His women also can be divided into two similar, contrasting types; on the one hand, the gentle--the type of the woman who possesses a heart which is tender and loving to self-abnegation, like Nelly and Natasha, in "Humiliated and Insulted"; Raskolnikoff's mother and Sonya, in "Crime and Punishment"; Netotchka Nezvanoff, in "The Stripling." On the other hand, there are the rapacious types of capricious, charming women who are tyrannical to the point of cruelty, like Polina, in "The Gambler," Nastasya Filippovna in "The Idiot," Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna in "The Karamazoff Brothers," and Varvara Petrovna, in "Devils." The reactionary tendency made its appearance in Dostoevsky almost contemporaneously with its appearance in Turgeneff and Gontcharoff, unhappily.

The first romance in which it presented itself was "Crime and Punishment," the masterpiece in which his talent attained its zenith.
This work, in virtue of its psychical and psychological analyses, deserves to rank among the greatest and best monuments of European literary art in the nineteenth century.

Unfortunately, it produced a strange impression on all reasonable people, because of the fact that the author suddenly makes the crime of his hero, Raskolnikoff, dependent upon the influence of new ideas, as though they justified crimes, committed with good objects.

No less surprising is the manner in which the romance winds up with the moral regeneration of Raskolnikoff under the influence of exile with hard labor.
Dostoevsky, to be fully appreciated, requires--perhaps more than most writers--to be read at length.

But the following brief extract will afford a glimpse of his manner.