the novel, and of whom a few hints are preserved in the rough draft
which no doubt issue from the idea of _The Life_.
The hesitation and vacillation as to the plan of the novel spread over
so long a time that, when he was finishing the second part of the novel
(Chapter IX.), Dostoevsky was even nearer to the plan of _The Life of a
Great Sinner_ than to the form which _The Possessed_ finally took. He
still meant to represent his great sinner, Stavrogin, in the light of
Grace. But, as he worked on the last chapter of the novel and approached
the catastrophe in the third part, Dostoevsky evidently realized that it
was impossible to carry out the religious and artistic objects which he
had in view. Dostoevsky did not find himself possessed of the artistic
powers needed to convert the Great Sinner, and everything that was
leading up to the expected conversion (Chapter IX.) was abandoned. Only
an echo of his original intention is left—not in the novel even, but on
the first page, in the quotation from the Gospels of the promise to the
sinner that he shall find salvation at the feet of Christ. The crimes of
the hero appeared to the writer at the end of his work suddenly, and
against his expectation, like a stronghold, enduring and
self-sufficient.
And in this sketch of the evolution of the significant idea of _The
Possessed_ is shown, I think, the usual course of Dostoevsky’s artistic
problems and their solution. _The Idiot_, _The Raw Youth_, and _The
Brothers Karamazov_ had all, like _The Possessed_, been meant originally
to reveal that desire for “universal harmony” cherished by Dostoevsky,
the universal Hosannah which Dostoevsky, the thinker, had visualized as
the hidden essence of the universe, clouded, but only accidentally, by
the phantom of sin. But each time, in the finished work of Dostoevsky,
the artist, there triumphed a sterner, but for all that a more
religious, conception of the world as a world subject to sin, beyond the
Grace of the Spirit, which is granted it as a gift, but not hidden in
the substance of nature.
Stavrogin’s Confession, as it echoed Dostoevsky’s optimistic view, had
inevitably to disappear in his masterpiece.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE UNFULFILLED IDEA
INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO
_THE LIFE OF A GREAT SINNER_
BY
N. BRODSKY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE UNFULFILLED IDEA
CREATIVE ideas and conceptions circled perpetually round the agitated
Dostoevsky like a whirlwind. His soul knew no rest, he was always at
boiling-point, and he rushed simultaneously along different roads in
different directions. Artistic visions raced before him in many streams
at the same time. “Ideas were born in his head like spray in a
whirlpool,”—such was A. E. Risenkampf’s memory of Dostoevsky as a boy
when a pupil in the College of Engineering. The same impression of a
dynamic spirit, saturated through and through with ideas and visions,
Dostoevsky also produced when he was a mature man. “Listen, listen,” was
his usual beginning as he entered upon the discussion of a problem that
interested him, so we read in the reminiscences of Prince V. M. “‘I’ll
tell you what,’ he would add, and then would clutch his head, as though
there immediately rushed into it so many ideas that he found it
difficult to begin. Very often for that reason he began to speak from
the end, from the conclusion, from a few very remote, very complicated
entanglements of his thought; or he would express the first and
principal idea and then would develop the parentheses, and begin
expressing supplementary and explanatory ideas or anything that occurred
to him _à propos_ at the moment.... This sudden inspiration was so
strong in him that it was felt not only in him but around him....”[99]
Footnote 99:
Prince V. M., _Reminiscences of F. M. Dostoevsky_, “Dobro,” No. 2-3,
1881.
This intellectual peculiarity of Dostoevsky’s is easily verified when
one listens to his own confessions. “I have a multitude of ideas,” he
wrote in 1845 to his brother Michael, when he had just begun his
literary career. “There is so much that is new in my life every day, so
many changes, so many impressions.... I am always busy, I have a
multitude of ideas and I write incessantly,” he wrote in 1846. In 1849
he writes to his brother: “I do not waste time in vain; I have thought
out three stories and two novels, one of which I am writing now.” When
he came out from prison in 1856 he wrote to A. Maikov from
Semipalatinsk: “I can’t tell you what agonies I suffered through not
writing at the galleys. And yet work was boiling within.” ... A few
years later we have the same confession, which proves the incessant,
complex, and many-sided activity of Dostoevsky’s spirit. In 1868 he
wrote to A. Maikov from Florence: “I have a tremendous novel in my head
now.” “I have an idea for a fairly long story of twelve printed sheets,
which attracts me. I have another idea.” “I have a number of themes,” he
writes to Maikov in 1870. “I have six stories conceived and planned
out,” he writes to N. N. Strakhov in 1870.
It is no wonder that Dostoevsky, possessed by a clamorous multitude of
visions, could not arrest them all, and could not fix them in print.
Every instant new subjects occurred to him and new characters. Somewhere
in the subconscious part of him all this material was melted into one
monolithic whole, but it gushed out so impetuously and variously on the
surface and overflowed into so many channels that it was impossible to
catch all the details and all the particulars. N. N. Strakhov,
Dostoevsky’s intimate friend, left a remarkable description which
testifies to the unrestrained overflow of Dostoevsky’s imagination. “New
characters, new schemes for novels, new problems occurred to him
incessantly; they besieged him. They even hampered his work.” Strakhov
says, “Certainly he only wrote a tenth part of the novels which he had
thought out and carried about with him, sometimes for many years. Some
of them he told in detail and with great enthusiasm, and he had endless
schemes like this which he had not time to work out.” Neither Strakhov
nor the other memoir writers (with the exception of Sophie Kovalevsky)
told Dostoevsky’s admirers about those plans of which he spoke “with
great enthusiasm.”... In Dostoevsky’s note-books there remain traces of
his creative ideas, “ideas for new stories,” plans of unfinished works,
“memento. For my whole life.” Thus on one page I found a note: “In 1860,
(1) The Darling, (2) Spring Love, (3) The Double (to re-write it), (4)
Memoirs of a Convict (fragments), (5) Apathy and Impressions.” “Spring
Love” is the title of a novel of which only the plan is left.... Under
the date Nov. 23, 1859, he put down the “plan of the tragedy _Fatum_.
Plan of Comedy: the lady places the married teacher under arrest because
he is married.” Among the stories of Makar Ivanovich (in _The Raw
Youth_) there was a story about “a squire who rebuilt a village that had
been destroyed by fire. Stinking Lizzie. How the Holy Monks killed a
monk, etc.”[100]
Footnote 100:
From unpublished materials.
On Dec. 11, 1868, Dostoevsky announced to Apollon Maikov that he had
conceived the idea of a “tremendous novel. Its title is _Atheism_ (it
will not be ready for two years).” The author attributed great
importance to this novel. “When I have written this last novel, then I
can die—I shall have expressed myself completely.” “Now I believe that I
shall express the whole of myself in it,” he wrote of the same novel, in
March 1869, to Madame S. A. Ivanov-Khmirov.
The principal character of the novel was meant to be “a Russian man of
our society, _not young_, not highly educated, but not uneducated, of
some standing, and _suddenly_, when already on in years, he loses his
belief in God. All his life he was occupied with his business, and never
got out of the rut, and distinguished himself in nothing until the age
of forty-five. (The solution of the problem is psychological: deep
feeling, a man, and a Russian.) The loss of his belief in God affects
him tremendously (indeed, the action in the novel, the setting, are
huge, Dostoevsky wrote on Dec. 11, 1868, to A. Maikov). He looks about
everywhere among the younger generation, among atheists, Slavophils and
Westerners, among Russian fanatics and hermits, among priests; by the
way, he gets stuck fast on the hook of a Jesuit propagandist, a Pole;
from him he descends into the abyss of Khlistovshchina [a fanatical
Russian sect], and at last he finds Christ and Russia, the Russian
Christ and the Russian God.” “Two or three characters have shaped very
well in my head, among them a Catholic enthusiast, a priest (of the kind
of Fanier’s St. Francis),” Dostoevsky wrote to Madame S. A.
Ivanov-Khmirov on March 8, 1869, confident that his novel is “a real
poem”; “it must have a great effect on account of its theme”; “it will
attract the reader involuntarily.” But that novel was not written—new
ideas crowded in.... Yet the mysterious threads of the creative idea
were not torn. They are combined in other entanglements, in another
novel of which Dostoevsky wrote to Strakhov on March 24, 1870, that its
“idea has been alive in me for three years.”[101] That new novel was
intended for the magazine _Sarya_. The author wrote that the “whole plan
of the novel was ‘ripe.’” “During three years a great deal has become
ripe”; “the idea of the novel demanded a large volume”; in its bulk at
any rate, the same as Tolstoi’s _War and Peace_. “The novel will consist
of five very long stories (about fifteen printed folios each). The
stories are quite separate from one another, so that they could even be
sold separately, and published in various magazines (except the two
stories in the middle),” so he wrote to A. Maikov on March 25, 1870.
“The common title will unite them into a whole novel.”
Footnote 101:
“This future novel has been tormenting me now for more than three
years.”
In his letter to N. N. Strakhov of March 24, 1870, we hear about the
title of the novel _The Life of a Great Sinner_. Dostoevsky’s letter,
written on the following day to A. Maikov, gives very valuable
particulars about the novel. The action of the first book takes place as
far back as the forties. “The main question which runs through all the
books is the same which has tormented me, consciously and unconsciously,
all my life—the existence of God. The hero is at different times in his
life an atheist, a believer, a fanatic, and sectarian, now again an
atheist. The action of the second book will take place in a monastery. I
place all my hopes on this second book. Perhaps they will say at last
that I have written not merely trifles. (To you alone, Apollon
Nikolaevich, I make the confession: I want to make Tikhon Sadonsky in
the second book the central figure, of course under a different name,
but he is also a bishop and will live in a monastery in retirement.) A
thirteen-year-old boy who took part in a criminal offence, highly
developed and depraved (I know that type), the future hero of the whole
novel, is placed in the monastery by his parents (educated, of our
class) to be educated there. The young wolf and nihilist of a boy makes
friends with Tikhon (you surely know the character and the whole aspect
of Tikhon.) I shall put Chaadaev also here in the monastery (also of
course under a different name). Why should not Chaadaev spend a year in
a monastery? Suppose that Chaadaev, after his first article, for which
his mental state was examined into by doctors every week, could not bear
it any longer and published, let us say, abroad a pamphlet in French. It
is extremely likely that for this offence he might have been sent to
spend a year in a monastery. Belinsky, for instance, Granovsky, even
Pushkin might come to Chaadaev as visitors. (It is not Chaadaev; I only
take that as a type in my novel.) In the monastery are also Pavel
Prusky;[102] Golubov[103] is also there, and the monk Parfeny.[104] (In
this world I am an expert, and I know the Russian monastery from my
childhood’s days.) But the chief thing is—Tikhon and the boy. For the
love of God do not tell any one the contents of the second part. I never
tell my themes beforehand; it feels awkward; but to you I confess
myself. To others it may not be worth a farthing, but to me it is a
treasure. Don’t tell them about Tikhon. I wrote to Strakhov about the
monastery, but I did not write about Tikhon. Perhaps I shall represent a
grand, positive, holy character. It is no longer a Konstanjhoglo, nor
the German (I forget his name) in _Oblomov_, nor the Lopukhovs and
Rakhmetovs. True, I shall not create anything, but shall only reveal the
actual Tikhon whom I have long since taken to my heart with rapture. But
I shall, if I succeed, consider even this an important deed for myself.
Do not then tell it to any one. But for the second book, for the
monastery, I must be in Russia.[105] Ah, if only I succeed in it! The
first book is the childhood of the hero. It is understood that children
are not in the scene; there is a love story.”
Footnote 102:
A sectarian of the old faith, who founded a printing-office in the
’60’s to print the books of the old faith; later embraced orthodoxy.
Footnote 103:
Editor of the journal of the old faith, _Istina_, in the ’60’s;
embraced orthodoxy under the influence of the monk Pavel.
Footnote 104:
Author of the book in three volumes, _The Story of My Wanderings in
Russia, Moldavia, Turkey, and the Holy Land_; Moscow, 1856.
Footnote 105:
Dostoevsky was at that time in Dresden.
Dostoevsky attributed to this novel the importance of a personal
confession and final summing up. “This will be my last novel.” “I
consider this novel as the last word in my literary career.” Six years
had to be spent in work on it. Interrupted by the idea and plan of _The
Possessed_, busily engaged in writing for the _Russkìi Vèstnik_,
Dostoevsky was waiting the moment when he could sit down to his large
canvas “with pleasure.” But the novel was only planned out with any
distinctness in its first stage, in the rough draft of the syllabus; and
the individual characters, ideas, and scenes have been dispersed in a
series of subsequent novels.
Among Dostoevsky’s manuscripts, preserved by his widow, A. G.
Dostoevsky, and handed over by her to the Russian Historical Museum, are
Dostoevsky’s note-books, and in one of them is the detailed plan of a
novel portraying the principal hero in the days of his childhood in the
monastery and after he came out of the monastery. The plot of the novel
changed in the course of writing; now the boy is with his family, now
from the beginning he is with the Alfonsky family. The details of the
novel were also erratic: its “canvas” could always be covered with new
patterns. The novelist’s favourite word “invent” serves to indicate that
the plan of the novel in question could by no means be considered
fixed.[106]
Footnote 106:
The original draft gives the following characteristics of the hero:
—No authority.
—Germs of the most violent physical passions.
—Inclinations towards boundless power and unshakable belief in his
authority. To move mountains. And is glad to test his power.
—Struggle—his second nature. But quiet, not stormy.
—Despises falsehood with all his strength.
We publish the _complete_ text of the plan of _The Life of a Great
Sinner_, preserving all the peculiarities of the writing and punctuation
of the original.
The novel was planned during various months in 1869-70.
The significance of this novel autobiographically is undeniable.
Strakhov has already called Dostoevsky the most subjective of writers. A
great many things show that in _The Life of a Great Sinner_ Dostoevsky
intended to dissect his soul, to open its wounds, to free himself from
the tormenting impulses of his _ego_, to chastise the outbreaks of his
spiteful, vicious thoughts, to lay bare before himself the secret places
of his soul, and to bring out into the light of day that darkness, so as
to disperse it—like Gogol, who fought the defects of his own spirit in
describing the characters in his books.
The hero of _The Life_ is not of course a portrait of the writer; the
details of the description are invented,[107] but _The Life_ gives hints
of the most interesting kind for an understanding of the writer’s
character.
Footnote 107:
Evidently Dostoevsky got some material for his “model” in I. N.
Shidlovsky, a friend of his youth, who serves also as the prototype of
Stavrogin in the first stages of work upon him.
The whole background in the first part is steeped in the raw material of
real life, of recollections of the writer’s actual experiences. “Brother
Misha”—is he not Michael, one of Dostoevsky’s younger brothers? Sushar
is Nikolai Ivanovich Souchard, the French teacher who gave lessons to
the Dostoevsky children. _Chermak_ is Leontii Ivanovich Chermak, in
whose boarding-school Fedor Dostoevsky spent the years 1834-37. _Umnov_
is a playmate of the Dostoevsky brothers who used to come to their
house, the Vanichka Umnov who brought them various books and books in
manuscript (for instance _The House of the Mad_, by Voyekov, etc.).
The list of authors and books known to the well-read hero of _The Life_
takes us vividly into the childhood and youth of Dostoevsky himself. The
New Testament, the Bible, Gogol, Pushkin, Walter Scott, Karamzin, works
on history and geography, _Arabian Nights_, etc.—all these are confirmed
by Dostoevsky’s own accounts of the early years of his life and in the
reminiscences of him by his brother Andrei Mikhailovich. The latter,
speaking of their family readings, points out first of all that the
father and mother read aloud the usual books to their children: _The
History of the Russian State_ by Karamzin, and above all volumes xi. and
xii. Karamzin’s _History_ was Fedor Dostoevsky’s table-book, and he
always read it when he had nothing new to read. Karamzin’s stories _Poor
Lisa_ and _Marfa Possadnitsa_ were also read aloud, also _Letters of a
Russian Traveller_. Dostoevsky himself owned to N. N. Strakhov (December
2, 1870): “I grew up on Karamzin”; and in _The Journal of a Writer_
Dostoevsky said that at the age of ten he “already knew almost all the
principal episodes of Russian history from Karamzin.” Andrei
Mikhailovich Dostoevsky says: “I saw Walter Scott most often in the
hands of my brother Fedor.” To a correspondent who asked Dostoevsky to
advise him about his daughter’s reading, Dostoevsky wrote in 1880: “When
I was twelve, during my summer holiday in the country I read Walter
Scott all through. From that reading I took with me into life so many
splendid and lofty impressions that they certainly formed a great force
in my soul for the struggle against impressions of a tempting, sensual,
and corrupting kind.” According to the recollections of Andrei
Dostoevsky, Pushkin was read many times and was almost learnt by heart.
Gogol, too, was one of his brother’s favourite writers in boyhood.
Referring to Dostoevsky’s love for Gogol, A. E. Risenkampf recorded that
Dostoevsky as a boy recited to him by heart whole pages from _Dead
Souls_. Concerning the New Testament Dostoevsky wrote: “I come from a
Russian and religious family. We in our family knew the New Testament
almost from early childhood.” As a boy of eight he was greatly impressed
by hearing in church the Bible story of Job.[108]
Footnote 108:
Madame A. G. Dostoevsky made the following note in the margin of the
title-page of _Brothers Karamazov_ (seventh edition, p. 308), beside
the quotation “A hundred and four sacred stories from the Old and New
Testament.” “Fedor Mikhailovich learnt to read from this book.” The
book is in the F. M. Dostoevsky Museum. (From unpublished materials.)
Relations of F. M. Dostoevsky remember that the stories from the
_Arabian Nights_ were told to the brothers Dostoevsky by an old woman,
Alexandra Nikolaevna, who used often to visit the family. She would tell
one story after another, and the children would not leave her side. In
F. M. Dostoevsky’s own words he was very fond of books of adventure.
_The Inhabitants of the Moon_ is evidently the title of a book which was
very popular in the thirties—“Of the Inhabitants of the Moon and other
remarkable discoveries made by the astronomer Sir John Herschel during
his stay at the Cape of Good Hope, translated from the German,
Petersburg, 1836.” That infatuation for the theatre, particularly for
_Hamlet_, which possessed the hero of _The Life_ finds confirmation also
in Dostoevsky’s biography.[109]
Footnote 109:
See complete edition of F. M. Dostoevsky’s Works, vol. i., Petersburg,
1883, p. 11; N. N. von Voght, “To the Biography of Dostoevsky,” in
_Istoricheskii Vèstnik_, 1901, xii. p. 1028. See also Dostoevsky’s
letter of Aug. 9, 1838, to his brother Michael.
The frequency in _The Life_ of details based on facts taken by the
author from his boyhood inevitably introduces a question as to the right
of the student to look for a _personal_ key in the author himself to his
hero’s character. Indeed, many of the hero’s spiritual experiences
testify to their subjective character.
He loved to test himself; he trained his will-power; he accustomed
himself to “self-torment.” This thirst for self-torment, this anxiety to
spend himself in suffering, so as to be convinced of his ability to
“endure,” was characteristic of Dostoevsky himself. A letter is brought
to him from his brother. “I have invented a new kind of enjoyment for
myself—a most strange one—to make myself suffer,” he tells his brother
Michael, in a letter of January 1, 1840. “I take your letter, turn it
over in my hand for several minutes, feel if it is full weight, and,
having looked at it sufficiently and admired the closed envelope, I put
it in my pocket.... You won’t believe what a voluptuous state of soul,
feeling, and heart there is in that! And so I sometimes wait for a
quarter of an hour....”
The hero of _The Life_ is unsociable, “uncommunicative,” keeps a great
many things to himself, is reserved and avoids people. Michael
Dostoevsky in 1838 calls his brother “reserved,” not without reason.
Fedor Dostoevsky, writing to him about the “strange and wonderful
things” in his life, says “that he will never tell any one this long
story.” In the College of Engineering, Dostoevsky, according to the
recollection of his fellow-students, usually sat or walked alone, and
kept himself apart from all. In 1854 he wrote from Semipalatinsk: “I
live a lonely life here; I hide myself from people as usual.” That
avoidance of human beings in the hero of _The Life_ was fed by his
contempt for them, by a feeling of repulsion, and sprang from “a proud,
passionate, and domineering nature.” Let us call to mind a fragment from
Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother Michael in 1847: “But, Lord, what a
multitude of disgusting, narrow-minded, grey-bearded wiseacres,
connoisseurs, Pharisees there are, who _pride themselves_ on their
experience, _i.e._ on their insignificance (for they are all made to the
same measure), who eternally preach contentment with one’s lot, belief
in something, sobriety in life, and satisfaction with one’s place,
without having realized the meaning of those words,—a satisfaction which
is like monastic flagellation and denial,—and with inexhaustible petty
spite they condemn a strong, fiery soul who cannot endure their banal
daily time-table and calendar of existence. They are scoundrels with
their farcical earthly happiness. They are scoundrels!”
The hero of _The Life_ had by nature a sharply defined sense of
personality, a consciousness of his superiority, of inner strength, of
his own uniqueness. Does not the very same tone sound in the proud and
“hyperbolical” admissions of Dostoevsky himself, when intoxicated by the
success of _Poor Folk_, his first literary venture?[110] “A crowd of new
writers has appeared. Some are my rivals. Herzen (Iskander) and
Goncharov are especially remarkable among them. They are highly praised.
But the first place is mine for the time being and, I hope, for ever.”
Footnote 110:
“I am now nearly drunk with my own fame.” (F. D.’s letter of Nov. 16,
1845.)
Much later, when he had served hard labour, he writes (Oct. 1, 1859) to
his brother from Tver: “Towards the middle of December I will send (or
bring myself) the corrected _Double_. Believe me, brother, that the
correction, provided with a preface, will be worth a _new novel_. They
will at last see what _The Double_ is like. I hope I shall make them
even too deeply interested. In a word, I challenge them all. And,
finally, if I do not correct _The Double_ now, when shall I do it? Why
should I lose a superb idea, the greatest type, in its social
importance, which I was the first to discover, and of which I was the
prophet?” The gigantic individualism of the hero of _The Life_, stressed
more than once by the author, is to be heard in Dostoevsky’s
characteristic admission to Apollon Maikov: “Everywhere and in
everything I reach the furthest limit; I have passed beyond the
boundaries of all life” (Aug. 16, 1867).
Certain eccentricities in the character of the hero of _The Life_ are
worth attention. He loved to “surprise everybody by unexpectedly rude
pranks”; “behaved like a monster”; “offended an old woman.” Something of
the kind, certain collapses in his spiritual life and in his relation to
people, were to be found in Dostoevsky. Thus on his own admission he was
rude to the officer who taught algebra in the College of Engineering
(1838). In his letter to his brother (1847) he gives himself the
following characteristics: “I have such a bad repulsive character....
For you and yours I am ready to give my life, but at times, when my
heart is melting with love, you can’t get a kind word from me. My nerves
do not obey me at such times.... How often I have been rude to Emily
Fedorovna,[111] the noblest of women, a thousand times better than
myself; I remembered how I used sometimes to be deliberately cross with
Fedya whom at the same time I loved even better than yourself....”
Footnote 111:
The wife of Michael Dostoevsky.
There flared up at times in the hero of _The Life_ “a feeling of
destructiveness,” and the same feeling showed itself in Dostoevsky’s
view of the world when he was a boy. “Up till now I did not know what
wounded vanity meant,” he wrote on Oct. 31, 1838. “I should blush if
that feeling possessed me ... but—do you know?—I should like to crush
the whole world at one go.” Those plunges into “abysses” and the
voluptuousness of the hero of _The Life_ have their counterpart in
certain details which Dostoevsky himself relates of his youth.
“Good-bye,” he ended his letter to his brother of Nov. 16, 1845; “the
little Minnies, Claras, Mariannes, etc., are enchanting, but they cost a
terrible amount of money. The other day Turgenev and Belinsky scolded me
terrifically for my disorderly life.”
“The idea of amassing money,” one of the hidden thoughts of _The Great
Sinner_, had early engrossed the attention of the greatest martyr in the
ranks of poverty-stricken writers, who all his life long was in need of
money and passionately awaited the chance of living and working in
conditions of security like Tolstoi and Turgenev. “Money and security
are good things. When shall I get rid of my debts?” “Money—I have not
one brass farthing.” “It is very painful.” “If you can save me, do.” “I
am again in such straits as to be ready to hang myself.” “I am really in
an awful state now.... I have not got a farthing.” “All my life I have
worked for money, and all my life I have been constantly in need.” “How
can I write when I am hungry?... Damn myself and my hunger. But my wife
is nursing, and she _herself_ has to go and pawn her last woollen skirt.
And it has been snowing now for two days. And then they ask me for
artistry, for purity of poetry, without strain, without violence, and
they point to Turgenev and Goncharov! Let them only see in what
conditions I work ... ”—that is the cry, echoing like a groan through
Dostoevsky’s letters at various periods of his life, particularly when
he was abroad, and during the years when _The Life of a Great Sinner_
was being shaped. We have to suppose that the religious problem was
being solved by Dostoevsky much in the same way as it was in the life of
the hero of the novel—by “stretches” of belief and unbelief.
An analysis of _The Life_ which reveals the autobiographic substratum
lets us see with greater certainty the _personal_ traits in those other
novels of Dostoevsky’s into which _The Life of a Great Sinner_ split
off. Versilov’s son, born Dolgorukov (_The Raw Youth_), with his “idea
of discipline,” approaches the character in Dostoevsky’s unwritten novel
who in this respect, by the way, is akin to Stavrogin. The hero of _The
Possessed_, with his falls, “abysses,” and depravity, is also akin to
the Great Sinner. The pages about “Tushar’s” boarding-school, the
exposed child, the figure of Lambert in _The Raw Youth_, are taken from
_The Life_. In certain particulars the Great Sinner approaches Ivan
Karamazov and Dmitri Karamazov. Tikhon of _The Life_ passed into _The
Possessed_ and _Brothers Karamazov_ in the characters of the Bishop and
of the old monk Zosima.[112]
Footnote 112:
A few expressions, typical of Dostoevsky, are found in _The Life_ and
in his later works: thus, the expression “sacrifice of life” found
place there and in _Brothers Karamazov_ (Part I. Book I. chap. v. p.
33; third edition of F. M. Dostoevsky’s Works).
Thus the novel connects the most important works of Dostoevsky’s later
period, and is allied in certain details with the early experiments, for
instance with _Notes from the Underworld_. But much of what he had
planned remained unexecuted and faded in the working out of the chosen
themes. Where is the broad picture of the people’s religious life, with
their world of sectarians and believers of the Old Faith, into which the
Great Sinner plunged? The pale figure of Makar Ivanovich Dolgorukov, the
pilgrim, is very far from corresponding with a great “poem.” The
principal character became much diminished and spiritually toned down in
the “raw youth,” Versilov.
The sketch of the unwritten novel is generally valuable for the light it
throws upon Dostoevsky’s habits of creation. _The novel was not
written._ The huge canvas would not have been covered by the mass of
characters that hovered in the writer’s imagination. The novels
_Atheism_ and _The Life of a Great Sinner_ clearly prove that Dostoevsky
could not cope with the swarm of his creative imagination. He could not
tame and conquer the rush of his elemental visions. His soul burnt too
fiercely to be satisfied with an inferior light. All in flames, his soul
set on fire and destroyed the flashing visions. And it seems as if iron
necessity alone chained the writer to the desk and made it possible for
us to read his works. There is something _accidental_ in the published
works of Dostoevsky. They do not represent the _whole_ creator; they are
paler than his original conceptions.
THE END
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).