the pressure of a series of various circumstances which add to the feeling of remorse--he goes to surrender himself, denouncing himself as the murderer of the old woman and her sister. This is, of course, only the framework of the novel; in reality it is full of the most thrilling scenes of poverty on the one hand and of moral degradation on the other, while a number of secondary characters--an elderly gentleman in whose family Raskólnikoff’s sister has been a governess, the examining magistrate, and so on--are introduced. Besides, Dostoyévskiy, after having accumulated so many reasons which might have brought a Raskólnikoff to commit such a murder, found it necessary to introduce another theoretical motive. One learns in the midst of the novel that Raskólnikoff, captivated by the modern, current ideas of materialist philosophy, has written and published a newspaper article to prove that men are divided into superior and inferior beings, and that for the former--Napoleon being a sample of them--the current rules of morality are not obligatory. Most of the readers of this novel and most of the literary critics speak very highly of the psychological analysis of Raskólnikoff’s soul and of the motives which brought him to his desperate step. However, I will permit myself to remark that the very profusion of accidental causes accumulated by Dostoyévskiy shows how difficult he felt it himself to prove that the propaganda of materialistic ideas could in reality bring an honest young man to act as Raskólnikoff did. Raskólnikoffs do not become murderers under the influence of such theoretical considerations, while those who murder and invoke such motives, like Lebiès at Paris, are not in the least of the Raskólnikoff type. Behind Raskólnikoff I feel Dostoyévskiy trying to decide whether he himself, or a man like him, might have been brought to act as Raskólnikoff did, and what would be the psychological explanation if he had been driven to do so. But such men do _not_ murder. Besides, men like the examining magistrate and M. Swidrigailoff are purely romantic inventions. However, with all its faults, the novel produces a most powerful effect by its real pictures of slum-life, and inspires every honest reader with the deepest commiseration towards even the lowest sunken inhabitants of the slums. When Dostoyévskiy comes to them, he becomes a realist in the very best sense of the word, like Turguéneff or Tolstóy. Marmeládoff--the old drunken official--his drunken talk and his death, his family, and the incidents which happen after his burial, his wife and his daughter Sónya--all these are living beings and real incidents of the life of the poorest ones, and the pages that Dostoyévskiy gave to them belong to the most impressive and the most moving pages in any literature. They have the touch of genius.