STAVROGIN’S MEETING WITH TIKHON
BY
V. FRICHE
STAVROGIN’S MEETING WITH TIKHON
From Dostoevsky’s Note-books
Bishop Tikhon, to whom Stavrogin makes his “Confession,” was conceived by Dostoevsky as one of the principal characters in the great—unnamed—novel in five books, the plan of which he communicated in 1870 to A. N. Maikov. The action of the second book, on which Dostoevsky rested all his hopes, was to take place in a monastery to which a boy, who had committed a criminal offence, had been sent by his parents. He was “fully developed and depraved” (a type, as Dostoevsky says, well known to him), “a little wolf and a nihilist,” who comes in the end to feel the beneficent influence of Bishop Tikhon. “I want to make Tikhon Sadonsky in the second book the central figure,” Dostoevsky wrote, “of course under a different name, but he is also a bishop and will live in a monastery in retirement.... 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.”
When Dostoevsky later conceived the idea of The Life of a Great Sinner, the hero of The Life, “sometimes a believer, sometimes an atheist,” had indeed to be spiritually reborn in a monastery under the influence of the “holy and grand” figure of Tikhon, and to issue into life as “the greatest of men.”
When Dostoevsky finally decided on his conception of The Possessed, his intention was to give a conspicuous place to Tikhon, to whom Stavrogin (the prince) was to give his Confession, and this Confession adds considerably to Peter Stepanovich Verkhovensky’s story about the Petersburg period of Nikolai Vsevolodovich’s life (The Possessed, Part I. chap. v.).
In the notes published by L. P. Grossman in his book on Dostoevsky (notes taken from the Dostoevsky Note-books in the Historical Museum), there are hints as to Stavrogin’s (prince) meeting with Tikhon, and also as to the subject of their conversation and the crime of which Stavrogin repents in his Confession.
Thus Dostoevsky intended the following words to appear in Stavrogin’s “document”: “And I did all this as an aristocrat, an idler, a man uprooted from the ground. I admit, though, that the chief factor was my own wicked will, and had nothing to do with my environment; of course nobody commits such crimes. But all, who are uprooted from the ground, do the same kind of things, although more feeble and watery. Many people do not even notice their nasty acts and think themselves honest.”
Tikhon, who in the note appears under the name of “Bishop,” advises that this passage shall be struck out, and Stavrogin replies in a grumbling tone: “I am not a man of letters.”
This passage is not in Stavrogin’s Confession. The idea that many people sin in the same way, yet go on living (“in peace and quiet with their conscience”), is expressed there not by Stavrogin, but by Tikhon. And it is Tikhon, not Stavrogin, who says that the latter’s moral fall is a result of his being uprooted from the ground (words inserted by Dostoevsky in the text of the proofs while correcting them).
In these published notes there is also some indication of the motive which decided Stavrogin to make his “document” public:
“Tikhon says: On earth people must be happy.
“(Prince): I am an idler and I am bored. I know that on earth one can be happy (and must be happy) and that there is something which gives happiness, but I do not know what it is. No, I am not one of the disappointed. I think I am one of the corrupt and idle.
“The Prince says to him: I want to test my strength and I will tell you about the little girl.”
As can be seen from Stavrogin’s Confession, he did commit his crime from “boredom.” Not satisfied with Stavrogin’s admission of this in the text, Dostoevsky tried to heighten the motive by adding the following words in the margin: “I say frankly, I was sometimes by no means far from thinking that I should be exiled to Siberia. The main thing is—I am bored. I was so bored that I could have hanged myself, I think. I remember, at that time I was much taken up with theology. That, it is true, diverted me a bit, but later I felt still more bored.”
Finally, in one of the notes published by Grossman the reason is indicated why Stavrogin, when it comes to the point, gives up the idea of publishing his “document”: “the Bishop says that the confession of faith is all right, but that faith without deeds is dead, and he demands a still higher deed, a still more difficult act, a moral labour, as if he said: ‘Well, Prince, are you capable of this?’ And the Prince admits that he is a Prince, he confesses that he has lied and takes back his words: in the end—Uri.”[[82]]
To these notes of Dostoevsky, which are already known, we are now able to add a series of new notes taken from Dostoevsky’s Note-book which is in the Central Archives (No. 15 in A. G. Dostoevsky’s list).
On page 30 we find:
“Lisa[[83]] pays attention to Nechaev.[[84]]
He kills Shatov.
Lisa is convinced that he (Stavrogin) had killed him.
She hurries off to him.
(Meanwhile the Prince[[85]] and Tikhon; before that the Prince and Shatov. Everything as before.)
Lisa runs away with Nechaev. St. Tr.[[86]] And the book-pedlar. He dies. The Prince hanged himself. Everything as before.”
This, clearly, is quite a different version of the end of the novel so far as it relates to Lisa. Another indication as to the meeting of Tikhon and Stavrogin is found on page 37:
“Sum total. Stavrogin as a character.
All noble impulses to a monstrous degree.
(Tikhon) and all passions (with unfailing boredom).
He throws himself on the girl[[87]] and on the beauty.[[88]]
He did not really love the beauty but despised her, but flared up with passion (illusory and momentary, but infinite) and, as soon as he has committed the crime, he is disappointed. He escaped punishment, but hanged himself.”
There is also a hint with regard to one detail in the supposed conversation between Tikhon and Stavrogin. On page 38 we find: “He confesses to Tikhon that he gets fun out of making game of the beauty.” But actually Stavrogin does not make game of Elisabeth Nikolaevna, and she is scarcely mentioned in the Confession and in the conversation with Tikhon.
There is also a hint with regard to the crime committed by Stavrogin on page 37: “No one knows the secret of the marriage[[89]] except Dasha and the beauty. Only Tikhon knows about the little girl.”
Finally, on page 36 there is a hint with regard to the passage in the novel to which Stavrogin’s meeting must be referred: “Stavrogin advises Dasha to give up S. T. and run away with him to Switzerland, to Uri. He had already done this before. Here there is a misunderstanding with S. T., who, to spite her, tells her he is a cuckold ... and Dasha goes to her brother. At the same time (the beauty showed jealousy) she warns him that Stavrogin is married to the lame girl. The beauty is in despair, since all her hopes are lost (for she suspects that the prince is in love with her, and she herself is madly in love with him); she laughs at Dasha; she runs and gives herself to the prince. Immediately after this the murder of the lame girl.
(He went to Tikhon).”[[90]]
Such are the hints and notes out of which eventually grew the chapters of “At Tikhon’s,” and we do not know the reason why they were not included by Dostoevsky in The Possessed. Some details of Stavrogin’s Confession were later used by Dostoevsky for the character of Versilov in The Raw Youth.
INTRODUCTION
TO THE UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER
OF
THE POSSESSED
BY
V. KOMAROVICH
THE UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER
OF
THE POSSESSED
The chapter of The Possessed, Stavrogin’s confession of his terrible crime, excluded from the completed novel, first became known to Merezhkovsky. Mrs. F. M. Dostoevsky (Anna Gregorievna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky’s widow) originally intended to invite Merezhkovsky to edit the 1906 Jubilee Edition of Dostoevsky’s Works and showed him the precious fragment in manuscript. In his book, Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, M. preserved his first impression of that reading by saying that it surpasses the bounds of the possible in its concentrated expression of horror. A. G. Dostoevsky hesitated to publish the chapter in full, and gave parts of it only in her edition of 1906 as a supplement to The Possessed. Her hesitation is understandable: Stavrogin’s terrible confession was not a complete secret even to Dostoevsky’s contemporaries. Excluded from the novel at Katkov’s request, the Confession became known by hearsay, and round these rumours grew up the dark legend of Dostoevsky as a Marquis de Sade. It was the doing of his enemies and of faithless friends.[[91]] But the feeling which kept the author’s widow from publishing the fragment of The Possessed must not restrain the student of Dostoevsky. Indeed, the dark legend that Dostoevsky was a sensualist is based (by N. Strakhov chiefly) either on an obscure calumny, or on coarse and callous surmises as to the mystery of that troubled and too exacting conscience which was the mark of Dostoevsky’s character. And we believe that the surest way of freeing Dostoevsky’s memory from those false accusations is by means of open enquiry and the fullest understanding of Dostoevsky as an artist.
“The scene from Stavrogin (the rape, etc.),” of which Strakhov speaks in the letter to Tolstoi, is preserved in the Dostoevsky Archives which belong to the Pushkin Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences.[[92]] It is a note-book of seventy-seven pages carefully executed in the handwriting of A. G. Dostoevsky, a copy, although unfinished, of a hitherto unknown manuscript of Dostoevsky. It is not difficult to determine the place which had been intended for that fragment in The Possessed. The manuscript is headed “Chapter IX. At Tikhon’s.” From the contents it can be seen that the chapter so numbered must be referred to Part Second of the novel. In our fragment the following incidents are supposed to have already taken place: Shatov’s box on Stavrogin’s ear (the last chapter of Part I.) and Stavrogin’s conversation with Shatov in the night (the first chapter of Part II.). On the other hand Stavrogin’s public declaration of his marriage with Maria Timofeevna (Chapter X. Part II.) is only expected and is still being considered by Stavrogin and Tikhon. Thus, our Chapter IX. ought to follow immediately after Chapter VIII. of Part II. (“Ivan the Tsarevich”), where the maddened Peter Verkhovensky confesses in a passionate whisper his incredible love of Stavrogin, and where Stavrogin—in the highest state of tension (as was ever the case with Dostoevsky)—reveals his true self. (Stavrogin as Ivan Tsarevich, the unknown “he” of all Russia, is hiding himself, the “beautiful” and “sun,” but through Verkhovensky’s wiles is already enslaved by the demon of nihilism.) Yet Stavrogin has two ways and two inclinations which constitute the basis and centre of the novel so far as it affects the religious destinies of Russia. Apart from the temptations of nihilism, he, like the future Aliosha Karamazov, knows also the way to the monastery and to religious obedience. Thus after the embraces of the devil—Verkhovensky (in Chapter VIII.)—there is the confession to Tikhon (in our Chapter IX.).
The question which has to be answered first by the student of this fragment is the question of its relation to the text of the finished novel, The Possessed. Is this Chapter IX. a part of the artistic whole, which, against the artist’s wish, has accidentally been omitted, and which therefore must now be restored to its proper place in that whole? Or is it one of those numerous fragments of Dostoevsky’s, which, corresponding to some early but subsequently altered scheme of the novel, have been detached from the finished novel, and have not been included in the final text by the artist, but are now preserved only in Dostoevsky’s rough manuscripts as curious examples of the complex origin of his books? As to the first of these suppositions, the words of N. Strakhov, which there is no reason to distrust, speak quite clearly. “The scene from Stavrogin (the rape, etc.) Katkov did not want to publish.” Thus the omission of the chapter “At Tikhon’s” from the novel did not arise from the artist’s decision, but from an external cause, the request of the editor of the Russkìi Vèstnik where The Possessed was appearing.
Strakhov’s evidence is confirmed by the connection which exists between the omitted Chapter IX. and Dostoevsky’s creative activity generally, and also with The Possessed as an artistic whole.
The motif of a cruelly insulted little girl, developed in Stavrogin’s Confession, is evidently one of Dostoevsky’s long-standing and enduring ideas. In the year 1866, at the time of his friendship with the family of the Korvin-Krukovskys, Dostoevsky told this idea of his as “a scene from a novel planned by him in his youth.” The hero of the novel one morning goes over all his recollections in memory, and “suddenly in the very heat ... of pleasant dreams and bygone experiences begins to feel an awkwardness—something like an inner pain, an alarm.... It appears to him that he must recollect something, and he makes efforts, strains his memory.... And suddenly, he actually called to mind, as vividly and realistically as if it had happened yesterday ... whereas for all these twenty years it had not worried him at all. He remembered how once, after a night of debauchery and under provocation from his friends, he had raped a little girl of ten.”[[93]]
The connection between this idea and Stavrogin’s Confession is indisputable. The recollection of a sin after a long forgetfulness leads straight to the closing scene of Stavrogin’s Confession and to the last “vision.”
But there are several connecting links between that idea (which in 1866 he thought of as of long standing and remote) and Chapter IX. of The Possessed. Putting aside Crime and Punishment, where Svidrigailov’s vision before his death is also an echo of that idea, The Life of a Great Sinner, which was conceived by him in the years 1869 and 1870, was without doubt to have developed the theme of the injured girl.
The hero of The Life was meant to show by the whole course of his existence the religious consistency of life in general, and the inevitability of the acceptance of God. The Life in its first parts was to tell the story of the constant and increasing immersion of man in sin. To the artist this utter absorption of the hero in sin was a necessity. Here Dostoevsky by artistic experiment tested one of his dearest and most secret ideas—his belief that each personality and man’s life on earth generally will not desert, nor can desert, the kingdom of the Grace of the Spirit so long as it preserves itself entire; that sin has nothing ontological in itself; that man’s soul is by its very nature a “Christian.” If the notes of The Life are read attentively, one sees how Dostoevsky tries to bring the sin and downfall of his hero to the utmost limits, to the last boundary—and this is in order that Dostoevsky’s optimistic belief in the essential illumination of life through Grace should be more strikingly justified, and should prevail in the end of The Life where “everything is becoming clear,” and the (“great”) sinner turns to God and dies confessing his crime.
Sin, the deepest sin, is not innate in, but accidental to, man—this belief of Dostoevsky’s dominated The Life, and led the artist to contrive situations in which the extremes of sin could be shown. To Dostoevsky the violation of the little girl was an extreme of this sort. This theme was provided by the writer with a view to the religious trials of the hero of The Life, for among the notes of the plan there is the following: “He makes an attempt on the lame girl....”
It should be plain that Dostoevsky’s interest in this conception had risen not from personal recollections, and was not maintained by them, but by the artist’s desire to find some adequate way of expressing in the plot his religious conception of the world.
But it is not only the conception of Chapter IX. that is anticipated by the plan of The Life. There is a deeper and closer connection between them.
The note, “he makes an attempt on the lame girl,” occurring in the plan, is closely connected as a particular development of the general idea with the other note, “straight into the abyss.” But this last is intimately connected with another and quite different note, brief but of great significance in the eyes of Dostoevsky, “The Monastery.” The Great Sinner, the violator of the little girl, doing penance to Tikhon in the monastery, was meant to form the second part of The Life, and in the plan is sketched out by independent notes.
It is at the same time the artistic skeleton of our Chapter IX. of The Possessed. The relations between Tikhon and the Great Sinner merely anticipate the dialogue between Stavrogin and Tikhon. “He vowed obedience to the boy” (i.e. Tikhon to the Great Sinner); “Friendship with the boy who allowed himself to torture Tikhon by pranks (The devil is in him).” These notes are closely related to those passages of the dialogue of Chapter IX. where Tikhon humbly lowers himself before Stavrogin, asks to be forgiven, confesses his love for Stavrogin, while Stavrogin is haughty and mocking.... “The boy has at times a low opinion of Tikhon, he is so funny, he does not know things, he is weak and helpless, comes to me for advice; but at last he realizes that Tikhon is strong in mind, as a babe is pure, and that he cannot have an evil thought.”
This note appears already as a simple sketch of the dialogue between Stavrogin and Tikhon, in which the relations of the sinner and the ascetic are depicted in this double way by vacillations between suspicious mockery and adoration.
The close correspondence between Stavrogin’s Confession and the plan of The Life can be explained by the history of the logical construction of The Possessed. That novel grew from the complicated re-fashioning of the originally simple idea which, as it grew larger and broader, drew into itself fragments of The Life, which had been conceived at the same time, but had not yet been executed. Stavrogin’s appearance in The Possessed in the part of the principal hero marks a comparatively late stage in the conception of that novel, which coincides with Dostoevsky’s determination not to write The Life. Stavrogin’s character introduced into the novel the broad religious and artistic problems of The Life of a Great Sinner. The Great Sinner’s meeting with Tikhon and his confession was an organic part of The Life, foreseen by Dostoevsky even in the first moments of inspiration.[[94]]
In so far as Stavrogin is the Great Sinner, his meeting with Tikhon and confession (i.e. our Chapter IX.) are a necessary part of The Possessed. This conclusion is justified by Dostoevsky’s direct evidence. There is no doubt that Dostoevsky had Chapter IX. (At Tikhon’s) in view when he says to Katkov, in his letter of October 8, 1870, that in The Possessed, which was at that time being published in the Russkìi Vèstnik, he “wants for the first time ... to deal with a certain group of people which has as yet been little dealt with in literature. I take Tikhon Sadonsky to be the ideal of such a character. He too is a priest living in a monastery in retirement. With him I confront the hero of my novel and bring them together for a time.”[[95]] That is, up to the end of writing the novel, Dostoevsky himself considered that Chapter IX. was a necessary, inseparable, and essential part of it. The relationship between The Life of a Great Sinner and The Possessed explains that necessity.
Turning to the completed text of The Possessed, we find signs of the seemingly accidental disappearance of Chapter IX. Without that chapter certain details of the novel appear to be incomplete. Stavrogin, when he awoke “looking stubbornly and curiously at an object in the corner of the room which had struck him, although there was nothing new or particular there....”[[96]] Shatov, seeing Stavrogin out, says to him: “Listen, go and see Tikhon ... Tikhon, the late Bishop, who through ill-health lives in retirement in this city, in our Yefimev-Bogorodskii Monastery.”[[97]] The first two details (we could indicate others) are, without Chapter IX., superfluous and have no artistic foundation. And only Stavrogin’s confession about the devil who persecutes him, only his meeting and conversation with Tikhon, only Chapter IX., give to these details the sense of that anticipation of motive which Dostoevsky was so fond of using.
Finally, by excluding Chapter IX. from the novel, we violate the characteristic grace of Dostoevsky’s construction. We violate Dostoevsky’s aesthetic principle, according to which the action in its early stages advances by motives concealed from the reader, and only when it approaches the catastrophe is the hidden cause immediately made clear by the hero’s lengthy confession. Such a “belated exposition” is Raskolnikov’s theory, communicated only after the murder. “The Revolt” and “The Legend of the Great Inquisitor”—Ivan Karamazov’s Confession—are communicated to the reader only after he already knows that Ivan has consented in his own mind to patricide (“Voluptuaries”). There is also the case of Versilov’s confession to his son—after the absurd letter to Madame Ahmakov and immediately before the catastrophe. Stavrogin’s confession before the catastrophe, together with events in the last chapter of the second part and the chapters of the third part, correspond perfectly to this obviously characteristic principle in the construction of Dostoevsky’s novels.
Such are the reasons for thinking that Chapter IX. was accidentally excluded and that it is necessary to restore it to its proper place in the novel.
There are, however, reasons leading to an opposite solution of the question, and they are the more convincing.
If we compare the character of Stavrogin, as he appears in the novel, with the new material which our fragment (Chapter IX.) adds to that character, important and deep-seated contradictions are at once apparent. A pale mask concealing behind itself indifference to good and evil—such is Stavrogin as we know him in the novel. Chapter IX. ostensibly brings to life that dead inert force by means of his religious experiences. Here Stavrogin’s Confession, however absurdly expressed, is a penance, i.e. the act of a live religious will. “You have discovered a great way, an unheard-of way,” Tikhon says to Stavrogin, “to punish yourself in the eyes of the whole world by the disgrace which you have deserved; you submitted to the judgment of the whole church, without believing in the church.” There is also a true humility in Stavrogin: “You ... speak to me exactly as to an equal,” he says to Tikhon; and Tikhon replies: “Your saying that I speak to you as to an equal, although involuntary, is a splendid saying.” And finally, the last verdict of the confessor: “For your unbelief God will forgive you, for you truly respect the Holy Spirit without knowing him.” If this Confession were included in the novel, then Stavrogin’s end, his callous—in a religious sense—suicide, would be perfectly impossible and artistically unprepared for. A man who “truly respects the Holy Spirit” could not have written the letters before his death to Darya Pavlovna; Dostoevsky would have prepared a completely different end from the end of Stavrogin for the elect of the Spirit: “the citizen of the canton of Uri hanged here behind the door, etc.”
This inconsistency in the principal character of the novel, which arises if Chapter IX. is included, clearly forbids any such inclusion. Besides, there are direct proofs that at the time he finished work on The Possessed, and also later, Dostoevsky considered that Chapter IX. was excluded from the novel. The words of the Apocalypse, “And to the Angel of the Laodicean Church,” would hardly have been repeated by Dostoevsky at the end of the novel in the last talk of Stepan Trofimovich with the “book-pedlar,” if he had not considered that Chapter IX. was finally excluded from the text.
Although The Possessed was published more than once after 1871, Dostoevsky, though no longer bound by Katkov’s censorship, did not include Chapter IX. And finally, the following fact gives us the clearest evidence as to how Dostoevsky regarded the fragment in relation to the text of The Possessed: a considerable part of Stavrogin’s Confession was inserted by Dostoevsky almost without alteration in the confession of Versilov (The Raw Youth), in 1874.[[98]] The artist might have used for the new novel the material of the rough draft of the preceding novel, but could not possibly have used a fragment of the authentic text.
Thus, both the completeness of Stavrogin’s character and the definitely expressed wish of the author compel us to conclude that Chapter IX. was not accidentally omitted, but did not belong to the novel. It is a variant of the manuscript, but nothing more. How then are we to reconcile this conclusion with the one which tells in favour of the opposite solution? Surely Dostoevsky’s letter of October 8, 1870, to Katkov clearly refers to our fragment as a necessary part of the novel.
The date, although it coincides with the beginning of the publication of the novel, does not fix the final moment of the conception of The Possessed. The autumn of 1870 is the time when the idea of The Possessed had become closely related in Dostoevsky’s mind with the idea of The Life of a Great Sinner. Stavrogin is almost identified with the hero of The Life. And since the crisis of that Life, as it was planned, was the repentance of the sinner and his conversion to God with Tikhon’s help, Dostoevsky had then planned the same conversion for Stavrogin. At that moment (the final moment in the creation of the novel, for the first part was already being published) Dostoevsky might, indeed, have thought that Chapter IX.—the story of the meeting of the sinner with Tikhon and the beginning of his repentance—was necessary.
The second part of the novel was evidently written by Dostoevsky with the determination to show the “great sinner” (Stavrogin) converted. Our Chapter IX. corresponds to the “serene” Stavrogin who does not appear in 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]]
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]]
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 [[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.”
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.”
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]]
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.
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]]
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]]
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.”
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....”
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]]
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.