one life with her; otherwise he is lost," or "It is better for me to sit in the debtor's prison in Russia than to remain abroad."
The simplicity and mildness of his wife's portion of the book, her reiterated devotion, and pat little assurances of her obedience and loyalty might almost be termed prosaic. Yet now and then she describes with an engaging archness certain incidents of her and her husband's life together. In commenting on his well-known attacks of jealousy she shows him to us driven to a frenzy of resentment by a timorous admirer who devoted his attentions exclusively to her merely as a means of securing favour in the eyes of the famous author. Dostoevsky, like a character in one of his own novels, finally gives a crashing blow to a nearby table, breaking a glass and nearly upsetting a lighted lamp, seizes his coat, flings himself out of the door, and starts running distractedly up the road while after him follows his loyal and exasperated wife calling loudly "Fedya, Fedya, are you mad? Where are you running?" Indeed, one sees traces of this same riding suspicion in his anxious and touchingly delicate letters to her from Moscow. "My lovely, dearest, darling Anya," one of them begins, and ends "I keep on having very bad dreams, nightmares about your being unfaithful to me with others." Even his exhilaration over the spectacular part he is to play in the great celebration is overshadowed by his eagerness to return to his family in the cramped, shabby rooms, where every morning new creditors sit angrily on the rickety rented chairs, rooms where hours of anguish and joy so strangely intermingle.
Fresh proof of his resentment toward Turgenev is revealed, "Turgenev has only clacquers, but my people have true enthusiasm." That the temporary embrace which passed between the two on the crest of Dostoevsky’s overwhelming triumph was but a momentary lowering of hostilities is already well enough known.
One regrets in the translation of this material the use of certain verbal vulgarities usually associated with the insincerity and lack of taste of the English middle classes, and the presence of these seriously interferes with the strength and dignity of the original Text, as for instance "seedy," "smithereens," "awful lot," to mention only a few.
As with Dostoevsky's novels so in reading over the present collection one's critical faculties forgo their habitual vigilance, and one is lost in speculation over the mysterious qualities of a person-
