ABSTRACT
The romantic school, reacting against the narrow rationalism of the preceding age, had rather self-consciously harked back to something more primitive or, as people would have put it, more natural; and Dostoevsky was a child or grandchild of the Romantics. The world of Dostoevsky is then a more primitive, more elemental place than the world in which people live. The belief of him in the irrationality both of the world of phenomena and of human nature was balanced by his belief in a rational, or at any rate a moral, force somewhere controlling the universe. The latter belief was, both actually and logically, the sequel to the former. The influence of Dostoevsky did not reach western Europe till a quarter of a century after his death. In Russia, the naive Victorian orthodoxy of Dostoevsky had been transformed by his ingenious followers into a revelation of moral anarchism and spiritual beauty.
