Old and New Masters

MP3 Audio CD. Old and New Masters

I

DOSTOEVSKY THE SENSATIONALIST


Mr. George Moore once summed up _Crime and Punishment_ as "Gaboriau with
psychological sauce." He afterwards apologized for the epigram, but he
insisted that all the same there is a certain amount of truth in it. And
so there is.

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the
last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost
always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like
the men and women one reads about in the police news. There are more
murders and attempted murders in his books than in those of any other
great novelist. His people more nearly resemble madmen and wild beasts
than normal human beings.

He releases them from most of the ordinary inhibitions. He is fascinated
by the loss of self-control--by the disturbance and excitement which
this produces, often in the most respectable circles. He is beyond all
his rivals the novelist of "scenes." His characters get drunk, or go mad
with jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits, or rave hysterically. If
Dostoevsky had had less vision he would have been Strindberg. If his
vision had been aesthetic and sensual, he might have been D'Annunzio.