Not all of his novels are worth general reading, even were they all available in English. He was too much preoccupied with his struggle with debt, his physical sufferings, his inner life, his passion of pity, his profound analyses of the characters about him, his tender religious faith, to allow him to study the graces of expression. In consequence, diffuseness and lack of compact, progressive plot--for he had no dramatic skill--characterize his work, and when he does rise to heights of beautiful utterance, which is not seldom, it is the outbursting of sheer feeling, the power of his theme, not the premeditated caperings of the self-conscious stylist. The man and his vehement message are far bigger than his technique. Seven of his works must here be dismissed in as many paragraphs as they deserve chapters. “Poor Folk,” strongly influenced by Gogol’s “The Cloak,” was written when Dostoevski was twenty-five. Though told in the handicapping form of letters, it made an immediate impression. Simplicity, human understanding, and compression--and the last was not one of his usual virtues--mark this spiritual history of two lives. It is an effective book, though not a great. The years of Siberian torment yielded fruit in that remarkable example of criminal psychology, “Memories of a House of the Dead,” 1861-62. Not Dickens, and certainly not Oscar Wilde, approached this dispassionate record of a tremendously passionate and passion-inspiring theme, the inside of a terrible prison, which stirred Europe just when Hugo was issuing “Les Miserables.” “His calm account of their unblushing knavery is entirely free from either vindictive malice or superior contempt. He loved them because they were buried alive, he loved them because of their wretchedness, with a love as far removed from condescension as it was from secret admiration of their bold wickedness.” These words of Professor Phelps are singularly illuminating. “Crime and Punishment,” the best known to English readers of the author’s works, is by many considered his masterpiece. Notwithstanding many waste places of digression, this book is a lofty peak. No one could picture in a few words the tremendous story of that other Eugene Aram--Raskolnikov--the philosophical student of crime, his double murder, his confession to the courtesan Sonia, her great-hearted reception of the news, her counsel that he confess his crime, their life in Siberia, and the gradual regeneration of both souls through the ministry of service.