Dostoevsky

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Arnold Bennett introduces André Gide's Dostoevsky as a remarkable critical study by a writer uniquely fitted to judge the Russian novelist: one who combines aesthetic delicacy with moral seriousness. Gide's lectures, first delivered in 1922, argue that Dostoevsky belongs beside Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Nietzsche as one of the central minds of modern Europe, and perhaps beyond them in his reach into moral and spiritual truth. He answers Western objections to Dostoevsky's apparent irrationality by suggesting that dreams, extremity, and contradiction can disclose reality more deeply than ordinary logic. Gide presents Dostoevsky as a novelist of inward struggle, where conscience, selfhood, and God matter more than social surfaces. His characters are unfinished, shifting, and intensely alive, their ideas embodied in crisis rather than abstract discussion. The book also turns to Dostoevsky's letters, revealing a man driven by debt, deadlines, grief, and relentless self-scrutiny, yet sustained by duty to his art. Across the study, Gide contrasts pride with humility, power with sainthood, and insists that Dostoevsky's true genius lies not in essays or theory but in fiction's vivid, tormented, and prophetic life.