Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/281

Rh being implicated in the pogroms, claiming that their profession is honorable, and that they would scorn to be concerned in the killing of helpless and defenseless people. It is, their spokesman says, an "outrage" that the accusation should have been made. This is the outrage.

The Witch is the longest of the four stories in the volume. It is a tragic tale of love and superstition and fate, in an out-of-the-way little village in Volhymnia, on the border of Polyessie.

Kuprin is, next to Gorky, the greatest of the living Russian writers of fiction. He is a realist, but his realism bears the unmistakable stamp of an idealistic aim. Kuprin's best stories deal with army life, for he is himself a retired army-officer. But, above all, Kuprin is a born story-teller, who ranks with the best of the short-story writers. Some think he is their superior in a realism that is pregnant with implications of higher things.

L. S. F.

This study of Dostoyevsky is translated from the Russian by C. J. Hogarth, who has already put many of Dostoievsky's books into English. Throughout Soloviev's work, the interest is centered upon the man, rather than the writer. Interesting accounts are given, of Dostoyevsky's boyhood, his youth, the arrest and imprisonment, and finally the return and the later hardships and literary strivings.

The book is not written from the standpoint of an unreasoningly ardent worshipper of Dostoyevsky. It is a sane and balanced study of the incidents of the great novelist's life, the peculiarities of his physical and psychological self, and the determining relation these bear to the character of his work. Soloviev does well to point out that Dostoyevsky saw life chiefly as a moral and religious problem, whose solution is the principal task of man on earth.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book is the last, in which the Russian critic puts himself the question: "What has Dostoyevsky given us?" and proceeds to answer it. It is the type of the "repentant intellectual" that Dostoyevsky most frequently studies,—the intellectual who renounces the pride and aloofness of intellect, and seeks the strength and faith that come from a reunion with the people. For Dostoyevsky held to the belief that the people had a spiritual message to give, for more powerful than the reasoned formulas of the thinkers. Without this element of the spiritual, this great intangible force, the intellectual ideas were but as so much chaff.

Soloviev's book is far from a complete study of the Russian novelist. But it serves to call attention to several fundamental tenets of Dostoyevsky's teaching.

L. S. F.

"The truth of the situation was well expressed by the English girl who said she greatly preferred English stories of Russia to Russian stories, because the Russian stories lacked local color, while the English tales of Russia were 'so much Russian.'"

This amazing statement made by Dr. Young in his book may serve as a key to that ungrateful task which