Also, it would be an excellent thing if some reader in the higher
walks of life, some person who stands remote, both by life and by
education, from the circle of folk which I have pictured in my book,
but who knows the life of the circle in which he himself revolves,
would undertake to read my work in similar fashion, and methodically
to recall to his mind any members of superior social classes whom he
has met, and carefully to observe whether there exists any resemblance
between one such class and another, and whether, at times, there may
not be repeated in a higher sphere what is done in a lower, and
likewise to note any additional fact in the same connection which may
occur to him (that is to say, any fact pertaining to the higher ranks
of society which would seem to confirm or to disprove his
conclusions), and, lastly, to record that fact as it may have occurred
within his own experience, while giving full details of persons (of
individual manners, tendencies, and customs) and also of inanimate
surroundings (of dress, furniture, fittings of houses, and so forth).
For I need knowledge of the classes in question, which are the flower
of our people. In fact, this very reason--the reason that I do not yet
know Russian life in all its aspects, and in the degree to which it is
necessary for me to know it in order to become a successful author--is
what has, until now, prevented me from publishing any subsequent
volumes of this story.

Again, it would be an excellent thing if some one who is endowed with
the faculty of imagining and vividly picturing to himself the various
situations wherein a character may be placed, and of mentally
following up a character's career in one field and another--by this I
mean some one who possesses the power of entering into and developing
the ideas of the author whose work he may be reading--would scan each
character herein portrayed, and tell me how each character ought to