“In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life; and this emotion is very variously provoked. We are moved when Levine labours in the field, when André sinks beyond emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, not cowardly, puts off his helmet, when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when in Dostoiefsky’s _Despised and Rejected_, the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes which please the great heart of man.” R. L. STEVENSON, _Across the Plains_ “Raskolnikoff (_Crime and Punishment_) is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years.... I divined ... the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day which prevents them from living in a book or a character and keeps them afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified.... “Another has been translated--_Humiliés et offensés_. It is even more incoherent than _Le Crime et le Châtiment_, but breathes much of _the same lovely goodness_.”[17] R. L. STEVENSON, _Letters_ I INTRODUCTORY In the autumn of 1897 I was staying in the South of Russia at the house of a gentleman who has played no unimportant part in Russian politics. We were sitting one evening at tea, a party of nearly thirty people round the table, consisting of country gentlemen, neighbours and friends. The village doctor was present: he was an ardent Tolstoyist, and not only an admirer of Tolstoy’s genius, but a disciple, and a believer in his religious teaching. He had been talking on this subject for some time, and expressing his hero-worship in emphatic terms, when the son of my host, a boy at school, only seventeen years of age, yet familiar with the literature of seven languages, a writer, moreover, of English and Russian verse, fired up and said: “In fifty years’ time we Russians shall blush with shame to think that we gave Tolstoy such fulsome admiration, when we had at the same time a genius like Dostoievsky, the latchet of whose shoes Tolstoy is not worthy to unloose.” A few months after this I read an article on Dostoievsky in one of the literary weeklies in England, in which the writer stated that Dostoievsky was a mere _fueilletonist_, a concocter of melodrama, to be ranked with Eugène Sue and Xavier de Montépin. I was struck at the time by the divergence between English and Russian views on this subject. I was amazed by the view of the English critic in itself; but the reason that such a view could be expressed at all is not far to seek, since there is at this moment no complete translation of Dostoievsky’s works in England, and no literary translation of the same. Only one of his books, _Crime and Punishment_, is known at all, and the rest of them are difficult even to obtain in the English language.