ABSTRACT
The apparent striving towards fair-mindedness is undermined by Lang’s abiding vice of flippancy. Clearly he feels the power of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and his remark ‘I read in that book till I was crushed and miserable’ oddly echoes Stevenson’s letter to J.A. Symonds (Spring 1886) on the same novel: ‘it nearly finished me’. However, Stevenson goes on to make some of the earliest and most perceptive comments on the book by someone in the English-speaking world; the year of his letter, significantly, is that of the publication of Jekyll and Hyde: both Dostoevsky’s and Stevenson’s novels are concerned with divided personality. (Stevenson, Letters, v. 3, Tusitala Edition, 1924: 81).
