INSIGHTS INTO RUSSIAN LIFE.

Evening Post, Volume XCV, Issue 41, 16 February 1918, Page 10

INSIGHTS INTO RUSSIAN LIFE.

" The Gambler ", and Other Stories. By Fyodor. Dostoevsky; translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. William Heinemann, London.

Mr. Heinemann is doing good service to. literature by these translations of Dostoevsky's works for English reading. The volume under notice contains three stories, "The Gambler," "Poor People," and "The Landlady." The first is a remarkable study of the power gambling exercises over- many people, aJI utterly dissimilar in temperament. • There is a remarkable description in it of an old lady, a chronic invalid, who is wheeled, to the gaming tables and falls an easy prey to their fascination, gambling away her fortune what time her prospective inheritors look on i chagrined as they see; the money slipping away for ever from them. Dostoevsky writes as if he were describing personages who had actually lived and whom he- had really met and studied. Th« series of letters of which

"Poor People" consist are pathetic in, the extreme, a.nd incidentally show how terribly hard life for the poor in prewar Petersburg could be. There is something altogether uncanny in "The Landlady "—a beautiful woman, and hoil devotion to Ordynov, a poor noble; also her relations with Murin, a ruined old man. Dostoevsky is strong meat for the average readei.' Here and there quiet humorous passages lighten the (gloom, which is over most of his work. The three tales of this present volume afford a ..deep insight into tha Russian character, as it appeared_ to Dostoevsky; and explains much that in the light of recent events in Russia is difficult to otherwise understand.