It is one of the many paradoxes of Dostoevski that this man, endowed with a rich literary culture, and born to become one of the classical masters of his craft, was at the same time a practitioner of “low brow” fiction, as it was manufactured by the most popular writers of the West. One of his early stories, The Landlady, is essentially a gothic tale. Even his more mature creation is affected by the sensational novel, as in the case of The Insulted and the Injured; or, as in the case of Crime and Punishment, by the murder story or detective story. This facet of his talent and taste may also be seen in his high regard not only for Les Misérables of Victor Hugo, but even for Les Mystères de Paris of Eugène Sue. Without this taste for the “thriller” he would not have brought the pathos of his characters to the emotional pitch it attains in those exhibitions of self-pity and self-torture to which he gives the name of “laceration” of one’s heart, or nadryv.
Popular fiction, which during Romanticism had taken in France the strange name of mélodrame, took later the name and shape of roman feuilleton, literally, a sensational narrative published serially in a newspaper. We know that in Russia serial publication came to be adopted even by the literary Journals: and that Dostoevski was bound to avail himself of this method of publication far more often than his great literary rivals. It is well known that his hard financial conditions forced him to sell a novel before writing it. He would compose the current installment while the preceding one was at the printer’s, and the sequel existed only in his brain.
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