THE INFLAMMABLE SLAV
Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences. Translated from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry. 8vo. 286 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
THIS fresh collection of Dostoevsky's letters which, with the permission of the present Russian government, has now been released for translation adds no new facts to our knowledge of the life of this writer. Besides eight letters sent from Geneva and Dresden to A. N. Maikov, already the recipient of many of the most interesting of Dostoevsky’s letters in an earlier volume (1914) there are several to Pobiedonszev, one of unusual interest written on the eve of his banishment to Siberia to his brother, and a number to his wife from Moscow, where he had gone for the famous Pushkin celebration. The volume also includes a fragment of his wife's reminiscences taken from her memoirs, which, it is understood, are to be published in their entirety at a later date, thus making of somewhat dubious wisdom the appearance of the present chapter.
Once more we see him in these letters—the perturbed, inflammable, and extreme Slav, so simple, so easily disarmed, so generously credulous—driven mad by poverty—writing, destroying in despair, and again flinging off page after page at breakneck speed, goaded on by accumulating debts which no amount of industry seems ever to diminish. "All the money I have is 30 francs; everything to the very last rag, mine and my wife's, has been pawned. My debts are urgent, pressing, immediate . . ." he writes to his friend, and after his death his wife plaintively remarks "Indeed, until the very end of his life Fiodor Mihailovich had not written a single novel with which he was satisfied himself; and the cause of this was our debts."
Protruding nervously, distractedly even, is his familiar dislike of everything foreign, his apprehensive nostalgia for Russia. "A writer should not leave his country for a long time, he should live
