Page:Crime and Punishment - Garnett - Neilson - 1917.djvu/18

x nature. The lovers he represents are not made of flesh and blood, but of nerves and tears. Yet this realist evokes only harrowing thoughts, never disagreeable images. I defy any one to quote a single line suggestive of anything sensual, or a single instance where the woman is represented in the light of a temptress. His love scenes are absolutely chaste, and yet he seems to be incapable of portraying any creation between an angel and a beast.—From "Dostoevsky" in "The Russian Novelists," translated by J. L. Edmands (1887).

ASKOLNIKOV, the student who claims the right to murder and steal by virtue of his ill-applied scientific theories, is not a figure the invention of which can be claimed by the Russian novelist. It is probable that before or after reading the works of Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky had perused those of Bulwer Lytton. Eugene Aram, the English novelist's hero, is a criminal of a very different order, and of a superior species. When he commits his crime, he not only thinks, like Raskolnikov, of a rapid means of attaining fortune, but also, and more nobly, of a great and solemn sacrifice to science, of which he feels himself to be the high priest. Like Raskolnikov, he draws no benefit from his booty. Like him, too, he hides it, and like him, he is pursued, not by remorse, but by regret—haunted by the painful thought that men now have the advantage over him, and that he no longer stands above their curiosity and their spite—tortured by his consciousness of the total change in his relations with the world. In both cases, the subject and the story, save for the voluntary expiation at the close, appear identical in their essential lines. This feature stands apart. Yet, properly speaking, it does not belong to Dostoevsky. In Turgenev's "The Tavern" (Postoïalyï Dvor), the peasant Akime, whom his wife has driven into crime, punishes himself by going out to beg, in all gentleness and humble submission.