morality. One of the eminent critics of his time, Nikolai Mikhai-
lovsky, characterized him as a 'cruel talent'. For Mikhailovsky,
Dostoevsky's heroes were mentally sick people, essentially clini-
cal cases, whose experience could not further the understanding
of the human condition. After his death, so powerful was the
opposition ranged against Dostoevsky that he was virtually
eliminated from his country's cultural consciousness. In thel
tense and unstable political atmosphere marked by five unsuc-
cessful attempts on the life of Aleksander II (assassinated at the
sixth attempt, 1 March 1881), nothing was more calculated to go
against the grain of the then politically correct thinking than the
way in which Dostoevsky undermined the pillars of society in his
mature novels. With the student-terrorist Dmitry Karakozov's
shot at the Tsar in 1866--the first of the five assassination
attempts--still ringing in people's ears, even the choice of the
name ' Karamazov' seemed provocative. It was only twenty years
after his death that Dostoevsky was finally culturally rehabilitated
by the Russian Symbolists at the turn of the century, notably by
V. Rozanov and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, thus paving the way for
his popularity abroad.

Although a novelist, the mature Dostoevsky had less in
common with Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, and Hugo than with the
dramatists of earlier ages. The range and depth of the nine-
teenth-century novel was in the main limited to the analysis of
external phenomena; man was seen as a social animal harmoni-
ous within himself, whatever his relationship with the outside
world might be; he was free from the internal disharmony that
afflicted Hamlet; free from the latent self-destructive forces that
were unleashed in Othello; free from the irrational senile
extravagance of Lear and the delayed, conceptualized carnality
of Faust. Dostoevsky changed all that. He turned man in upon
himself, dragged each man back into his own private universe
'bounded by a nutshell'. For him, in the beginning was the
thought. Dostoevsky's heroes 'feel deeply because they think
deeply; they suffer endlessly because they were endlessly delib-
erative; they dare to will because they have dared to think'. ³

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