Uncle's Dream ; and The Permanent Husband. By Fedor Dos-
toieffsky. (Vizetelly and Co.)—Dostoieffsky was undoubtedly a great novelist ; but greatness is not always sufficiently great to understand its own limitations, and of this inability in his case the present volume is a proof. He was a master of realistic tragedy, and he had some command of the humour of comedy or of character; but when he attempted to achieve that farcical kind of humour which inheres in ludicrous incident, his hand lost its cunning. The first of the stories in this volume is devoted to the manceuvres of two scheming women to entrap a wealthy dotard, and is simply fatuous ; the second deals with the relations of two men, one of whom knows that the other has been the lover of his dead wife, and is simply unpleasant. The book could not have been written save by an able man, but its ability is utterly wasted.
Previous page
