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out across its pages. In his discussion of Crime and Punishment Gide also shows the clear links that unite it with Dostoyevsky's later works, and illustrates how it prepares the way for them.
    In Russia, as we have seen, criticism of the novel has also been coloured by partisan and ideological interests. In the political climate of nineteenth-century Russia the implications of Dostoyevsky's message were already keenly felt by the book's earliest reviewers, and even in Soviet times literary critics tended to write of it as a work of ‘moral’ and social significance, shying clear of the underlying anti-materialist, anti-revolutionary and anti-humanist elements it contains. Perhaps the most sensitive interpretations apart from those of Rozanov and V. S. Solovyov have come from critics and philosophers of the Christian–existentialist school such as Konstantin Mochulsky and Nicholas Berdyaev, whose thinking and spiritual experience, while not proceeding directly from those of Dostoyevsky, none the less run parallel to them. Berdyaev, who viewed Dostoyevsky not as a psychologist but as a ‘pneumatologist’, a researcher of souls, probably comes closer than any other critic, Russian or non-Russian, to providing a way towards an inner understandingof the novel for Western readers. The way is to be found in Dostoievsky – An Interpretation (1934). There, however, Berdyaev characterizes the Russian soul as being fundamentally different in nature from the Western soul. Berdyaev's study may help Westerners along a part of the route – but in the last result, approached in a non-Russian context, Crime and Punishment requires a leap of the spirit and imagination by readers themselves.
NOTES
    1. All his life Dostoyevsky showed a considerable interest in Victor Hugo's prose fiction, and in 1862, during his first visit to western Europe, he read the newly published Les Misérables with excitement. Crime and Punishment shows the influence of Hugo's novel in respect of plot (a criminal trying to evade a police agent who is shadowing him), background (the sewers of Paris have their counterpart in the canals of St Petersburg) and character (it is possible to draw parallels between Jean Valjean and Raskolnikov, Cosette and Dunya, Marius and Razumikhin, and Thénardier and Svidrigailov, among others). The subject of the many points of coincidence between the two novels has been thoroughly investigated by Nathalie Babel Brown in her valuable study Hugo and Dostoevsky , Ardis/Ann Arbor, 1978.
    2. Philip Rahv, ‘Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment ’, Partisan Review , XXVII (1960).
    3. Helen Muchnic, ‘Dostoevsky's English Reputation (1881–1936)’, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, vol. 20, nos. 3/4.

Further Reading
    Berdyaev, Nicholas, Dostoievsky (Sheed & Ward, 1934). Not a biography in the strict sense, but rather a philosophical study of Dostoyevsky's world view and aesthetics by a major Christian existentialist thinker.
    Brown, Nathalie Babel, Hugo and Dostoevsky (Ardis, 1978). Contains a detailed comparison of Crime and Punishment and Les Misérables , and their structural similarities.
    Catteau, Jacques, Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
    Dostoevskaya, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences (Liveright, 1975).
    Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky : The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Princeton University Press, 1983).
    —, Dostoevsky : The Stir of Liberation , 1860-1865 (Princeton University Press, 1986).
    —, Dostoevsky : The Miraculous Years , 1865–1871 (Princeton University Press, 1995).
    Gide, André, Dostoevsky (Secker & Warburg, 1949).
    Grossman, Leonid Petrovich, Balzac and Dostoevsky (Ardis, 1973).
    Jackson, Robert Louis, Twentieth - Century Interpretations of Crime and Punishment : A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1974).
    Johnson, Leslie A., The Experience of Time in ‘ Crime and Punishment ’ (Slavica Publishers, 1985).
    Kjetsaa, Geir,