In his pictures of low life, he more resembles Dickens than the followers of Georges Sand of his day.
But the most essential quality of Dostoevsky's creative art is the psychical analysis, which occupies the foreground in the majority of his romances, and constitutes their chief power and value.

A well-known alienist doctor, who has examined these romances from a scientific point of view, declares himself amazed by the scientific accuracy wherewith Dostoevsky has depicted the mentally afflicted.

In his opinion, about one-fourth of this author's characters are more or less afflicted in this manner, some romances containing as many as three who are not normal, in one way or another.

This doctor demonstrates that Dostoevsky was a great psychopathologist, and that, with his artistic insight, he anticipated even exact science.

And much that he has written will certainly be incorporated in psychological text-books.