ABSTRACT
Not one of Dostoeffsky's characters is at ease in the authors' world; in every case their sensibilities reach back to the fundamental problems of life. Dostoeffsky loves his creations only so long as they suffer, only so long as they manifest in a high degree the conflicting tendencies in his own life, so long as they are chaotic, so long as this primal disorder can shape itself into destiny. Dostoeffsky's heroes, on the other hand, neither seek a contact with real life, nor ever find it; that is their peculiarity. These creatures of Dostoeffsky's universe wish to drink at the fountain-head, not from the pipes and conduits in the streets of the authors' cities; they want to feel eternity, the infinite, within their hearts, and to escape the temporal. Dostoeffsky's characters are the pathfinders into another world, his novels form the background to the mythus of the new men who are to be born of the Russian spirit.
