"Dostoevsky has penetrated more deeply than Tolstoy into the fabric of contemporary thought," Steiner wrote. Dostoevsky's novels, according to Leatherbarrow, "which tend toward plurality and discord in both their technique and the image they project of modern man, correspond so perfectly to the complex nature of modern life as to engage the interest of all readers, no matter how diverse their outlooks. The twentieth century has done everything possible to confirm the accuracy of Dostoevsky's chaotic vision."
And chaos there is in Dostoevsky. The axe murder of a female pawnbroker sets off a strangled chain of events and an interior monologue of startling prescience; a radical and a nihilist involve the innocent in their schemes for a brave new world; four brothers explore realms of guilt over the death of their father; a truly Jesus-like figure is all but destroyed by the modern world. These are only some of the bleak plots around which Dostoevsky built his amazing novels. "Dostoevsky was," according to D. A. Traversi writing in The Criterion, "the master of all explorers of physical and spiritual disorder, and .
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