If there were no more insoluble questions nor impenetrable riddles, infinity would not be infinite; and we should have forever to curse the fate that placed us in a universe proportionate to our intelligence. All that exists would be but a gateless prison, an irreparable evil and mistake. The unknown and unknowable are necessary to our happiness. In any case I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousand times loftier and a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp the least atom. These words were written by Maeterlinck a few years ago in his essay, _Our Eternity_. He has surely gone astray since. The last book is written in a dull pale style, in a tone of a professional table-rapper, enumerating legions of “facts” to prove the theory of psychometry or whatever it may be, forgetting his own words of some time ago: “Facts are nothing but the laggards, the spies, and camp followers of the great forces we cannot see.” What a tragedy! Was Dostoevsky a mystic? Undoubtedly so, but not exclusively so. Far from being a monomaniac, he applied his genius to various aspects of life and wistfully absorbed the realistic manifestations of his fellow-beings as well as the inner struggles of their souls. Dostoevsky is the Cézanne of the novel. With the same eagerness that Cézanne puts into his endeavor to produce the “treeness” of a tree, brushing aside irrelevant details, does Dostoevsky strive to present the “soulness” of a soul, stripping it of its veils and demonstrating its throbbing nudeness before our terrified eyes. We fear him, for he is cruel and takes great pleasure in torturing us, in bringing us to the verge of hysteria; we fear him, for we feel uneasy when we are shown a nude soul. Perhaps he owed his wonderful clairvoyancy to his ill health, a feature that reminds us of his great disciple, Nietzsche. I do not know which is more awesome in Raskolnikov[3]: his physical, realistic tortures, or his mysterious dreams and hallucinations. In all his heroes: the winged murderer who wished to kill a principle; the harlot, Sonya, who sells her body for the sake of her drunkard father and her stepmother; the father, Marmeladov, whose monologues in the tavern present the most heart-gripping rhapsody of sorrow and despair; the perversed nobleman, Svidrigailov, broad-hearted and cynical, who jokingly blows out his brains—in the whole gallery of his morbid types Dostoevsky mingles the real with the fantastic, makes us wander in the labyrinth of illusionary facts and preternatural dreams, brings us in dizzily-close touch with the nuances of palpitating souls, and leaves us mentally maimed and stupefied. I think of Dostoevsky as of a Demon, a Russian Demon, the sorrowful Demon of the poet Lermontov, the graceful humane Mephistopheles of the sculptor Antokolsky.