RUSSIAN Literature, like that of America began to free itself from western Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century. Pushkin, Tolstoi, and Dostoevsky all wrote with a nationalistic outlook. As a leading Slavophil, Dostoevsky wished that Russia, with its great spiritual resources, should inspire and redeem the decaying civilization of Europe.

The life of Dostoevsky was closely connected with his work. Epileptic fits, occasional poverty, and a long Siberian exile in a bestial prison camp, made him spasmodically elated or despondent. He discovered in the contact with his fellow prisoners in Siberia, that under a rough exterior many criminals had really extraordinary qualities. He conceived that man might become noble through sin. When Raskolnikov, the young student in "Crime and Punishment," murdered two old women through a Napoleon ambition to transcend all human values at a blow his final defeat was not attributable to the sinfulness of the act, but rather to his lack of fortitude in self-justification. Dostoevsky was not irreligious. At bottom he had a primitive kind of Christianity, which thought man became great through suffering. Furthermore, since man was naturally evil and irrational, there was all the more reason he should find refuge in the perfectness of God.

Mr. Carr's "Life of Dostoevsky" brings out ht peculiarities of the Russian mind from an Anglo-Saxon point of view. His subject had to a high degree the introspective, soul-searching nature of an average Russian. What Dostoevsky lacked was the wide decriptive power of Tolstoi. Psychologically his work is intensely interesting, but this should not obscure the creative and artistic qualities of "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov." Mr. Carr's book is a dispassionate study of the great Russian novelist. The biographer believes that Dostoevsky, in his subtlety, brutality, piety, and lust, came nearer to the inconsistency of the Elizabethans than to any other age. His book, although often unsympathetic to Russian nature, is a readable and thoughtful analysis.