ABSTRACT
All the great novelists of the world are Russian, and foremost among them is Fyodor Dostoevsky. In a review of a French translation of Crime and Punishment which appeared in the same year as Frederick Whishaw's version, the Spectator called Dostoevsky the 'most highly gifted' of the Russians, but doubted that he would ever achieve popularity with the English public. Dramatizations of Crime and Punishment had already had some success on the Russian and German stages, and even in Paris. In Henry Irving's interpretations of Mathias and Macbeth, as in Dostoevsky's major novels, a soul-shattering experience is precipitated by a murder. By reabsorbing the murderer into the Christian cycle of sin and redemption, and by subordinating the passions and the intellect to faith, Dostoevsky powerfully reversed the romantic tradition of the demiurgic criminal. When Laurence Irving came to transfer Dostoevsky's complex and tormented student to the stage, he naturally cast him in the mould of his father's homicidal heroes.
