_The Brothers Karamázoff_ is the most artistically worked out of Dostoyévskiy’s novels, but it is also the novel in which all the inner defects of the author’s mind and imagination have found their fullest expression. The philosophy of this novel--incredulous Western Europe; wildly passionate, drunken, unreformed Russia; and Russia reformed by creed and monks--the three represented by the three brothers Karamázoff--only faintly appears in the background. But there is certainly not in any literature such a collection of the most repulsive types of mankind--lunatics, half-lunatics, criminals in germ and in reality, in all possible gradations--as one finds in this novel. A Russian specialist in brain and nervous diseases finds representatives of all sorts of such diseases in Dostoyévskiy’s novels, and especially in _The Brothers Karamázoff_--the whole being set in a frame which represents the strangest mixture of realism and romanticism run wild. Whatsoever a certain portion of contemporary critics, fond of all sorts of morbid literature, may have written about this novel, the present writer can only say that he finds it, all through, so unnatural, so much fabricated for the purpose of introducing--here, a bit of morals, there, some abominable character taken from a psycho-pathological hospital; or again, in order to analyse the feelings of some purely imaginary criminal, that a few good pages scattered here and there do not compensate the reader for the hard task of reading these two volumes.