sincere. It is not nearly so well written as Oscar Wilde's "De
Profundis;" but one cannot escape the suspicion that this latter
masterpiece was a brilliant pose. Dostoevski's "House of the Dead" is
marked by that naive Russian simplicity that goes not to the reader's
head but to his heart. It is at the farthest remove from a
well-constructed novel; it is indeed simply an irregular, incoherent
notebook. But if the shop-worn phrase "human document" can ever be
fittingly applied, no better instance can be found than this. It is a
revelation of Dostoevski's all-embracing sympathy. He shows no
bitterness, no spirit of revenge, toward the government that sent him
into penal servitude; he merely describes what happened there. Nor
does he attempt to arouse our sympathy for his fellow-convicts by
depicting them as heroes, or in showing their innate nobleness. They
are indeed a bad lot, and one is forced to the conviction that they
ought not to be at large. Confinement and hard labour is what most of
them need; for the majority of them in this particular Siberian prison
are not revolutionists, offenders against the government, sent there
for some petty or trumped-up charge, but cold-blooded murderers,
fiendishly cruel assassins, wife-beaters, dull, degraded brutes. But
the regime, as our novelist describes it, does not improve them; the
officers are as brutal as the men, and the floggings do not make for
spiritual culture. One cannot wish, after reading the book, that such
prisoners were free, but one cannot help thinking that something is
rotten in the state of their imprisonment. Dostoevski brings out with
great clearness the utter childishness of the prisoners; mentally,
they are just bad little boys; they seem never to have developed,
except in an increased capacity for sin. They spend what time they
have in silly talk, in purposeless discussions, in endeavours to get
drink, in practical jokes, and in thefts from one another. The cruel
pathos of the story is not in the fact that such men are in prison,