indicated rather than realized and the reader is able to differentiate various characters chiefly because they wear names.
Except that they both cover a large canvas, this book bears no vaguest resemblance to War and Peace. Nor is Alexey to be compared with Lyof Tolstoy. If one must seek analogies he is a very sick Dostoevsky suffering for the moment under the hallucination that he 1s Rasputin. It is to be expected that the imitator of a great master should lack his art. In addition Alexey Tolstoy seems to have missed the essential fact that no matter how fantastic Dostoevsky's episodes may be they are "directly referable to the fundamental operations of the spirit." Thus the nightmare delusion which causes Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment to see a shrivelled prostitute in the face of a fresh young girl, is a stroke of genius, while the midnight attempt of Bezsonov, the decadent poet, to break into the room of Dasha, the chaste heroine of The Road to Calvary, is pure melodrama.
L'homme moyen sensuel, like the Teliegin of the book, sees little but the surfaces of life. The great thinker clarifies. Numerous hybrids occupy the middle ground between these two extremes and among them there emerge occasionally, emotional, obscure, groping intellects which peer into many dark corners and stir up seemingly clear waters. For some reason their heaving, laborious efforts at the interpretation of life are clogged and sterile. They seem almost to be swamped by their own profundity. The work of such an intellect, complex and intriguing, this is nevertheless a muddy book, although the reader abandons reluctantly his hope, cherished for the first hundred pages or so, that it is going to take up the story of the Russian people where it was dropped by Chekhov and Gorki.
