Excerpt from Fiction<br><br>A gratifying sign of the times is the fact that the merits of Theodor Dostoievsky, the greatest of Russian realistic writers, are becoming increasingly realised by the reading public of this country, who no longer look upon the works of Tolstoi, Turgeniev and Tchekhov as the be-all and end-all of Russian fiction. Dostoievsky may be said to constitute particularly healthy reading for the "comfortable" section of society, for he lays bare some of the worst of our social sores, and invites all men and women to contemplate the putrescent foulness which civilisation permits to exist, even if it has not brought into existence. That it is Russia of which the author speaks does not make the picture any the less applicable to other modern communities, our own included, since moral plagues and plague-spots of the kind which he describes exist everywhere, and seem to form a necessary concomitant of the system upon which modern society is based.<br><br>Unlike what so many realistic writers portray, his descriptions of the terrible things of this world are descriptions written at first hand, for he himself had descended into, had dwelt in, the Inferno; not merely as a spectator, but as a captive in, an inmate of, Hell - an outcast who had been forced to rub shoulders with the lost souls who herd there, and to endure their bodily pains and mental sufferings. Drawing us pictures of what he has seen and heard in those murky depths, he, by implication, asks of the comfortable section of society what it thinks of it all. Yet he does not seek to extenuate, any more than he seeks to condemn, the vices and foulnesses, moral and physical, of the underworld. He does not lay the blame for what he has witnessed at the door of any particular social system, any particular social class.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of