I have had this experience three times now, on three different occasions, in admittedly similar circumstances, but not similar enough to explain the coincidence: I am speaking from a podium to a fairly large audience on the topics of — to put it broadly — evil, suffering, and God; I have been talking for
several minutes about Ivan Karamazov, and about things I have written on Dostoevsky, to what seems general approbation;
then, for some reason or
other, I happen to remark that, considered purely as an
artist, Dostoevsky is immeasurably inferior to Tolstoy; at this, a single pained gasp of incredulity breaks out somewhat to the right of the podium, and I turn my head to see a woman with long brown hair, somewhere in her middle thirties, seated in the third or fourth row, shaking her head in wide - eyed astonishment at my loutish stupidity.