Ebook Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to His Family and Friends

The present text, therefore, while it contains much that is relatively inedited, yet cannot pretend to full completeness. On comparing it with a French translation of some of the letters, issued by the Société du Mercure de France in 1908, it is seen to be a good deal the more judiciously edited of the two — the German translator has pared away many repetitions, much irrelevant and uninteresting matter, while he has used material of the highest biographical value which the French editor either unaccountably omitted, or, it may be, had not at disposal. Of such are the letters enumerated above; and, more than all, the peculiarly interesting passage in Letter XXXIV., which relates Dostoevsky's historic quarrel with Turgenev. A word about the punctuation. It has been, so far as was thought at all feasible, left as Dostoevsky offered it. Like Byron, he did not know a comma at least, where to put one — or rather, in Dostoevsky's case, where not to put one, for his lavish use of the less important and lucid sign is very remarkable. Here and there, this predilection has been departed from by me, but only when it too deeply obscured the sense; elsewhere, since even punctuation has its value for the student of character, Dostoevsky's system is retained in all its chaotic originality.