No. 15
(62 pages)
The Possessed.
In addition to these note-books which were in A. G. Dostoevsky’s list, there were also found in the white case three other note-books not mentioned by her, namely, (1) containing materials for The Raw Youth, in a linen binding, 204 pages; (2) unbound, 33½ folios, also containing material for The Raw Youth (one of these may be either No. 7 or No. 8 above); (3) containing materials for The Idiot, 144 pages.[[1]]
Everything of value in these note-books will be published in a book, now being prepared, which will include Dostoevsky’s letters found in the case; they cover the period 1839-1855, mostly to his brother, as well as the period 1866-1880, the latter being to his fiancée and future wife, A. G. Dostoevsky. The new note-books will make it possible to understand with some accuracy and completeness the method of work by which Dostoevsky produced such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment, The Raw Youth, and The Possessed. Besides these, there are scattered through the note-books subjects of stories (The Crank), long tales (The Seekings), poems (Imperator), which were planned but not written.
In addition to the list which Madame Dostoevsky gives in the note-book marked “en cas de ma mort, etc.,” she also mentions one other note-book in which fifteen proof-sheets of The Possessed had been pasted. This note-book was also found in the white case. On the first page of it A. G. Dostoevsky has written: “In this note-book (in proof-sheets) are a few chapters of the novel The Possessed, which were not included in it by F. M. Dostoevsky, when it was published in Russkìi Vèstnik. The first chapter (proof-sheets 1-5) was first published in the eighth volume of the jubilee edition of the Complete Works in the section ‘Materials for the novel The Possessed.’” (This last statement is not quite correct. In the “Materials,” to which A. G. Dostoevsky refers, the first chapter is not published in full, the first twenty lines not being included.) “The other chapters,” A. G. Dostoevsky continues, “have never been published.”
Below the reader will find the text of these two hitherto unpublished chapters of The Possessed. We have thought it necessary also to republish the first chapter, because all these chapters form a whole and should be given together, and also because the beginning of the first chapter was not published in the Supplement to Vol. VIII. of the jubilee edition. The fifteen proof-sheets pasted in the note-book—particularly after the first chapter—are covered, in the margins and the text itself, with a vast number of corrections, insertions, and additions in Dostoevsky’s handwriting.
We give below the text of the proofs with only a few of the author’s corrections. We have omitted passages which Dostoevsky struck out without substituting a variant, though we give such passages in the footnotes. We have made a few corrections about which there could be no doubt. All the other corrections and additions, which are extremely numerous, will be given in a book of new materials on Dostoevsky which is under preparation. It is clear that the author himself did not consider that these marginal corrections and additions were final. This is shown by the fact that there are several mistakes in the text and the punctuation is not always correct, while often there are several different corrections of the text in the margin and it is not clear which correction is to be preferred; other passages are incompletely corrected, and, lastly, several corrections inserted in the text give a rough version in which the same idea is expressed more than once in different words.
The plan of The Life of a Great Sinner, which we give below, is taken from F. M. Dostoevsky’s note-book which is in the Historical Museum. This plan has recently been published by L. P. Grossman in his book on Dostoevsky,[[2]] but not in full nor accurately, with such important omissions that the text given below can alone be considered accurately to reproduce the original.