A Funny Man's Dream

Dostoyevsky is intimately linked with his heroes. It is his blood that courses through their veins, and his heart that beats in all of them. Dostoyevsky brings forth his characters in anguish, with throbbing pulse and breath that is gasping and labored. He commits the crimes his heroes commit, lives their titanically turbulent lives, repents with them, and is with them in his thoughts, which shake heaven and earth. Because of his urge to go through more and more experience with them with such terrible concreteness, we are shaken by him as by no one else.