Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/159

Rh launched thirteen original publications, not a single one of which added anything to his fame. It was not until after the cruel years of Siberia that the great books began to appear.

Nor did they appear at once. In 1859 he published The Uncle's Dream, a society novel, showing both in its humour and in its ruthless satire the influence of Gogol. This is an exceedingly entertaining book, and, a strange thing in Dostoevski, it is, in many places, hilariously funny. The satire is so enormously exaggerated that it completely overshoots the mark, but perhaps this very exaggeration adds to the reader's merriment. The conversation in this story is often brilliant, full of unexpected quips and retorts delivered in a manner far more French than Russian. The intention of the author seems to have been to write a scathing and terrible satire on provincial society, where every one almost without exception is represented as absolutely selfish, absolutely conceited, and absolutely heartless. It is a study of village gossip, a favourite subject for satirists in all languages. In the middle of the book Dostoevski remarks: "Everybody in the provinces lives as though he were under a bell of glass. It is impossible for him to conceal anything whatever from his honourable fellow-citizens. They know things about him of which he himself is ignorant. The provincial, by his very nature, ought to be a