Dostoyevski and the religion of suffering (Odd Volumes)

The first French edition of Le roman russe, of which this essay is an extended chapter, appeared in 1886 and was perhaps one of the most influential books of literary comment in the nineteenth century, bringing Russian fiction to the attention of French, then English, readers, to whom it was new and interesting. As historian Owen Chadwick later wrote, “Le roman russe was so critical, and yet so constructive, so personal and yet so objective, so penetrating without being astringent, so prosaic and yet so haunting, that even after so many decades you cannot read it without wanting to go back to read the Russian novelists for themselves. If we say that Vogüé ‘popularized’ Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, that would be true. But the description is very inadequate both to explain what the book achieved and the way it achieved that effect.” Eugène-Melchior, vicomte de Vogüé (1848-1910), was a diplomat, writer, critic, an acquaintance of Maupassant’s and other contemporary literary celebrities. He was a frequent contributor to the Revue des deux Mondes, and a friend and associate of Ferdinand Brunetière. Note: This English-language translation is by Col. Herbert Anthony Sawyer and was published in The Russian Novel in 1913 by Chapman & Hall.