It is really a hopeless task to view within small compass so prolific and so intense a novelist as Féodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski. Indeed, I long questioned the fitness of including him in this series of brief studies, for his little fictions are few; but Russian literature knows no more vigorous novelist than this inartistic though colossal figure, and any compendious treatment of Russian writers would seem inadequate which did not include the author of “Crime and Punishment.” Apart from a few little stories, Dostoevski’s short fictional creations are chiefly episodes in his long and mostly rambling novels--powerful and compact little digressions often almost unrelated to the main thread of the story, but worthy of existence separately as pieces of impressionism. * * * * * No finer tribute could be paid to a man than to recognize him as the apostle of humble folk--unless it were to add that this apostolate was free from the taint of demagoguery and solely the vocation of a tender spirit. Fifty years ago, in the Russia of the sixties, Dostoevski came to the full enduement of his ministry for man. What Jean François Millet saw in the French peasant, that the great Russian novelist felt in the muzhik--the pathos of those who suffer under burdens, the heart-break of hopeless toil, the unexpected beauty gleaming in the midst of ugliness, honey hidden in the carcass of the lion. No man ever lived a selfless life of service but his reward followed him--though often enough too late to cheer the rigors of his way. So too Dostoevski came to his own at last, but not till after a life of suffering, banishment, disease, disappointment, poverty, and debt; and he died just when his voice was heard most impressively, leaving his master-novel unfinished, and its author wept by forty thousand mourners who followed his bier as delegates, so to call them, of the uncounted millions whose cries he had voiced. * * * * * We are all agreed that the function of literature is to portray life, but when we have said that, we have not begun at the beginning. What motive must be back of the portrayal? Or must there be no motive at all save that of picturing life faithfully? Here is where opinions divide, as well as upon that other question: Is all life proper subject-matter for literary portrayal?