[fantasyfan]

Personally, this would not be one of my favourite Conrad novels. It lacks the narrative power of both Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. I agree with those who find the narrator annoying. Further, the influence of Dostoyevsky is so strong that it seems simply imitative rather than conveying the sense of a powerful psychological drama.

However, some might enjoy this excerpt from a review of the book from the 1911 issue of The North American Review: (Author not given)

"Mr. Joseph Conrad has more than great talent; he has genius; and his latest novel is one of absorbing interest. Its very defects, seeing that it is too unrelieved like that of a previous book, The Secret Agent appeal just because of the " little more" that would have so greatly strengthened and have made more effective the picture. But just here comes in this confounding of values. The picture is too unrelieved for art, and yet is doubtless admirable as history. But Mr. Conrad thoroughly knows his Russia and Russians, the land and its people, with their strange mental and moral obsessions, their worship of an Unknown God which they call Liberty. There are mighty minds that have, nevertheless, little or no selective and constructive faculty. They are like human suns and take the picture of life accurately, but their work remains photographic; and while no one ever questions the truth and use of photography, one must equally recognize its limitations. Mr. Conrad is far from being merely photographic, however, since his work has unusual psychologic and subjective qualities. For in subtle fashion does he put before us the in versions and perversions of the Russian revolutionist mind. Just as there are physical diseases due to climate and modes of living, so there are mental diseases due to political conditions. And Russian terrorism is one of them. The " subliminal uprush" of intrigue and assassination is inevitably consequent upon the schooling of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries superimposed upon the political conditions of the thirteenth. The Russian revolutionists are schooled in French, German, and English ideas, and then are expected to live submissively under a semi oriental form of government. So the strain upon the mental and moral nature is intense, and the effect alike disastrous to the individual and to the cause he seeks to serve. The motto of this book, like that of Anna Karenina, might be 'Vengeance is mine'; for life rights itself, corrects, and revenges.

"Mr. Conrad's book, somber as it is, gives an impressive idea of human nature under terrible conditions, and it is well worth a serious and careful reading by all who are interested in present history and in human, every-day life."