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.”