heart it seems that she is more good than bad), isn’t she always the same, whether it’s Nastasia Philipovna writing love letters to Aglaya and telling her that she hates her, or in a visit that’s absolutely identical with this—as also the one where Nastasia Philipovna insults Gania’s family—Grushenka, as charming in Katerina Ivanovna’s house as the latter had supposed her to be terrible, then suddenly revealing her malevolence by insulting Katerina Ivanovna (although Grushenka is good at heart)? Grushenka, Nastasia—figures as original, as mysterious, not merely as Carpaccio’s courtesans but as Rembrandt’s Bathsheba. Mind you, he certainly didn’t only know how to depict that striking dual face, with its sudden explosions of furious pride, which makes the woman seem other than she is (‘You are not like that,’ says Myshkin to Nastasia during the visit to Gania’s family, and Alyosha might have said the same to Grushenka during the visit to Katerina Ivanovna). But on the other hand when he wants ‘ideas for paintings’ they’re always stupid and would at best result in the pictures where Munkacsy wanted to see a condemned man represented at the moment when … etc., or the Virgin Mary at the moment when … etc. But to return to the new kind of beauty that Dostoievsky brought to the world, just as, in Vermeer, there’s the creation of a certain soul, of a certain colour of fabrics and places, so in Dostoievsky there’s the creation not only of people but of their homes, and the house of the Murder in Crime and Punishment, with its janitor, isn’t it as marvellous as the masterpiece of the house of Murder in The Idiot, that sombre house of Rogozhin’s, so long, and so high, and so vast, in which he kills Nastasia Philipovna. That new and terrible beauty of a house, that new and two-sided beauty of a woman’s face, that is the unique thing that Dostoievsky has given to the world, and the comparisons that literary critics may make, between him and Gogol, or between him and Paul de Kock, are of no interest, being external to this secret beauty. Besides, if I’ve said to you that from one novel to another it’s the same scene, it’s in the compass of a single novel that the same scenes, the same characters reappear if the novel is at all long. I could illustrate this to you easily in War and Peace, and a certain scene in a carriage …”
“I didn’t want to interrupt you, but now that I see that you’re leaving Dostoievsky, I’m afraid I might forget. My sweet, what was it you meant the other day when you said: ‘It’s like the Dostoievsky side of Mme de Sévigné.’ I must confess that I didn’t understand. It seems to me so different.”
“Come, little girl, let me give you a kiss to thank you for remembering so well what I say. You shall go back to the pianola afterwards. And I must admit that what I said was rather stupid. But I said it for two reasons. The first is a special reason. What I meant was that Mme de Sévigné, like Elstir, like Dostoievsky, instead of presenting things in their logical sequence, that is to say beginning with the cause, shows us first of all the effect, the illusion that strikes us. That is how Dostoievsky presents his characters. Their actions seem to us as deceptive as those effects in Elstir’s pictures where the sea appears to be in the sky. We’re quite surprised to find later on that some sly-looking individual is really the best of men, or vice versa.”
“Yes, but give me an example in Mme de Sévigné.”
“I admit,” I answered her with a laugh, “that it’s very far-fetched, but still I could find examples. For instance …,”23
“But did he ever murder anyone, Dostoievsky? The novels of his that I know might all be called The Story of a Crime. It’s an obsession with him, it isn’t natural that he should always be talking about it.”
“I don’t think so, dear Albertine. I know little about his life. It’s certain that, like everyone else, he was acquainted with sin, in one form or another, and probably in a form which the laws condemn. In that sense he must have been a bit criminal, like his heroes—who in any case are not entirely criminal,