This astounding mergence Dostoevsky actually seems to achieve. That is what gives him the intimate power which distinguishes every story of his from anything else you have ever read. Again he contrasts with the classical novelists. For they are quite palpably outside their subjects. You are never unaware of the author as telling the story. He has always the air of the showman, unrolling his drama before your eyes. His characters may be infinitely warm and human, but the writer himself is somehow not in them. “Wuthering Heights” is the only English story I think of that has something of the fierce, absorbed intensity of Dostoevsky. In the great Russian you lose all sense of the showman. The writer is himself the story; he is inextricably in it. In narratives like “The Double” or “A Gentle Spirit” immanence could go no further. The story seems to tell itself. Its strange, breathless intimacy of mood follows faithfully every turn and quirk of thought and feeling. Its tempo is just of that inner life we know, with its ceaseless boring into the anxious future and its trails of the unresolved past. These stories follow just that fluctuating line of our conscious life with its depressions and satisfactions, its striving always for a sense of control, its uneasiness. In Dostoevsky’s novels it is not only the author that is immanent. The reader also is absorbed. After reading “Crime and Punishment” you are yourself the murderer. For days the odor of guilt follows you around. The extravaganza of “The Double” pursues you like a vivid dream of your own. Such stories, however fantastic the problems of the soul, get deeply into us. We cannot ignore them, we cannot take them irresponsibly. We cannot read them for amusement, or even in detachment, as we can our classics. We forget our categories, our standards, our notions of human nature. All we feel is that we are tracing the current of life itself. Dostoevsky is so much in his stories that we get no sense of his attitude toward his characters or of his criticism of life. Yet the after-impression is one of rich kindness, born of suffering and imperfection, and of a truly religious reverence for all living experience. Man as a being with his feet in the mud and his gaze turned toward the stars, yet always indissolubly one in feet and eyes and heart and brain! If we are strong enough to hear him, this is the decisive force we need on our American creative outlook. THE ART OF THEODORE DREISER