's books are full of disconnected but painfully oppressive incidents.