Books: Sinners In Chaos

A RAW YOUTH (615 pp.) — Fyodor Dostoevsky— Introduction by Alfred Kazin—Dial ($3.50).

The Life of a Great Sinner was the title that Dostoevsky gave to a vast novel for which he made reams of notes but which he never managed to write. Instead, members of A Great Sinner's huge projected cast of characters kept escaping prematurely from their creator's notebooks and showing up in his completed works. Some of them became prominent people in The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov; a few (including the Great Sinner himself, in his young manhood) became part of...