start. It is an open question if the motive of this denial is repentance, shame, love for Grushenka, or fear. The three experts of the trial each has his own opinion. The first two declare the murderer to be abnormal. The third regards him as normal. The author himself has made it easy to judge of Dimitri's state of mind. Though on the boundary line of accountability the murderer was not in a pathological condition such as to exclude his free determination; however, he was not fully responsible for his crime and extenuating circumstances had to be conceded by the judge.

The younger brother, Ivan, is characterized by the prosecuting attorney as a well-educated and talented youth, gifted with a high intelligence. He is a cynic and has lost all faith. Indeed, he is constitutionally devoid of faith, and intellectually adverse to it and to morality. His fate is to brood over the destiny of mankind, to accept God with his lips but not with his heart, for he cannot forgive Him for having made the world and made known the promise of eternal harmony. The transition of Ivan's thought under the influences of dream first and hallucination later is one of the most masterly things in modern literature. He does not feel guiltless of his brother's crime, for he knew Dimitri's intention but allowed things to take their course. The parricide oppresses his soul and under the pressure of his guilt he becomes insane. At the trial he appears fatigued, almost dying, and accuses himself of his father's murder. Ivan, like all the Karamazov characters, is a degenerate and unbalanced personality. His psychosis is a delirium characterized by hallucinations. The servant Smerdyakof, the illegitimate son of old Karamazov and the idiot girl, is very carefully delineated by Dostoievsky. He is epileptic, and the author describes the disease down to the smallest detail, often seeming to identify himself with the fictitious character. He is weak, speaks slowly and moves his tongue with difficulty. A short time before the trial he kills himself by hanging. Smerdyakof presents all the typical signs of the epileptic character. In childhood he is cruel, later he becomes solitary and misanthropical. His behavior is pedantic. He broods, is preoccupied with religious problems, and his attitude varies from subserviency to impertinence.

Grushenka is a genuine case of hysteria. The daughter of well-to-do parents, at an early age she is seduced by an officer, leaves her home and later becomes the mistress of an old man. Her beauty attracts men, she flirts with them, wants to dominate them but is chary of her favors. She lusts after Aloysha, the pious son, and promises a sum of money to Rakitin to be paid when he brings him to her. Her toying between father and son is truly hysterical. When she has finally decided in favor of the son, she firmly clings to him despite his guilt and is ready to follow him to Siberia, although she has only played with him heretofore.

It is Aloysha who is Dostoievsky's superman. He is the essence of Myshkin and Stavrogin and Karamazov and Father Zosima, the residue that is left in the crucible when their struggles were reduced, their virtues and their vices distilled. He is Myshkin whose mind has not been destroyed by epilepsy, he is Stavrogin who has seen light before his soul was sold to the devil, he is a Karamazov who has been redeemed by prayer and good works, he is the apotheosis of Father Zosima. "He felt clearly and as it were tangibly that something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind-and it was for all his life and for ever and for ever." In other words, Aloysha realized in a mild form and continuously that which Myshkin realized as the result of disease and spasmodically. Aloysha went into a state of faith, of resignation, of adjustment with the Infinite, and Myshkin went into dementia via ecstasy.

The Idiot was one of Dostoievsky's books that had a cold reception from the Russian reading public but which has been, next to The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, the most popular in this country. The basic idea is the representation of a truly perfect and noble man, and it is not at all astonishing that Dostoievsky made him an epileptic. He had been impressed, he said, that all writers who had sought to represent Absolute Beauty were unequal to the task. It is so difficult, for the beautiful is the ideal and ideals have long been wavering and waning in civilized Europe. There is only one figure of absolute beauty, Christ, and he patterns Prince Myshkin upon the Divine model.

He brings him in contact with Nastasya Filipovna, who is the incarnation of the evil done in the world and this evil is represented symbolically by Dostoievsky as the outrage of a child. The nine years of brooding which Nastasya had following the outrage inflicted upon her as a child by Prince Tosky had imprinted upon her face something which Myshkin recognized as the pain of the world, and from which he cannot deliver himself and which he cannot mitigate for her. She marries him after agonies of rebellion and foregoing, after having given him to her alter ego in virginal state, Aglaia Epanchin, and then taken him away to show her power and demonstrate her own weakness, but she deserts him on the church steps for her lover Rogozhin, who murders her that night. Myshkin, finding him next morning, said more than "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do"; he lay beside him in the night and bathed his temples with his tears, but fortunately in the morning when the murderer was a raving lunatic a merciful Providence had enshrouded Myshkin in his disease.

As Dimitri Merejkowski, the most understanding critic and interpreter of Dostoievsky who has written of him, truthfully says, his works are not novels or epics but tragedies. The narrative is secondary to the construction of the whole work and the keystone of the narrative is the dialogue between the characters. The reader feels that he hears real persons talking and talking without artifice just as they would talk in real life, and they express sentiments and convictions which one would expect from individuals of such inheritance, education, development and environment, obsessed particularly with the injustices of this world and the uncertainties of the world to be, concerned day and night with the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, the future of civilization. It has been said that he does not describe the appearance of his characters, for they depict themselves, their thoughts and feelings, their faces and bodies, by their peculiar form of language and tones of voices. Although he does not dwell on portraiture, he has scarcely a rival in delineation and his portraits have that quality which perhaps Leonardo of all others who worked with the brush had the сарасity to do, and which Pater saw in the Gioconda: the revelation of the soul and its possibilities in the lineaments. The portrait of

Mlle. Lebyadkin, the imbecile whom the proud Nikolay Stavrogin married not from love or lust but that he might exhaust the list of mortifications, those of the flesh for himself, and those of pride for his family, that he might kill his instincts and become pure spirit, is as true to life as if Dostoievsky had spent his life in an Almshouse sketching the unfortunates segregated there. The art of portraiture cannot surpass this picture of Shatov, upon whose plastic soul Stavrogin impressed his immoralities in the shape of "the grand idea" and who said to Stavrogin in his agony, "Shan't I kiss your foot-prints when you've gone? I can't tear you out of my heart, Nikolay Stavrogin."

He was short, awkward, had a shock of flaxen hair, broad shoulders, thick lips, very thick overhanging white eyebrows, a wrinkled forehead, and a hostile, obstinately downcast, as it were shamefaced, expression in his eyes. His hair was always in a wild tangle and stood up in a shock which nothing could smooth. He was seven or eight and twenty.

In the same masterful way he has described Pyotr Verhovensky and Kirillov in The Possessed, the other souls that Stavrogin had captivated, and of Stavrogin himself. Indeed the pen pictures of the latter are uncanny, as is that of Feodor Karamazov which adheres to one's memory like a scarlet sin.

It is not as a photographer of the body that Dostoievsky is a source of power and inspiration in the world to-day, and will remain so for countless days to come, for he has depicted the Russian people as has no one else save Tolstoi, and his pictures constitute historical documents, but as photographer of the soul, a psychologist. Psychology is said to be a new science and a generation ago there was much ado over a new development called "experimental psychology" which was hailed as the key that would unlock the casket wherein repose the secrets of the mind, the windlass that would lift layer by layer the veil that has since man began concealed the mysteries of thought, behavior and action. It has not fulfilled its promise. It would be beyond the truth to say that it has been sterile, but it is entirely true to say that the contributions that it has made have been as naught compared with those made by abnormal psychology. Some, indeed, contend that the only real contributions of value have come from a study of disease and deficiency, and their contentions are

granted by the vast majority of those entitled to an opinion. Dostoievsky is the master portrayer of madness and of bizarre states of the soul and of the mind that are on the borderland of madness. Not only does he depict the different types of mental alienation but by an intuition peculiar to his genius, by a species of artistic divination he has understood and portrayed their display, their causation, their onset-so often difficult to determine even for the expert-and finally the full development of the disease. Indeed, he forestalled the descriptions of the alienists. "They call me a psychologist," says Dostoievsky; "it is not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense of the word, that is I depict all the soul's depth. Arid observations of every-day trivialities I have long ceased to regard as realism—it is quite the reverse.' It is the mission of one important branch of psychology to depict the soul's depth, the workings of the conscious mind, and as the interior of a house that one is forbidden to enter is best seen when the house has been shattered or is succumbing to the incidences of time and existence, so the contents of the soul are most discernible in the mind that has some of its impenetralia removed by disease. It was in this laboratory that Dostoievsky conducted his experiments, made his observations and recorded the results from which he drew conclusions and inferences. "In my works I have never said so much as the twentieth part of what I wished to say, and perhaps could have actually said. I am firmly convinced that mankind knows much more than it has hitherto expressed either in science or in art. In what I have written there is much that came from the depth of my heart", he says in a letter to a friendly critic, to which may be added that what he has said is in keeping with the science of to-day, and is corroborated by workers in other fields of psychology and psychiatry.

The annihilation of the sense of time in Dostoievsky's stories was first dwelt upon by Merejkowski and it has been much discussed by all of his serious commentators. Events occur and things take place within a few hours in his stories which would ordinarily take months and years. The reason for this timeless cycle of events may be sought in the experiences that the author had in the moments preceding his attacks of epilepsy in