ABSTRACT
All the great novelists of the world are Russian, and foremost among them is Dostoevsky. So Arnold Bennett declared, speaking for a generation that was bowled over by the publication in 1912 of Constance Garnett's translation of The Brothers Karamazov. 1 The Dostoevsky craze spread so rapidly that, the following year, the inimitable Max Beerbohm felt called upon to issue what purports to be a biographical sketch of another esteemed Russian novelist. This prodigy is said to have, at the age of 18, murdered his grandmother as a sign of his precocious genius. Such a conflation of Dostoevsky with his characters is named Luntic Kolniyatsch. Give the name a Cockney inflection and it sounds like Colney Hatch, the lunatic asylum. 2
