The whole problem of creating a literature, as of doing anything else, is one of direction and power. If we blame someone else for our deficiencies, if we stand aloof, if we bow to circumstances and are afraid to pay for what we want, we shall of course do nothing. And we shall not enjoy ourselves or the world much either. But if we fix on a goal that is worth a life, and set out for it with the joyous spirit of adventurers, risking everything, enduring everything, sleeping under the stars, staying hard and keen, we shall command the fates. What more could we ask of the world? DOSTOEVSKY'S NOVELS MAURICE LAZAR _The Idiot_, _The Brothers Karamazov_, _Crime and Punishment_, etc., translated by Constance Garnett. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving (life) with one's inside, with one's stomach.... --Ivan Karamazov. Chiefly concerned with the fester of civilization, literature, music, painting, all the modern forms of individual expression are elliptical in the sense that the old æsthetic values of emotional beauty seem to have become nullified, or else congealed, in the artist's direct application of his instrument to the repudiation of fixed social values or moralities; to the expansion of life-interests. We today want more than beauty of external form; we want the beauty of depth! The true artist is such primarily because of his engrossing appetite for life, because (as Flaubert said) of the chaos in his soul. And although Flaubert kept on chiseling words around the lives of men and women totally devoid of inspirating individuality, his dictum has been nobly exemplified in the life and writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, that great-hearted epileptic Russian of whose psychological powers Nietzsche admittedly availed himself. Tolstoy was reported to have said, in conversation with a writer for _Le Temps_, "A woman who has never suffered pain is a beast." He could have stretched the allegation to include the other sex, if only by way of illusion to that intense spiritual quality in modern Russian literature--a literature that has never been (notably) an off-shoot of, as much as a protest against, the retrogressive structures of its respective periods. This spiritual, or psychical, concern with the individual's adjustment to the functioning of life has been revealed to highest degree in Dostoevsky's novels. It is also manifest in the analytical mould assumed by the creative arts of our time.