[3] _Crime and Punishment_, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] The tragedy of Raskolnikov is twofold: he is a Russian and an intellectual. The craving, religious soul of the child of the endless melancholy plains, keened by a profound, analytic intellect seeks in vain an outlet for its strivings and doubtings in the land where interrogation marks are officially forbidden. The young man should have plunged into the Revolution, the broad-breasted river that has welcomed thousands of Russian youth; but Dostoevsky willed not his hero to take the logical road. The epileptic Demon hated the “Possessed” revolutionists; he saw the Russian ideal in Christian suffering. “He is a great poet, but an abominable creature, quite Christian in his emotions and at the same time quite _sadique_. His whole morality is what you have baptised slave-morality”—this from Dr. Brandes’s letter to Nietzsche,—a specimen of professorial nomenclature. I am thinking of a threefold—nay, of a manifold—tragedy of a young man, who, besides being a Russian and an intellectual, is a revolutionist and is a son of the eternal Ahasver, the people that have borne for centuries the double cross of being persecuted and of teaching their persecutors. What makes this tragedy still more tragic is the element of grim irony that enters it as in those of Attic Greece: the Russian-Jewish-Anarchist is hurled by Fate into the country of Matter-of-Fact, your United States. The boy is poetic, sentimental, idealistic; imbued with the lofty traditions of the Narodovoltzy, the Russian saints-revolutionists, he craves for a heroic deed, for an act of self-sacrifice for the “people.” “Ah, the People! The grand, mysterious, yet so near and real, People....”[4] He attempts to shoot an oppressor of the people, is delivered to the Justice, and is sentenced to twenty-two years of prison confinement. The curtain falls, but does the tragedy end here? No, it only begins. [4] _Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist_, by Alexander Berkman. [Mother Earth Company, New York.] For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.