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A psychological novel by a master writer. The story of a lame and otherwise inferior individual, purporting to be written by himself, chopped up into chapters of varying length much after the fashion of a diary, and setting forth the circumstances which led up to a brief career of crime, a six year term of imprisonment, and a final coming out of it all with little more than a feeling as if it were all a bad dream.
The story deals with a young government clerk, plodding along and helping to support his widowed mother. One day he sees the beautiful, golden-haired daughter of a neighboring merchant, and falls deeply in love with her. From that moment he is a changed man. His egotism mounts by leaps and bounds, he writes a few indifferent poems that are rejected, and believes himself to be the coming poet of the century. Money he needs to support this new conception of himself and he arranges with a disreputable associate to defraud his wealthy aunt. He plunges from one excess to another, and in a final effort to rob his aunt he is apprehended as an accessory and serves six years in prison.
The extraordinary effect of his love for the young girl, who by the way he never speaks to, would indicate that she may have stood for an incest object; the result, however, is nothing short of a definite psychosis from which apparently he recovers with defect, for as the story opens we find him married to the young woman who stood by him through all his difficulties and who now keeps a little store, while he sits quietly up-stairs in his room, smoking cheap tobacco and dreaming his life away.
The story is written in a manner that suggests the art of the Russian story tellers. It is a ruthless discovery of the secret motives of an