His greatest novel is “Crime and Punishment”; telling the story of a student who, ambitious and starving, has an impulse to murder an old woman money-lender and rob her. He commits the crime, but is too much terrified to get the money; then he is pursued by remorse, and we follow him through his inner torments. He meets a young girl who has become a prostitute in order to save her family from starvation; she persuades him to give himself up to the police, and she follows him to Siberia, and together their souls are redeemed by love. I am conscientious in my attitude toward literature, and when I find the critics raving over a great master, I feel obliged to read him. Some years ago, I was in a hospital, recuperating from an operation, and that seemed a good time to tackle an eight hundred-page volume, so I began Dostoievski’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” There are several of these brothers, also an old father, and all of them are drunk most of the time, and tangled up with a stupid prostitute. The old father has money, and so has the advantage over the sons, and apparently one of the sons is on the way to murdering him. To cheer you up while the climax is preparing, there is a monastery full of monks who hate one another like poison, and one venerable and lovable saint, in whose spirituality you are expected to find hope for Russia and mankind. But this saint dies, and the youngest Karamazov brother, who loves him, has his faith in God and his hope for humanity shattered forever, because the expected miracle does not happen--Father Zossima stinks like any other corpse!--That is as far as I got in the novel, and if you want to know the outcome, you will have to do your own reading. This is called “realism”; but get my point clear, it is romantic and subjective to the highest degree; it is impassioned, even frenzied, propaganda. Dostoievski is an orthodox Eastern or Byzantine Christian; also he is a Slavophile, or mystical Russian patriot, believing that the Russian soul is something wonderful and special, having secret relationship with God. This relationship is the old mediaeval orgy of suffering and submission, a wallowing in repentance and self-abasement, the glorification of sores, boils, rags, lice, beggary, and bad smells. All degradation, if patiently endured, is penitential and holy, whereby the character is lifted to exalted mystical states. When the young student in “Crime and Punishment” awakens to the horror of having killed a human being, he does not decide to redeem himself by devoting his educated brain to some useful labor; no, he decides he must go to a police station and deliver himself into the hands of officials who are worse criminals than he. A government, itself the distilled essence of a billion hideous crimes, will send him to Siberia, so that he and his pious prostitute may endure ecstacies of torment.