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Title: Stavrogin's Confession and The Plan of The Life of a Great
Sinner

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Translator: S. S. Koteliansky
Virginia Woolf

Release date: April 25, 2018 [eBook #57050]

Language: English

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CONFESSION AND THE PLAN OF THE LIFE OF A GREAT SINNER
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STAVROGIN’S CONFESSION

AND

THE PLAN OF

THE LIFE OF A GREAT SINNER

F. M. DOSTOEVSKY

STAVROGIN’S CONFESSION
AND
THE PLAN OF
THE LIFE OF A GREAT SINNER
WITH INTRODUCTORY AND EXPLANATORY NOTES

TRANSLATED BY

S. S. KOTELIANSKY AND VIRGINIA WOOLF

PUBLISHED BY LEONARD & VIRGINIA WOOLF AT
THE HOGARTH PRESS, PARADISE ROAD, RICHMOND
1922

All rights reserved

TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

The Russian Government has recently published a small paper-covered
book containing Stavrogin’s Confession, unpublished chapters of
Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, and Dostoevsky’s plan or sketch of a
novel which he never actually wrote but which he called The Life of a Great
Sinner. The circumstances in which these MSS. were discovered are
described in the note of the Russian Government which we give below. Our
translation of Stavrogin’s Confession and of the plan is from the text as
published by the Russian Government. We have added translations of
introductory or explanatory notes upon the two MSS. by V. Friche, V.
Komarovich, and N. Brodsky. The notes by Friche and Komarovich are
given in the book published by the Russian Government, that by M.
Komarovich appeared in Builoe (No. 18, 1922).
It should be added that there are two different versions of the unpublished
chapters of The Possessed in existence, and they have both been published
for the first time this year. The second version, which is in the Pushkin
Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was published in Builoe.
We have not included it, since it appears to be an earlier version than that
published by the Russian Government. It should be noted that M.
Komarovich’s note refers to this version in the Academy of Sciences.

CONTENTS

PAGE
Translators’ Note 5

New MSS. of F. M. Dostoevsky: Note by the 9
Russian Government

Stavrogin’s Confession. By F. M. Dostoevsky 17

The Plan of The Life of a Great Sinner. By F. M. 85
Dostoevsky

Stavrogin’s Meeting with Tikhon. By V. Friche 115

Introduction to the Unpublished Chapter of The 125
Possessed. By V. Komarovich

The Unfulfilled Idea: Note on The Life of a Great 145
Sinner. By N. Brodsky

Footnotes 171

NEW MSS. OF F. M. DOSTOEVSKY

Note by the Russian Government

On November 12, 1921, in the presence of A. V. Lunacharsky, Commissar
of Education, and M. N. Pokrovsky, Assistant Commissar of Education, in
the Central Archive Department of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet
Republic there was opened a white tin case numbered 5038 from the State
Archives containing F. M. Dostoevsky’s papers.
In the case were twenty-three articles: note-books, bags, and bundles of
letters and other documents. On one of these note-books, which is bound
(187 numbered pages), is written: “en cas de ma mort ou une maladie
grave”; these are business papers and instructions of Anna Grigorevna
Dostoevsky, the writer’s wife. On pages 53-55 she has written: “List of
note-books in which Fedor Mikhailovich wrote the plans of his novels and
also some biographical notes, copies of letters, etc.” Madame A. G.
Dostoevsky gives a list of fifteen such note-books with a short description
of their contents and disposal: Nos. 1 and 2, Crime and Punishment; No. 3,
Crime and Punishment and The Idiot; Nos. 4-5, Journal, 1876; No. 6,
Journal, 1881; Nos. 7 and 8, The Raw Youth; No. 9, Brothers Karamazov;
No. 10, The Idiot; No. 11, The Eternal Husband; Nos. 12-15, The
Possessed. Of these fifteen note-books enumerated by A. G. Dostoevsky the
following were deposited on her instructions in the Historical Museum: No.
7, No. 12, and No. 13. Note-book No. 8 was in 1901 “transferred to Lubov
Fedorovna Dostoevsky” (Dostoevsky’s daughter), and No. 9 was deposited
elsewhere. The other note-books of Dostoevsky given in A. G.
Dostoevsky’s list, with the exception of No. 11, i.e. Nos. 1-6, 10, 14, and
15, were found in the white case when it was opened on November 12 at
the Central Archive Department.

On the first page of these note-books A. G. Dostoevsky has, in her own
handwriting, given a brief list of their contents, as follows:

No. 1
(147 numbered pages)
1. Variant of the novel Crime and Punishment, under the title On
Trial. (Raskolnikov tells his story.)
2. Materials for the novel Crime and Punishment.
3. Draft of letter to Katkov.

No. 2
(152 pages)
1. Variant of the novel Crime and Punishment.
2. Materials for the novel Crime and Punishment.
3. Materials for the tale The Crocodile.—Answers to Sovremennik.—
Notes.
4. Letter to Katkov (1865) explaining the fundamental idea of Crime
and Punishment.

No. 3
(154 pages)
1. Materials for the novel Crime and Punishment.
2. Materials for the novel The Idiot.

No. 4
(Pages not numbered)
Journal, 1876. January, February, March.

No. 5
(84 pages)
Journal, 1876. April, December.

No. 6
(58 pages)
Journal, 1881.

No. 10
(136 pages)
The Idiot.

No. 14
(56 pages)
The Possessed. Notes for the end of the novel.

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.

STAVROGIN’S CONFESSION

THREE HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED CHAPTERS OF THE
NOVEL

THE POSSESSED

[3]
PART SECOND

CHAPTER I
AT TIKHON’S

I

Nikolai Vsevolodovich did not sleep that night, and all the time he sat on
the sofa, often gazing fixedly at a particular point in the corner near the
chest of drawers. All night long the lamp burnt in his room. About seven
o’clock in the morning he fell asleep where he sat, and, when Alexei
Egorovich, according to invariable custom, came into his room at half-past
nine precisely with a cup of coffee and, by coming in, woke him, he seemed
unpleasantly surprised that he should have slept so long and that it was
already so late. He hastily drank his coffee, hastily dressed himself, and
hurriedly left the house. To Alexei Egorovich’s hesitating question “Any
orders?” he made no reply. He walked along the street looking at the
ground, deep in thought, save that now and then he looked up for a moment,
raised his head, showing a certain vague but violent uneasiness. At one
crossing, not far from the house, a crowd of peasants, about fifty or more,
crossed the road; they walked orderly, almost silently, in deliberate order. At
the little shop, where he had to wait a moment, some one said that these
were “Shpigulin’s workmen.” He hardly paid any attention to them. At last,
about half-past ten, he approached the gate of Our Lady Spasso-Efimev
Monastery, on the outskirts of the town, by the river. Here only he suddenly
seemed to remember something alarming and troublesome, stopped, hastily
fumbled for something in his side pocket and—smiled. Upon entering the
enclosure he asked the first youth he met how to find Bishop Tikhon, who
was living in retirement in the Monastery. The youth began bowing, and
immediately showed the way. Near the little flight of steps, at the end of the
long two-storied Monastery buildings, he was taken over from the youth,
authoritatively and promptly, by a fat grey-haired monk, who took him
through a long narrow corridor, also bowing all the time (though because of
his fat he could not bow low, but only twitched his head frequently and
abruptly), and all the time begging him to follow, though Nikolai
Vsevolodovich followed without being told to. The monk asked questions
incessantly and spoke of the Father Archimandrite, but, receiving no
answers, he became more and more deferential. Stavrogin observed that he
was known here, although, so far as he remembered, he had only been here

as a child. When they reached the door at the very end of the corridor the
monk opened it, as if he had authority, and enquired familiarly of the lay-
brother, who instantly appeared, whether they might go in; then, without
waiting for a reply, he threw the door wide open, and, bending down, let the
“dear” visitor enter. On receiving a gratuity he quickly disappeared, as if in
flight. Nikolai Vsevolodovich entered a small room, and almost at that very
moment there appeared in the door of the adjoining room a tall thin man,
aged about fifty-five, in a simple cassock, looking rather ill, with a vague
smile and with a strange, somewhat shy expression. This was that very
Tikhon of whom Nikolai Vsevolodovich had heard for the first time from
Shatov, and about whom he had since managed to collect in passing certain
information.
The information was varied and contradictory, but there was something
common to it all, namely, that those who liked Tikhon and those who did
not like him (there were such) both kept back something of their opinion.
Those who did not like him probably did it out of contempt for him; and his
adherents, even the ardent ones, from a sort of modesty, as though wishing
to conceal something about him—some weakness, some craziness perhaps.
Nikolai Vsevolodovich had found out that Tikhon had been living in the
Monastery for about six years, and that the humblest people as well as the
most distinguished were in the habit of going to him there; that even in far-
distant Petersburg he had ardent admirers amongst men, but chiefly among
women. Again he had also heard from one stately-looking old man
belonging to our “Club,” a pious old man too, this opinion, that “that
Tikhon is almost a madman[4] and, undoubtedly, given to drink.” For my
own part, I shall add, although this is anticipating, that the last statement is
complete rubbish, but that he is afflicted with a chronic rheumatic affection
in his legs and suffers at times from nervous tremors. Nikolai
Vsevolodovich also learnt that the Bishop who lived in retreat in the
Monastery had not managed to inspire a particular respect for himself in the
Monastery itself, either through weakness of character or through
absentmindedness unforgivable and improper in one of his rank. It was also
said that the Father Archimandrite, a stern man, conscientious in the
discharge of his duties as Father Superior, and famous too for his
scholarship, even cherished a certain hostility against him and condemned
him (not to his face, but indirectly) for his slovenly mode of life, and almost
accused him of heresy. The monks, too, treated the sick Bishop not exactly

with neglect, but with a sort of familiarity. The two rooms which composed
Tikhon’s cell were also rather strangely furnished. Side by side with clumsy
old pieces of furniture, covered with shabby leather, were three or four
elegant things: a superb easy-chair, a large writing-table of excellent
workmanship, a daintily carved bookcase, little tables, shelves, all of which
had, of course, been given to him as presents. There was an expensive
Bokhara carpet, and also mats. There were engravings of a “worldly” nature
and of mythological subjects, and alongside with these in the corner there
was a large shrine glittering with gold and silver icons, one of which was of
very ancient date and contained relics. His library also, it was said, was of a
too varied and contradictory character: side by side with the works of the
great ecclesiastics and Christian Fathers there were works “of drama and
fiction, and perhaps something even worse.”
After the first greetings, uttered with an evident awkwardness on both
sides, hurriedly and even indistinctly, Tikhon led his visitor to his study,
and, as if all the while in a hurry, made him sit on the sofa, in front of the
table, and sat down himself nearby in a wicker chair.[5] To his surprise
Nikolai Vsevolodovich was completely at a loss. It looked as if he was
making up his mind with all his might on a step extraordinary and
inevitable, and yet at the same time almost impossible for him. For a minute
he looked about the study, evidently without seeing what he looked at;[6] he
was thinking but, perhaps, without knowing of what. He was roused by the
stillness, and suddenly it appeared to him that Tikhon cast down his eyes
with a kind of shyness, with a quite unnecessary[7] smile. This instantly
roused in him disgust and reaction; he wanted to get up and go; in his
opinion, Tikhon was decidedly drunk. But the latter suddenly raised his
eyes and looked at him with such a firm and thoughtful gaze, and at the
same time with such an unexpected and enigmatical expression, that he
nearly shuddered. And now it suddenly seemed to him something absolutely
different: that Tikhon already knew why he had come, that he was already
warned (although nobody in the whole world could know the reason), and
that if he did not speak first, it was because he was sparing his feelings, was
afraid of his humiliation.
“Do you know me?” he suddenly asked abruptly. “Did I introduce myself
when I came in or not? Pardon me, I am so absent-minded....”

“You did not introduce yourself, but I had the pleasure of seeing you
once about four years ago, here in the Monastery ... by chance.”
Tikhon spoke unhurriedly and evenly, in a soft voice, pronouncing his
words clearly and distinctly.
“I was not in this Monastery four years ago,” Nikolai Vsevolodovich
replied with unnecessary rudeness. “I was here only as a child, when you
were not yet here.”
“Perhaps you have forgotten?” Tikhon observed guardedly and without
insisting upon it.
“No, I have not forgotten; it would be ridiculous if I did not remember,”
Stavrogin on his part insisted rather too hotly. “Perhaps you have merely
heard about me and formed some idea, and thus made the mistake that you
had seen me.”
Tikhon remained silent. Nikolai Vsevolodovich now noticed that a
nervous shudder sometimes passed over his face, a symptom of chronic
nervous exhaustion.
“I see only that you are not well to-day,” he said. “I think it would be
better if I went.”
He even began to rise from his seat.
“Yes, to-day and yesterday I have had violent pains in my legs and I slept
little during the night....”
Tikhon stopped. His visitor suddenly fell into a vague reverie. The
silence lasted long, about two minutes.
“You were watching me?” he suddenly asked with anxiety and suspicion.
“I looked at you, and was reminded of the expression on your mother’s
face. Externally unlike, there is much inner, spiritual resemblance.”
“There is no resemblance at all, certainly no spiritual—absolutely none!”
Nikolai Vsevolodovich grew again uneasy for no reason and too persistent
without knowing why. “You say this just ... out of pity for my state,”[8] he
said without thinking. “Ah! does my mother come and see you?”
“She does.”

“I didn’t know. She never told me. Does she come often?”
“Nearly every month, sometimes oftener.”
“I never, never heard of that. I did not know.” He seemed terribly
alarmed by that fact. “And she, of course, told you that I am mad,” he broke
out again.
“No, not exactly that you are mad—though, I’ve heard that notion too,
but from others.”
“You must have a very good memory, if you can remember such trifles.
And did you hear about the slap in the face?”
“I heard something about that.”
“You mean everything. You must have a great deal of time on your
hands. And about the duel too?”[9]
“And about the duel.”
“You don’t need newspapers here. Shatov warned you against me?”
“No, I know Mr. Shatov, though; but I haven’t seen him for a long time.”
“Hm.... What’s that map you have got there? Ah, the map of the last war!
What do you want with it?”
“I wanted to refer to it in reading this book. It’s a most interesting
description.”
“Let me see. Yes, the account is not bad.[10] Yet what strange reading for
you.”
He drew the book towards him and gave it a cursory glance. It was a full
and able account of the circumstances of the last war, not so much from the
military point of view, however, as from the purely literary. Having turned
the book over, he suddenly put it down impatiently.
“I positively do not know why I came here,” he said with aversion,
looking straight into Tikhon’s eyes, as though he expected him to reply.
“You, too, are not feeling well!”
“No, not altogether.”[11]

And suddenly he related, in the shortest and most abrupt manner so that
certain words could hardly be understood, that he was subject, especially at
nights, to a kind of hallucinations, that he sometimes saw or felt near him a
spiteful being, mocking and “rational,” “in various forms and in various
characters, but it is always one and the same and I always fly into a rage.”
Wild and confused were these revelations, as if indeed they came from a
madman. And yet Nikolai Vsevolodovich spoke with such strange
frankness, never seen in him before, with such a simplicity, quite unnatural
to him, that it seemed as if suddenly and unexpectedly his former self had
completely disappeared. He was not in the least ashamed of showing the
fear with which he spoke of his apparition. But all this was momentary and
went as suddenly as it had come.
“It’s all nonsense,” he said, drawing back with awkward irritation. “I’ll
go and see a doctor.”
“You should, certainly,” Tikhon assented.
“You speak so confidently.... Have you seen people, like me, with such
apparitions?”
“I have, but very rarely. Indeed I remember only one such case in my life.
He was a military officer; it was after he had lost his wife, his life
companion. The other case was mere hearsay. Both men then went to a cure
abroad.[12] Have you been subject to this for long?”
“For about a year, but it’s all nonsense. I’ll see a doctor. This is all
nonsense, utter nonsense. It is myself in various aspects, and nothing else.
But even as I use that phrase, you certainly think that I am still doubtful and
am not sure that it is myself, and not really the devil.”
Tikhon gave him a questioning look.
“And ... you actually see him?” he asked, dismissing, in fact, any
question of its being a false and morbid hallucination. “Do you actually see
a certain image?”
“It is strange that you should lay such stress upon this, when I have
already told you that I do see it.” Stavrogin again began to grow more and
more irritated with each word. “Of course I see it; I see it as plainly as I see
you ... and sometimes I see it and I’m not sure that I see it, although I do see

it ... and sometimes[13] I do not know what is real: I or it ... it’s all nonsense.
And can’t you possibly believe that this is indeed the devil?” he added,
breaking into a laugh and passing too abruptly into derision. “Surely that
would be more in keeping with your profession.”
“It is more likely a disease, although....”
“Although what?”
“Devils certainly exist, but one’s conception of them may be very
various.”
“And you have again just looked down,” Stavrogin broke in with an
irritating laugh, “because you were ashamed that I should believe in the
devil; but I made out that I did not believe and cunningly put the question to
you: does he or does he not really exist?”
Tikhon gave a vague smile.[14]
“Well, know then that I am not at all ashamed, and to make up for my
rudeness I will tell you, seriously and unblushingly: I do believe in the
devil, I believe canonically, in a personal, not allegorical, devil, and I do not
in the least want to extort an answer from any one; now that’s all.”[15]
He gave a nervous, unnatural laugh. Tikhon looked at him with curiosity,
with a rather timorous, yet gentle look.
“You believe in God?” Nikolai Vsevolodovich suddenly burst out.
“I do.”
“It is said, if you believe and bid a mountain move, it will move ...
though, pardon me this nonsense. Yet I am curious to know: could you
move a mountain or not?”
“If God will, I could,” Tikhon uttered quickly and calmly, again
beginning to look down at the ground.
“Well, it’s just the same as saying that God Himself could move it. But
you, you, as a reward for your belief in God?”
“Perhaps I could move it.”
“‘Perhaps.’[16] Well, that is not bad, either. But you are still doubtful?”
“Through the imperfection of my belief I have doubts.”

“Why, do you believe incompletely?”
“Yes ... perhaps; I do believe and not perfectly,” Tikhon replied.
“That is what I should not think, looking at you!”—he suddenly gave him
a look of some surprise, a perfectly simple look which did not at all
harmonize with the mocking tone of the preceding questions.
“Well, at any rate you do believe that, even if it be with God’s help, you
could move it, and that is something, after all. At least, you wish to believe.
And you take the mountain literally. It is a good principle. I observed that
the progressives among our Levites are greatly inclined towards
Lutheranism. Anyhow it is better than the très peu of the Archbishop, it is
true, under the threat of the sword. You are, certainly, a Christian too.”
Stavrogin spoke quickly, his words now serious, now mocking.
“May I not be ashamed, Lord, of Thy Cross.” Tikhon almost whispered
it, with a passionate whisper, and bowed his head still lower.[17]
“And can one believe in the devil, without believing in God?” Stavrogin
laughed.
“Oh, there are such people everywhere.” Tikhon raised his eyes and
smiled.
“And I am sure that you find such belief more respectable after all than
complete unbelief....”[18] Stavrogin began to laugh.
“On the contrary, complete atheism is more respectable than worldly
indifference,” Tikhon answered, with visible gaiety and good-nature.
“Oho, that’s how you get round it!”
“A complete atheist stands on the last rung but one before absolute faith
(he may or may not step higher), but an indifferent man has no longer any
faith at all, nothing but an ugly fear, and that only on rare occasions, if he is
a sentimental man.”
“Hm ... you have read the Apocalypse?”
“I have.”
“Do you remember, ‘Write to the Angel of the Laodicean Church’?”
“I do.”[19]

“Where is the book?” Stavrogin began with a strange hurry and anxiety,
searching with his eyes for the book on the table. “I want to read to you ...
you have a Russian translation?”
“I know the passage, I remember it,” Tikhon murmured.
“Do you know it by heart? Read it....”
He at once looked at the ground, rested both his hands on his knees, and
impatiently prepared to listen. Tikhon repeated word for word:
“Write to the Angel of the Laodicean Church: The true and authoritative
witness of the beginning of the creations of God says Amen. I know thy
works; thou art neither cold nor hot. Would that thou wert cold or hot. But
in so far as thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I shall spew thee
out from my lips. For thou sayest: I am rich; I have everything and need
nothing; but thou knowest not that thou art miserable, and poor and
beggarly and blind and naked....”
“Enough,” Stavrogin cut him short.[20] “Do you know, I love you very
much.”
“I love you too,” Tikhon replied in a low voice.
Stavrogin fell silent and suddenly lapsed again into his old reverie. This
came as though in fits and now for the third time. And the “I love” he said
to Tikhon was also said almost in an impulse, at any rate unexpectedly to
himself. More than a minute passed.
“Do not be angry,” Tikhon whispered, touching his arm very lightly with
his finger and as though his courage failed him.
Stavrogin shuddered and frowned angrily.
“How did you know that I was angry?” he said hastily. Tikhon was about
to reply, when he suddenly interrupted him in inexplicable alarm:
“Why did you think that I must necessarily become angry? Yes, I was
angry; you are right; and just because I had said to you ‘I love.’ You are
right, but you are a crude cynic, you think slightingly of human nature.
There might have been no anger, had it been any one else but myself....
Though, it does not matter about others; it concerns me. After all, you are a
queer fellow and crazy.”

He grew more and more irritated, and, strangely, made no attempt to
restrain his language:
“Listen, I do not like spies and thought-readers, at any rate those who
creep into my soul. I do not invite any one into my soul; I need no one; I am
able to shift for myself. You think I am afraid of you,” he raised his voice
and looked up defiantly; “you are quite convinced that I have come to
confide to you some ‘terrible’ secret, and you are waiting for it with all the
hermit curiosity of which you are capable. Understand then that I will
confide nothing to you, no secret, because I can perfectly well do without
you....”[21]
Tikhon looked at him firmly.
“It surprised you that the Lamb prefers a cold man to a merely lukewarm
one,” he said. “You don’t want to be merely lukewarm. I have a foreboding
that you are possessed by an extraordinary intention, perhaps a terrible one.
I implore you, don’t torment yourself and tell me everything.”[22]
“And you knew for certain that I had come with something.”
“I ... guessed it,”[23] Tikhon replied in a whisper, looking down.
Nikolai Vsevolodovich was rather pale; his hands shook a little. For a
few seconds he looked motionlessly and silently, as though coming to a
final decision. At last he took out of the side pocket of his coat a few printed
sheets and put them on the table.
“These sheets are meant for circulation,” he said in a tremulous voice. “If
only one man reads them, then understand that I shall keep them back no
longer, and they will be read by every one. That is settled. I don’t need you
at all, for I have settled it. But read them ... while you are reading them, say
nothing; but after you have read them—say everything....”
“Shall I read them?” Tikhon asked irresolutely.
“Do; I am calm.”
“No; I shall not be able to read them without glasses; the printing is pale,
foreign.”
“Here are your glasses.” Stavrogin took them from the table and handed
them to him, and leant on the back of the sofa. Tikhon did not look at him,

and plunged straight into the reading.

II

The printing was in fact foreign: three little sheets of ordinary small-sized
writing-paper printed and stitched together. It must have been printed
secretly at a Russian press abroad, and the sheets at the first glance looked
very much like a political pamphlet. The title read: “From Stavrogin.”
I insert the document literally in my chronicle.[24] I have allowed myself
to correct the spelling, for the mistakes are rather numerous and have
surprised me a little, considering after all that the author was a man of
education and even well-read (of course, relatively speaking). But in the
style I have made no alterations whatever, in spite of its irregularities. It is
at any rate clear that the writer was above all not a man of letters.[25]
“From Stavrogin.
“I, Nikolai Stavrogin, retired officer, lived in the year 186.. in Petersburg,
abandoned to vice, in which I found no pleasure. For a certain period at that
time I rented three lodgings. In one of them I lived myself and boarded and
lodged, and there at that time lived Marya Lebiadkin, now my lawful wife.
My other two lodgings I rented by the month for the purpose of an intrigue:
in one I received a certain lady who loved me, and in the other her maid,
and for a time I was much engrossed with the notion of contriving that both
the lady and the maid should meet each other at my lodging.[26] Knowing
the characters of both, I anticipated for myself great pleasure from that joke.
“While I was gradually preparing for this meeting, I had to go more often
to one of the two lodgings in a large house in Gorokhovaya Street, since
that was the place where the maid and I met. I had only one room there, on
the fifth floor, which I rented from some Russian working-class people.
They themselves fitted themselves into the adjoining room, which was
smaller than mine and so much so that the door dividing my room from
theirs always stood open, which was what I wanted. The husband, a clerk in
some office, used to be out from early morning till night. His wife, a
woman of about forty, was occupied in cutting down old clothes and
making them up into new, and she also frequently left the house to deliver

her work. I remained alone with their daughter,[27] who was quite a child to
look at. They called her Matryosha. Her mother loved her, but often beat
her, and, as is the custom of these people, shouted at her horribly. This little
girl waited on me and tidied up after me behind the screens. I declare I have
forgotten the number of the house. Now, upon enquiry, I find that the old
house has been demolished, and, where there were then two or three houses,
there is now one very large new house. I have also forgotten my landlord’s
name (or perhaps I never knew it even at the time). I remember that the
woman was called Stepanida, I believe, Mikhailovna. Him I do not
remember.[28] I suppose that if a search were started and all possible
enquiries made by the Petersburg police, they could be traced. The flat was
in a courtyard, in the corner. All happened in June. The house was painted a
bright sky-blue.
“One day I missed from my table a penknife which I did not need in the
least, and which lay there for no particular reason. I told my landlady,
without thinking that she would thrash her daughter for it. But the landlady
had just been scolding the little girl[29] for the loss of some rag, suspecting
that she had stolen it, and had even pulled her hair. When that rag was
found under the tablecloth, the little girl did not utter a single word of
complaint, and just looked in silence. I noticed that, and then for the first
time I observed the face of the little girl, which until then I had hardly
noticed properly. She had fair hair, and a freckled ordinary face, but there
was much in it that was childish and quiet, extraordinarily quiet. The
mother did not like it that the daughter made no complaint for having been
beaten for nothing, and she raised her fist, but did not strike; and just at that
moment the subject of the penknife came up. Besides the three of us, there
was in fact nobody, and only the little girl went behind my screen. The
woman flew into a rage at having for the first time punished her unjustly,
and she rushed for the broom, tore twigs from it, and thrashed the little girl
in my presence until her body was covered with scars, although the child
was already in her twelfth year. Matryosha did not cry at the thrashing,
probably because I was there, but she gave a strange sob at each blow. And
afterwards she sobbed very much for a whole hour.
“But there was just this before that happened: at the very moment when
the landlady rushed for the broom to pull out twigs, I found the penknife on
my bed, where it had somehow or other fallen from the table. Instantly it

occurred to my mind not to say so, in order that she should be thrashed. I
decided on it instantaneously; in such moments my breathing always stops.
But I mean to tell the whole thing in the plainest language, so that there can
no longer remain anything concealed.
“Every unusually disgraceful, utterly degrading, dastardly, and, above all,
ridiculous situation, in which I ever happened to be in my life, always
roused in me, side by side with extreme anger, an incredible delight. I felt
exactly this in moments of committing crimes and in moments when life
was in danger. If I stole, I would feel, while committing the theft, a rapture
from the consciousness of the depth of my vileness. It was not the vileness
that I loved (here my mind was perfectly sound), but I enjoyed rapture from
the tormenting consciousness of the baseness. In the same way each time
when, standing at the barrier, I waited for my opponent to fire, I
experienced just the same disgraceful and wild sensation; and once I did so
with extraordinary vividness. I confess that I often myself looked out for it,
because it is to me the strongest of sensations of the kind. When I received a
slap in the face (and I received two in my life), it was there too, in spite of
my terrible anger. But if the anger is checked by it, then the delight
surpasses anything that can be imagined. I never spoke of this to any one,
even by a hint, and I concealed it as a shame and disgrace. But when I was
once soundly beaten in a public-house in Petersburg and was dragged by the
hair, I did not experience that sensation, but only an incredible anger, not
being intoxicated, and I put up a fight. But had I been seized by my hair and
forced down by the French Viscount abroad who slapped me on the cheek
and whose lower jaw I shot away for it, I should have felt a rapture and,
perhaps, should not have felt anger. So it seemed to me then.
“I tell all this in order that every one may know that the feeling never
absorbed the whole of me absolutely, but there always remained the most
perfect consciousness (on that consciousness indeed it was all based). And
although it would take hold of me to the pitch of madness, or, so to say,
obstinacy, it would never reach the point of making me forget myself. It
reached in me the point of a perfect fire, but I could at the same time
overcome it completely, even stop it at its climax; only I never wished to
stop it. I am convinced that I could live all my life as a monk, in spite of the
brutal voluptuousness with which I am gifted and which I always called
forth.[30] I am always master of myself when I want to be. And so let it be

understood that I do not claim irresponsibility for my crimes, either on
account of environment or of disease.
“The thrashing over, I put the penknife in my waistcoat pocket and,
without saying a single word, left the house and threw it away in the street,
a long distance from the house, so that nobody should ever discover it. Then
I waited two days. The little girl, after she had cried, became even more
silent; against me, I am convinced, she had no spite. Though she was,
certainly, ashamed that she had been punished in that way in my presence.
[31]
But for the shame she, like the child she was, assuredly blamed no one
but herself.[32]
“It was precisely during those two days that I once put to myself the
question, could I go away and give up the plan I had invented, and I
immediately felt that I could, that I could at any moment and at once. About
that time I wished to kill myself from the disease of indifference; or rather I
don’t know the reason, but during those two or three days (for it was
necessary to wait till the little girl forgot it all) I, probably in order to divert
myself from the idea which obsessed me, or for fun, committed a theft in
the rooms. This was the only theft of my life.
“There were many people crowded in those rooms. Amongst others there
lived there a minor official with his family in two rooms; he was about
forty, not altogether a fool, and had a decent appearance, but was poor. I did
not make friends with him, and he was afraid of the company that
surrounded me there. He had only just received his salary—thirty-five
roubles. What chiefly influenced me was that I at that moment needed
money (although four days later I received money by post), so that I stole,
as though out of want, and not for fun. It was done impudently and
obviously: I simply entered his room, when he, his wife, and children were
dining in the other little room. There on the chair by the door lay his folded
uniform. The idea suddenly occurred to me when I was in the corridor. I put
my hand into the pocket and took the purse. But the official heard a
movement and looked out of his room. He, it seems, actually saw, at any
rate, something, but as he did not see it all, he, of course, did not believe his
eyes. I said that, as I was passing down the corridor, I had come in to see
the time by his clock. ‘It has stopped,’ he said, and I went out.

“At that time I drank a great deal, and in my rooms was a whole crowd,
Lebiadkin amongst them. I threw away the purse and the small coins, but
kept the notes. There were thirty-two roubles, three red notes and two
yellow. I immediately changed one red note and sent for champagne; then I
sent the second red note, and the third. About four hours later towards
evening the official was waiting for me in the corridor.
“‘Nikolai Vsevolodovich, when you came in just now, did you by any
chance let my uniform fall off the chair ... it was by the door?’
“‘No, I don’t remember; was your uniform there?’
“‘Yes, it was.’
“‘On the floor?’
“‘First on the chair, and then on the floor.’
“‘Did you pick it up?’
“‘I did.’
“‘Well, what more do you want?’
“‘In that case, it’s all right....’
“He dared not finish, nor did he dare tell anybody in the rooms—so timid
are those people. In the lodgings every one was extremely afraid of me and
respected me. After that I liked to catch his eye a couple of times in the
corridor. Soon I got bored with it.
“After three days[33] I returned to Gorokhovaya Street. The mother was
just going out with a bundle; the man, of course, was not at home;
Matryosha and myself were left alone. The windows were open. The house
was all inhabited by artisans, and all day long from every floor was heard
the knocking of hammers or of singing. About an hour passed. Matryosha
sat in her room, on a bench, with her back to me, and occupied with her
needle. At last, she suddenly began to sing softly, very softly, as was
sometimes her way. I took out my watch and looked at the time; it was two
o’clock. My heart began beating.[34] I got up and began approaching her
stealthily. On their window-sill stood pots of geranium, and the sun shone
very brightly. I quietly sat down near her on the floor. She started, and at
first was terribly frightened and jumped up. I took her hand and kissed it

quietly, sat her down again on the little bench, and began looking into her
eyes. My kissing her hand made her suddenly laugh like a baby, but only
for one second, because she impetuously jumped up for the second time and
was in such a fright that a spasm passed across her face. She looked at me
with eyes motionless with terror, and her lips began to twitch as if she were
about to cry, but she did not cry. I kissed her hand again, and took her on
my knee.[35] Then she suddenly pulled herself away and smiled as if
ashamed, with a wry smile. All her face flushed with shame. I was
whispering to her all the time, as though drunk. At last, all of a sudden, such
a strange thing happened, which I shall never forget and which bewildered
me: the little girl flung her arms round my neck and suddenly began to kiss
me passionately. Her face expressed perfect ecstasy. I almost got up to go
away—so unpleasant was this to me in the little creature from the sense of
pity that I suddenly felt.[36]...
“When all was over, she was confused. I did not try to reassure her and
no longer fondled her. She looked at me, smiling timidly. Her face suddenly
appeared to me stupid. The confusion rapidly with each minute took an
increasing hold over her. At last she covered her face with her hands and
stood in the corner with her face to the wall motionless. I was afraid that
she might be frightened again, as she had been just before, and silently I left
the house.
“I think that all that happened must have seemed to her, in the end,
infinitely horrible, a deadly horror. Notwithstanding the Russian swear
words and all sorts of queer conversations that she must have heard from
her very cradle, I am completely convinced that she did not yet know
anything. For indeed it appeared to her in the end that she had committed an
immense crime, and was guilty of a mortal sin. ‘She had killed God.’
“That night I had the row in the bar which I mentioned in passing. But I
woke up in my rooms in the morning; Lebiadkin took me home. My first
thought when I awoke was whether she had told or not. It was a minute of
real fear, although as yet not very intense. I was very gay that morning and
extremely good-natured with every one, and the whole company was very
pleased with me. But I left them all and went to Gorokhovaya Street. I met
her downstairs in the passage. She was coming in from the grocer’s shop
where she had been sent for chicory. On seeing me she dashed off in a
terrible fright upstairs. When I entered, her mother had just given her a

cuff[37] for bursting in ‘like a maniac,’ and thus the real reason of her fright
was concealed. So far then all was safe. She hid in a corner and did not
come out while I was there. I stayed about an hour and then went away.
“Towards evening I again felt the fear, but incomparably more intense.
Of course I could deny all knowledge, but might be given the lie. Penal
servitude glimmered for me in the distance. I had never felt fear, and all my
life, except in this one case, I never before nor after was afraid of anything
—particularly of Siberia, although I might have been deported there more
than once. But this time I was frightened and really felt fear, I don’t know
why, for the first time in my life—a very tormenting sensation. Besides, that
evening in my rooms, I got to hate her to such an extent that I decided to
kill her. My chief hatred was at the recollection of her smile. I began to feel
contempt and immense loathing for her having, after the whole thing was
over, rushed off to the corner and covered her face with her hands; an
inexplicable rage seized me, and then cold shivering, and, when towards the
morning I began to feel feverish, I was again seized with fear, but such an
intense fear that I never knew any torment more violent. Yet I no longer
hated the little girl—at any rate it did not reach such a paroxysm as on the
previous evening. I realized that intense fear completely drives away hatred
and the feeling of revenge.
“I woke about mid-day, feeling well and surprised even at the force of
yesterday’s sensations. Yet I was in a bad humour and was again compelled
to go to Gorokhovaya Street, in spite of all my aversion. I remember that I
wished intensely at that minute to pick a quarrel on the way with any one,
so long as it was a violent quarrel. But when I reached Gorokhovaya Street,
I suddenly found Nina Savelevna, the maid, in my room, where she had
been waiting for an hour already. I did not like the girl altogether, so that
she had come half afraid that I should be angry with her for coming
unasked. But I suddenly felt very glad to see her. She was not bad-looking,
but unassuming, with those manners of which common people are very
fond, so that my landlady had for long sung her praises to me. I found them
both drinking coffee together, and the landlady highly pleased with the
polite conversation. In the corner of their room I saw Matryosha. She stood
looking at her mother and at the visitor without stirring. When I came in she
did not hide as before and did not run away. It only appeared to me that she
had grown very thin and was in a fever. I was cordial to Nina, and locked

my door against the landlady, which I had not done for a long time, so that
Nina left perfectly delighted. We left together and for two days I did not
return to Gorokhovaya Street. I was already bored with it. I resolved to put
an end to it all, to give up my rooms and leave Petersburg.
“But when I came to give notice to my landlady, I found her much
worried and distressed: Matryosha had been ill for three days, had a high
temperature, and was delirious every night. Of course I asked what she said
in her delirium (we spoke in whispers in my room); she whispered back that
she raved of ‘horrors’: ‘“I killed God,” she says.’ I offered to have a doctor
at my own expense, but she did not wish it. ‘By God’s will it will pass
without doctors; she is not in bed all the time; during the day she gets up;
she has just run round to the grocer’s shop.’ I determined to see Matryosha
alone, and, as the landlady let out that she had to go to the Petersburg Road
about five o’clock, I decided to come back in the evening.
“I had a meal in a public-house. Exactly at a quarter past five I returned. I
always let myself in with my key. There was no one there but Matryosha.
She lay on her mother’s bed behind a screen, and I saw her peep out; but I
pretended not to have seen her. All the windows were open. The air outside
was warm, and even hot. I walked up and down and then sat down on the
sofa. I remember everything up to the last moment. It decidedly gave me
pleasure not to speak to Matryosha, but to keep her in suspense; I don’t
know why. I waited a whole hour, when suddenly she sprang from her bed
behind the screen. I heard both her feet thud upon the floor and then fairly
quick steps, and she stood on the threshold of my room. She stood and
looked silently. I was so mean that my heart thrilled with joy that I had kept
up my character and waited for her to come first. During these days, when I
had not once seen her close, she had grown very thin. Her face had shrunk,
and her head, I was sure, was hot.
“Her eyes had grown large and gazed at me without moving, with a dull
curiosity, as I thought at first. I sat still and looked and did not move. And
then suddenly I felt hatred for her again. But I very soon noticed that she
was not in the least afraid of me, but was perhaps rather delirious. But she
was not delirious either. She suddenly began shaking her head repeatedly at
me, as simple uneducated people without manners do when they find fault
with you. And suddenly she raised her tiny fist and began threatening from
where she stood. The first moment her gesture seemed to me ridiculous, but

then I could stand it no longer.[38] On her face was such despair as was
unendurable to see on a child’s face. She shook her tiny fist at me all the
while threateningly, and nodded her head reproachfully. I rose and moved
towards her in fear, and warily began saying something softly and kindly,
but I saw that she would not understand. Then suddenly she covered her
face impulsively with both hands, as she had done before, and moved off
and stood by the window with her back to me. I returned to my room and
sat by the window. I cannot possibly make out why I did not leave then, but
remained as though waiting for something. Soon I again heard her quick
steps; she came out of the door on to the wooden landing which led to the
stairs. I hastily ran to my door, opened it, and had just time to see that
Matryosha went into the tiny box-room, which was like a hen-roost and was
next door to the water-closet. A very curious idea shot through my mind. To
this day I can’t make out why all of a sudden this idea came into my head—
everything turned upon it. I half closed the door and sat down again by the
window. Of course, it was still impossible to believe in this sudden idea:
—‘but after all....’ (I remember everything, and my heart beat violently).
“After a minute I looked at my watch and noted the time with perfect
accuracy. Why I should need to know the time so precisely I don’t know,
but I was able to do it, and altogether at that moment I wanted to notice
everything. So that I remember now what I noticed and see it as if it were
before me. The evening drew on. A fly buzzed about my head and settled
continually on my face. I caught it, held it in my fingers, and put it out of
the window. Very loudly a van entered the courtyard below. Very loudly
(and for some time before) a tailor, sitting at his window in the corner of the
courtyard, sang a song. He sat at his work, and I could see him there. It
struck me that, as nobody had met me when I passed through the gate and
came upstairs, it was also, of course, not necessary that I should be seen
now when I should be going downstairs; and I moved my chair from the
window purposely so that I could not be seen by the lodgers. I took a book,
but threw it away, and began looking at a tiny reddish spider on the leaf of a
geranium, and I fell into a trance. I remember everything up to the last
moment.
“Suddenly I took out my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since she
went out of the room. The conjecture was assuming the shape of a
probability. But I determined to wait precisely fifteen minutes more. It also

crossed my mind that perhaps she had come back, and that I perhaps had
not heard her. But that was impossible: there was a dead silence, and I could
hear the hum of every small fly. Suddenly my heart began bounding again. I
looked at my watch: it was three minutes short of the quarter. I sat them out,
though my heart beat so as to hurt me. Then I got up, put on my hat,
buttoned my overcoat, and looked round the room[39]—had I left any traces
of my visit? I moved the chair closer to the window just as it had been
before. At last I gently opened the door, locked it with my key, and went to
the little box-room. It was closed, but not locked; I knew that it did not
lock, but I did not want to open it, and I stood on tiptoe and began looking
through the chink. At that moment, standing on tiptoe, I remembered that,
when I sat by the window and looked at the little red spider and fell into a
trance, I had been thinking of how I should stand on tiptoe and peer through
this very chink. I mention this detail because I wish to prove fully to what
an extent I was obviously in possession of my mental faculties and I hold
myself responsible for everything. For a long time I peered through the
chink, but it was dark there, but not absolutely, so that at last I saw what I
wanted....[40]
“At last I decided to leave.[41] I met no one on the stairs. Three hours later
we were all drinking tea in our shirt-sleeves in our rooms and playing with
a pack of old cards; Lebiadkin recited poetry. Many stories were told, and,
as if on purpose, they were good and amusing, and not as foolish as usual.
Kirillov too was there. No one drank, although there was a bottle of rum,
but only Lebiadkin took a pull at it now and then.
“Prokhor Malov once said that ‘when Nikolai Vsevolodovich is pleased
to be cheerful and does not sulk, the whole lot of us are happy and talk
cleverly.’ I remembered this at that time; consequently I was merry,
cheerful, and not sulky. This was how it looked. But I remember being
conscious that I was simply a low and despicable coward for my joy at
having escaped and that I should never be an honest man.
“About eleven o’clock the doorkeeper’s little daughter came from the
landlady at Gorokhovaya Street, with a message to me that Matryosha had
hanged herself. I went with the little girl and saw that the landlady herself
did not know why she had sent for me. She wailed aloud and beat her
head[42]; there was a crowd and policemen. I stood about for a time[43] and
went away.

“I was scarcely disturbed all that time, yet I was asked the usual
questions. But all I said was that the girl had been ill and delirious, so that I
had offered to call a doctor at my own expense. They also questioned me
about the penknife, and I said that the landlady had thrashed her, but that
there was nothing in that. Nobody knew about my having been there that
evening.[44]
“For about a week I did not call there. I went at last[45] to give notice
about the room. The landlady was still crying, although she was already
messing about with her rags and sewing as usual. ‘It was for your penknife
that I wronged her,’ she said to me, but without much reproach. I settled my
account with her, and gave as an excuse for going that I could not remain in
a house like that to receive Nina Savelevna. At parting, she again praised
Nina Savelevna to me. When I left, I gave her five roubles over and above
what was due for the room.
“In the main I was sick of life, to the verge of madness. The incident in
Gorokhovaya Street, after the danger was over, I would have completely
forgotten, just as I forgot all the other events of that time, had I not for a
certain time remembered with anger what a coward I had been.
“I vented my anger on any one I could find. About that time, altogether
for no definite reason, I took it into my head to cripple my life, but only in
as disgusting a way as possible. Already for about a year I had been
thinking of shooting myself; but something better presented itself.
“One day, as I looked at the lame Marya Timofeevna Lebiadkin, the
woman who in a sense tidied up the rooms, and at that time was not yet
mad, but simply an exalted idiot, in secret madly in love with me (which
my friends had discovered), I suddenly determined to marry her. The idea of
the marriage of Stavrogin with that lowest of creatures excited my nerves.
Anything more monstrous it was impossible to imagine.[46] At any rate I
married her, not simply because of ‘a bet made after dinner in one’s cups.’
The witnesses were Kirillov and Peter Verkhovensky, who happened to be
in Petersburg; and lastly, Lebiadkin himself and Prokhor Malov (who is
now dead). No one else ever knew of it, and those who did swore to keep
silence. That silence always seemed to me a kind of meanness, but it has not
been broken up till now, although I intended to make it public; now I make
it public as well as the rest.

“The wedding over, I went to the country to stay with my mother. I went
to distract myself.[47] In our town I had left behind me the idea that I was
mad—which idea still persists even now and undoubtedly does me harm, as
I shall explain later. After that I went abroad and remained there four years.
“I was in the East in the monastery on Mount Athos and attended
religious services which lasted eight hours; I was in Egypt, lived in
Switzerland, travelled even in Iceland; spent a whole year at Göttingen
University. During the last year I became very friendly with a distinguished
Russian family in Paris, and with two Russian girls in Switzerland. About
two years ago, in Frankfort, passing a stationer’s shop, I noticed amongst
the photographs for sale a portrait of a little girl, dressed in an elegant
childish dress, but very much like Matryosha.
I bought the portrait at once, and when I returned to my hotel I put it on
the mantelpiece of my room. There it lay for a week untouched, and I did
not once look at it; and when I left Frankfort I forgot to take it with me.
“I mention this fact only to prove to what an extent I could master my
memories and had become indifferent to them. I dismissed the whole lot of
them at one go en masse, and the whole mass obediently disappeared, each
time, directly I wished it to disappear. To recall the past always bored me,
and I never could talk about the past, as nearly all people do, the more so
that it was, like everything else concerning me, hateful to me. As for
Matryosha, I even forgot to take her picture from the mantelpiece. About a
year ago, in the spring, travelling through Germany, I forgot
absentmindedly to get out at the station where I had to change, and so went
on the wrong line. At the next station I had to get out; it was past two
o’clock in the afternoon and a fine bright day. It was a tiny German town. I
was shown to a hotel. I had to wait, for the next train did not arrive until
eleven o’clock at night. I was even pleased with my adventure, as I was in
no hurry to get anywhere. The hotel turned out a wretched little place, but it
was all wooded and surrounded with flower-beds. I was given a very small
room. I made a large meal, and, as I had been travelling all night, I fell
sound asleep after lunch at about four o’clock in the afternoon.
“In my sleep I had a dream which was completely new to me, for I had
never had one like it. In the Dresden gallery there is a picture by Claude
Lorraine, called in the catalogue, I think, ‘Acis and Galatea,’ but I always

called it ‘The Golden Age,’ I don’t know why. I had seen it before, but
about three days ago, as I passed through Dresden, I saw it again. I even
went on purpose to have a look at it, and possibly for this alone I stopped at
Dresden. It was that picture I dreamt of, but not as of a picture, but as of a
reality.
“A corner of the Greek Archipelago; blue caressing waves, islands and
rocks; fertile shore, a magic vista on the horizon, the appeal of the setting
sun—no words could describe it. Here was the cradle of European man,
here were the first scenes of the mythological world, here its green
paradise.... Here had once lived a beautiful race. They rose and went to
sleep happy and innocent; they filled the woods with their joyful songs; the
great abundance of their virgin powers went out into love and into simple
happiness. The sun bathed these islands and sea in its beams, rejoicing in its
beautiful children. Wonderful dream, splendid illusion! A dream the most
incredible of all that had ever been dreamt, but upon it the whole of
mankind has lavished all its powers throughout history; for this it has made
every sacrifice, for this men have died on the cross and their prophets have
been killed; without this, nations will not live and are unable even to die. I
lived through all these feelings in my dream; I do not know what exactly I
dreamt about, but the rocks, the sea, and the slanting rays of the setting sun
—all these seemed to be still visible to me, when I woke and opened my
eyes and, for the first time in my life, found them full of tears. A feeling of
happiness, until then unfamiliar to me, went through my whole heart, even
painfully. It was now evening; through the window of my tiny room,
through the green leaves of the flowers standing on the sill, poured a shaft
of bright slanting rays from the setting sun, and bathed me in their light. I
quickly shut my eyes again, as if longing to bring back the vanished dream,
but suddenly, in the middle of the bright, bright light, I saw a tiny point. The
point began suddenly to take a definite form, and all of a sudden I distinctly
pictured to myself a tiny reddish spider. At once I remembered it on the leaf
of the geranium, upon which, too, had poured the rays of the setting sun. It
was as though something were plunged through me; I raised myself and sat
on my bed.
“(That’s all how it happened then!)
“I saw before me! (Oh, not in the flesh! Would that the vision had been
true!) I saw before me Matryosha, emaciated, with feverish eyes, in every

point exactly as she was when she stood on the threshold of my room and,
shaking her head at me, threatened me with her tiny fist. Nothing has ever
been so agonizing to me! The pitiable despair of a helpless creature[48] with
an unformed mind, threatening me (with what? what could she do to me, O
Lord?), but blaming, of course, herself alone! Nothing like that has ever
happened to me. I sat, till night came, without moving, having lost count of
time. Is this what they call remorse or repentance? I do not know, and even
now cannot say.[49] But it was intolerable to me, that image of her standing
on the threshold with her raised and threatening little fist, merely that vision
of her then, that moment ‘then,’ that shaking of her head. It is precisely that
which I cannot endure, because since then it has come to me almost every
day. Not that it comes itself, but that I bring it before myself and cannot
help bringing it, although I can’t live with it. Oh, if I could ever see her in
the flesh, even though it were an hallucination![50]
“Why, then, do no other of the memories of my life rouse in me anything
like this?—and I had indeed many memories, perhaps much worse in the
judgment of men. They rouse merely hatred in me, and that only because
they are stimulated by my present state; but formerly I forgot them callously
and dismissed them from my mind.
“I wandered after that for nearly the whole of the following year, and
tried to find some occupation. I know I can dismiss the thought of
Matryosha even now whenever I want to. I am as completely master of my
will as ever. But the whole point is that I never wanted to do it; I myself do
not want to, and never shall.[51] So it will go on until I go mad.
“In Switzerland two months later I was seized with a fit of the same
passion and one of the same furious impulses which I used to have before.
[52]
I felt a terrible temptation to commit a new crime, namely, to commit
bigamy (for I was already married). But I fled on the advice of another girl
to whom I had confided almost everything, even that I had no love for her
whom I desired so much, and that I could never love any one. Moreover, the
fresh crime would not in any way rid me of Matryosha.
“Thus I decided to have these little sheets printed and three hundred
copies sent to Russia. When the time comes, I shall send some of them to
the police and to the local authorities; simultaneously I shall send them to
the editors of all newspapers with a request that they shall be published; I

shall also send them to a number of people in Petersburg and in Russia who
know me. They will also come out in a translation abroad. I know that I
shall, perhaps, not be worried by the law, at any rate not to any considerable
extent. It is I who am informing against myself and I have no accuser;
besides, the evidence is extraordinarily slight or non-existent. Finally, the
rooted idea that I am mentally unbalanced and, certainly, the efforts of my
family, who will make use of that idea, will quash any legal prosecution that
might threaten me. By the way, I make this statement in order to prove that
I am now of sound mind and understand my situation. But there will remain
those who will know everything and will look at me, and I at them.[53] I
want every one to look at me. Will it relieve me? I don’t know. I come to
this as to my last resource.
“Once more: if a good search be made by the Petersburg police, perhaps
something might be discovered. The landlady and her husband might be
living even now in Petersburg. The house, of course, must be remembered.
It was painted a bright sky-blue. For myself, I shall not go anywhere, and
for a certain length of time (a year or two) I shall always be found at
Skvoreshniki, my mother’s estate. If required, I will appear anywhere.
“Nikolai Stavrogin.”

[54]
CHAPTER IX

The reading lasted for about an hour. Tikhon read slowly, and, possibly,
read certain passages twice over. All the time Stavrogin had sat silent and
motionless.[55] Tikhon took off his glasses, paused, and, looking up at him,
was the first to begin to speak rather guardedly.
“Can’t certain corrections be made in this document?”
“Why should there? I wrote sincerely,” Stavrogin replied.
“Some corrections in the style should....”
“I forgot to warn you,” he said quickly and peremptorily, pulling himself
up, “that all you say will be useless; I shall not postpone my intention; don’t
try to dissuade me. I shall publish it.”
“You did not forget to tell me that, before I began to read.”
“Never mind,” Stavrogin interrupted peremptorily, “I repeat it again:
however great the force of your objections may be, I shall not give up my
intention. And observe that, by this clumsy or clever phrase—think of it
what you like—I am not trying to get you at once to start arguing and
coaxing me.”[56]
“I shall not argue with you, still less coax you, to give up your intention,
nor could I do it either. Your idea is a great idea, and it would be impossible
to express more perfectly a Christian idea. Repentance cannot go further
than the wonderful deed which you have conceived, if only....”
“If only what?”
“If it were indeed repentance and indeed a Christian idea.”

“I wrote sincerely.”[57]
“You seem deliberately to wish to make yourself out coarser than your
heart would desire....” Tikhon gradually became bolder. Evidently “the
document” made a strong impression on him.
“‘Make myself out’? I repeat to you, I did not ‘make myself out,’ still less
did I ‘pose.’”[58]
Tikhon quickly cast his eyes down.
“This document comes straight from the needs of a heart which is
mortally wounded,—am I not right in this?” he said emphatically and with
extraordinary earnestness. “Yes, it is repentance and natural need of
repentance that has overcome you, and you have taken the great way, the
rarest way. But you, it seems, already hate and despise beforehand all those
who will read what is written here, and you challenge them. You were not
ashamed of admitting your crime; why are you ashamed of repentance?”
“Ashamed?”
“You are ashamed and afraid!”
“Afraid?”
“Mortally. Let them look at me, you say; well, and you, how will you
look at them? Certain passages in your statement are emphasized; you seem
to be luxuriating in your own psychology and clutch at each detail, in order
to surprise the reader by a callousness which is not really in you. What is
this but a haughty defiance of the judge by the accused?”
“Where is the defiance? I kept out all personal discussion.”
Tikhon was silent. His pale cheeks flushed.
“Let us leave that,” Stavrogin said peremptorily. “Allow me to put to you
a question on my side: we have now been talking for five minutes since you
read that” (he nodded at the pages), “and I do not see in you any expression
of aversion or shame.... You don’t seem to be squeamish....”
He did not finish.[59]
“I shall not conceal anything from you: I was horrified at the great idle
force that had been deliberately wasted in abomination. As for the crime

itself, many people sin like that, but they live in peace and quiet with their
conscience, even considering it to be the inevitable delinquency of youth.
There are old men, too, who sin in the same way—yes, lightly and
indulgently. The world is full of these horrors. But you have felt the whole
depth to a degree which is extremely rare.”
“Have you come to respect me after these pages?” Stavrogin said, with a
wry smile.
“I am not going to answer that straight off. But there certainly is not, nor
can there be, a greater and more terrible crime than your behaviour towards
the girl.”
“Let us stop this measuring by the yard.[60] Perhaps I do not suffer so
much as I have made out, and perhaps I have even told many lies against
myself,” he added suddenly.
Tikhon once more let this pass in silence.[61]
“And the young lady,”[62] Tikhon began again, “with whom you broke off
in Switzerland; where, if I may ask, is she ... at this moment?”
“Here.”
There was silence again.
“Perhaps I did lie much against myself,” Stavrogin persisted once more.
“Well, what does it matter that I challenge them by the coarseness of my
confession, if you noticed the challenge? I shall make them hate me still
more, that’s all. Surely that will make it easier for me.”[63]
“That is, anger in you will rouse responsive anger in them, and, in hating,
you will feel easier than if you accepted their pity.”
“You are right. You understand.” He laughed suddenly. “They may
perhaps call me a Jesuit and sanctimonious hypocrite after the document,
ha, ha, ha! Yes?”
“Certainly there is sure to be some such opinion. And do you expect to
carry out your intention soon?”
“To-day, to-morrow, the day after to-morrow, how do I know? But very
soon. You are right: I think, indeed, it will in the end happen that I shall

publish it unexpectedly, and, indeed, in a revengeful, hateful moment, when
I hate them most.”
“Answer me one question, but sincerely, to me alone, only to me,”
Tikhon said in quite a different voice; “if some one forgave you for this”
(Tikhon pointed at the pages), “and not one of those whom you respect or
fear, but a stranger, a man whom you will never know, if, reading your
terrible confession, he forgave you, in the privacy of his heart—would you
feel relieved, or would it be just the same to you?”
“I should feel easier,” Stavrogin said in an undertone. “If you forgave me,
I should feel very much relieved,” he added, casting his eyes down.
“Provided that you forgive me too,” Tikhon murmured in a penetrating
voice.[64]
“It is false humility. All these monastic formulas, you know, are not fine
in the least. I will tell you the whole truth: I want you to forgive me. And
besides you—one or two more, but as for the rest—let the rest rather hate
me. But I want this, so that I may bear it with humility....”
“And universal pity for you—could you not bear it with the same
humility?”
“Perhaps I could not.[65] Why do you....”[66]
“I feel the extent of your sincerity and am, of course, very much to
blame, but I am not good at approaching people. I have always felt it a great
fault in myself,” Tikhon said sincerely and intimately, looking straight into
Stavrogin’s eyes. “I just say this, because I am afraid for you,” he added;
“there is an almost impassable abyss before you.”
“That I shan’t be able to bear it? Not able to endure[67] their hatred?”
Stavrogin gave a start.
“Not their hatred alone.”
“What else?”
“Their laughter.” Tikhon half whispered these words, as if it were more
than he had strength for.
Stavrogin blushed; his face expressed alarm.

“I foresaw it,” he said; “I must have appeared to you a very comic
character after your reading of my ‘document.’[68] Don’t be uncomfortable.
Don’t look disconcerted. I expected it.”
“The horror will be universal and, of course, more false than sincere.
People fear only what directly threatens their personal interests. I am not
talking of pure souls: they will be horrified in themselves and will blame
themselves, but no notice will be taken of them—besides they will keep
silent. But the laughter will be universal.”[69]
“I am surprised what a low opinion you have of people and how they
disgust you.” Stavrogin spoke with some show of anger.
“Believe me, I judged rather by myself than by other people!” Tikhon
exclaimed.
“Indeed? but is there also something in your soul that makes you amused
at my misery?”
“Who knows, perhaps there is? oh, perhaps there is!”
“Enough. Tell me, then, where exactly am I ridiculous in my manuscript?
I know myself, but I want you to put your finger on it. And tell it as
cynically as possible, tell me with all the sincerity of which you are capable.
And I repeat to you again that you are a terribly queer fellow.”
“In the very form of this great penance there is something ridiculous. Oh,
don’t let yourself think that you won’t conquer!” he suddenly exclaimed,
almost in ecstasy. “Even this form will conquer” (he pointed to the pages),
“if only you sincerely accept the blows and the spitting. It always ended in
the most ignominious cross becoming a great glory and a great strength, if
the humility of the deed was sincere. Perhaps even in your lifetime you will
be comforted!...”
“So you find something ridiculous in the form itself?”[70] Stavrogin
insisted.
“And in the substance. The ugliness of it will kill it,” Tikhon said in a
whisper, looking down.
“Ugliness! what ugliness?”

“Of the crime. There are truly ugly crimes. Crimes, whatever they be, the
more blood, the more horror in them, the more imposing they are, so to say,
more picturesque. But there are crimes shameful, disgraceful, past all
horror, they are, so to say, almost too inelegant....”
Tikhon did not finish.
“You mean to say,” Stavrogin caught him up in agitation, “you find me a
very ridiculous figure when I kissed the hands of the dirty little girl....[71] I
understand you very well, and that is why you despair for me, that it is ugly,
revolting—not precisely revolting, but shameful, ridiculous, and you think
that that is what I shall least of all be able to bear.”
Tikhon was silent.[72]
“I understand why you asked about the young lady from Switzerland,
whether she was here.”
“You are not prepared, not hardened,” Tikhon said timidly in a whisper,
casting his eyes down; “you are uprooted, you do not believe.”
“Listen, Father Tikhon: I want to forgive myself, and that is my object,
my whole object!” Stavrogin suddenly said with gloomy ecstasy in his eyes.
“Then only, I know, that vision will disappear. That is why I seek boundless
suffering. I seek it myself. Don’t make me afraid, or I shall die in anger.”
The sincerity was so unexpected that Tikhon got up.
“If you believe that you can forgive yourself and attain that forgiveness
in this world through your suffering; if you set that object before you with
faith, then you already believe completely!” Tikhon exclaimed rapturously.
“Why did you say, then, that you did not believe in God?”
Stavrogin made no answer.
“For your unbelief God will forgive you, for you respect the Holy Spirit
without knowing Him.”
“Christ will forgive too?” asked Stavrogin, with a wry smile and in a
quickly changed tone; and in the tone of his question a suspicion of irony
could be heard.
“It says in the Book: ‘And whosoever shall offend one of these little
ones,’ you remember. According to the Gospel there is no greater

crime....”[73]
“Quite plainly, you don’t want a row, and you are laying a trap for me,
venerable Father Tikhon,” Stavrogin muttered scornfully and with
annoyance, making as if to get up; “in a word, you want me to settle down,
to marry, perhaps, and end my life as a member of the local club, and visit
your monastery on holidays. Why, that’s penance! isn’t it so? though as a
reader of hearts you, perhaps, foresee that it will certainly be so, and all that
is needed now is for me to be nicely wheedled into it for form’s sake, since
I am only too eager for that,—isn’t it so?”
He gave a wry smile.
“No, not that penance, I am preparing another for you!” Tikhon went on
earnestly, without taking the least notice of Stavrogin’s smile and remark.
“I know an old man, a hermit and ascetic, not here, but not far from here,
of such great Christian wisdom that he is even beyond your and my
understanding. He will listen to my request. I will tell him about you. Go to
him, into retreat, as a novice under his guidance, for five years, for seven,
for as many as you find necessary. Make a vow to yourself, and by this
great sacrifice you will acquire all that you long for and don’t even expect,
for you cannot possibly realize now what you will obtain.”
Stavrogin listened gravely.
“You suggest that I enter the monastery as a monk.”[74]
“You must not be in the monastery, nor take orders as a monk; be only a
lay-brother, a secret, not an open one; it may be that, even living altogether
in society....”
“Enough, Father Tikhon.” Stavrogin interrupted him with aversion and
rose from his chair. Tikhon also rose.
“What is the matter with you?” he suddenly exclaimed almost in fear,
staring at Tikhon. Tikhon stood before him, with his hands clasped, and a
painful convulsion seemed to pass for a moment across his face as if from
the greatest fear.
“What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter?” Stavrogin repeated,
rushing to him in order to support him. It seemed to him that Tikhon was
going to fall.

“I see ... I see, as if it stood before me,” Tikhon exclaimed in a voice
which penetrated the soul and with an expression of the most violent grief,
“that you, poor, lost youth, have never been so near another and a still
greater crime than you are at this moment.”
“Calm yourself!” pleaded Stavrogin, decidedly alarmed for him.
“Perhaps I shall still postpone it.... You are right....”
“No, not after the publication, but before it, a day, an hour, perhaps,
before the great step, you will throw yourself on a new crime, as a way out,
and you will commit it solely in order to avoid the publication of these
pages.”
Stavrogin shuddered with anger and almost with fear.[75] “You cursed
psychologist!”—he suddenly cut him short in fury and, without looking
round, left the cell.

PLAN OF THE NOVEL

THE LIFE OF A GREAT SINNER

THE LIFE OF A GREAT SINNER
Page 8.
20/8 December.
—Accumulation of wealth.
—The birth of strong passions.
—Strengthening of the will and of the inner powers.
—Measureless pride and struggle with ambition.
—The prose of life and a passionate belief that incessantly overcomes it.
—That all should plead; I only demand.
—Not to be afraid of anything. The sacrifices of life.
—The influence of vice; the horror and coldness from it.
—A desire to defile every one.
—The romance of the years of childhood. Maccary.[76]
—Schooling and first ideals.
—Gets to know everything secretly.
—Alone, to prepare himself for anything.
(He is incessantly preparing himself for something, although he does not
know for what, and—what is strange—he does not care about the what, as
though perfectly sure that it will come of itself.)
—Either slavery or domination. He believes. And that only. Unbelief for
the first time—strangely springing up and taking shape only in the
monastery. The little lame girl. Katya. Brother Misha. The Stolen Money.
Underwent punishment. Fearlessness. A Cornfield. Do not kill me, Uncle.

Love of Kulikov. John. Brutilov. The Frenchman Pougot. Upbraids
Brutilov. Goes on with his studies. The diver. Albert.[77] Shibo. Receiving
the communion. Albert does not believe in God. The old people. Loves a
great many things secretly and keeps them to himself. They call him a brute
and thus he behaves like a brute. Passionate desire to surprise all by
unexpectedly impertinent tricks? But not from ambition. By himself. The
old people. Songs, Therese-Philosophe John, Brin, Brutilov—Brother,
Albert. Friends, and yet they torture a friend; disgusting. A meek, good and
pure friend before whom he blushes. Training himself by hardships and
accumulating money. Humboldt.
They immediately inform him that he is not their brother.
He makes friends with Kulikov. The lady doctor. He sees her in a halo. A
passionate desire to foul himself, to degrade himself in her eyes, but not to
please her. A theft took place. They accuse him, he exculpates himself, but
the affair becomes clear. The step-brother committed the theft.
Page 7.
A strong and permanent
trait. Disrespect for the people round him, but this is not
yet based on reason, but solely on a repulsion for
them. Much repulsion. I eat grapes. He is beaten and flogged for his
repulsion. He only shuts himself up in himself and hates still more. Haughty
contempt for his persecutors, and rapidity of judgment. Extraordinary
quickness of judgment signifies a strong passionate individuality. He begins
to feel that he ought not to make quick judgments and for this he must
strengthen his will.
First signs of —It is a lie, mon Mushvar.
expansiveness.
The mother’s boys are at Arkashka and French conversations.
Sushar’s and at
Chermak’s. (Their Arkashka, Brutilov and himself keep together.
repulsion comes from
stupidity.) At Sushar’s—only Brutilov and his history;
altogether two chapters—
All up. Because he slapped Sushar. The beginning of Albert.
The boarding-school. An unjust punishment takes place in the house.
Exams. In the country. Self-renunciation. Katya. In the town and in the
boarding-school he surprises by his brutality. Lambert. Heroic acts—to run

away with Katya. Kulikov, with him. Murder. He does not forgive any lie or
falsehood and without reasoning instantly rushes into a fight. For a long
time he does not believe Katya, then he put her to the test and at last
intimidated her with the disgrace.
—Strength of will—this he set before himself as the chief thing.
—After Kulikov, he immediately goes to ask about the lame girl.
Just here they caught him.
—In the country the lady doctor falls in love with him.
He caught her with a lover.
The lady doctor. Mr. Alfonsky—characters.
Page 9.
At the house of the old people. With the old man—reading Karamzin,
Arabian tales—On Suvorov, etc. On interest on money. He offended the
younger old lady. Ask pardon, I do not want to. He locked them in. Death.
Anna and Vasilissa ran away. They sold Vasilissa. The last communion. The
first confession. Repulsion. Is there a God? Bible and reading.

January 2.
He smashed the mirror deliberately.
He decides to keep silent and not to say a single word—
—St. mother: why do you make a show of yourself as a sacrifice? (An
ideal and strange creature.)
Alfonsky, the father. (His speeches to his son and aspirations.)
—A feeling of destruction.
How many sciences —Voluptuousness (he wants to remain in this state
must one know (his
conversation with
until he has money).
Vanka). —And the enormous idea of domination (a direct
feeling) is hidden so deep in him that he does not feel able, by himself, to
adjust himself to these people.

He is surprised at himself, puts himself to the test, and loves to plunge
into the abyss—
—The running away with the little girl and the murderer Kulikov
immediately after his removal from Sushar’s to Chermak’s. (The fact which
produces an overwhelming effect on him and which has even somewhat
unsettled him so that he feels a natural need to contract inwardly and to
reflect so as to lean on something.) He leans after all on money.
Of God meanwhile he After Kulikov, he is humble at home and in the
does not think.
boarding-school in order to reflect and
His silence ends after a
year and a half by his to concentrate.
confession about find himself,
Kulikov.

—But he is unsociable and uncommunicative, nor could it be otherwise,
remembering and knowing such a horror, and looking at all the other
children, for instance, as at something perfectly alien to him, from which he
had fled away into another path, into a good path or a bad one—
The blood at times torments him. But the chief thing:
(He is violently carried It is not this alone that isolates him from
away by something, by
Hamlet, for instance.)
everybody, but really his dreams of power and his
enormous height above everything.
The Inhabitants of the
Moon. From that height he is kept back by science,
poetry, etc., i.e. in the sense that these are higher
things and that it is therefore necessary that he should be higher and better
in them too.
Only to prepare oneself, but he is strangely certain that it will all come
by itself. Money will solve all questions.
The chief thing. The meaning of the first part—Hesitation, insatiable
desire for the ideal, instinctive consciousness of superiority, power and
strength. Looking for a fixed point to rest upon. But at any rate an unusual
man.
Page 11.[78]
or better:—Not a single dream of what to be and what’s his vocation
prevented him from amassing money.

—But doubt is always solved by the necessity of money and the chance
of amassing a fortune (he sells himself to the men-servants).
Concerning a horse that The father gave him a flogging—a rupture
went mad, or a fire.
between them—I do not consider you my father.
—He sells himself to the men-servants, and for this he is held in general
contempt, but
—Finds a pocket-book—the infatuation that possessed him finally on
account of his exam.—he nearly yields.
But after this the history of Katya’s disgrace, and then the hellish
debauchery with Albert, crime and blasphemy and denouncing himself as
accessory to the murder with Kulikov—straight into the abyss. The
Monastery.
—Although money concentrates him terribly on a certain firm point and
solves all questions, at times the point wavers (poetry and many other
things) and he cannot find a way out. This state of wavering forms the
novel.
—Strengthening of his will, wounds and burns—feed his pride. He
wishes to be ready for anything.
—He made up his mind to make money in an honest way. His hesitation
with regard to the pocket-book.
—Since a great many things at times move him sincerely, in a terrible fit
of spite and pride he plunges into debauchery.
(This is the chief thing.)
—His estrangement from people was furthered by the fact that they all
looked upon him as an eccentric and laughed or feared him.
—A broken head (pantalons en haut), he is ill.
Then Chermak left him alone. (Mango.)
—By the process of thinking he arrived at the conclusion, for instance,
that it is not necessary to act dishonestly, because acting honestly he would
make money even better, since to the rich all privileges for any evil are
granted even without that.

—Albert and he steal a star from the crown and escape successfully (he
incited), but when Albert began to blaspheme, he began beating him. And
then he declared himself before the court as an atheist.
—Idea: that he could gain a still greater power by flattery, like Von Brin.
But no—he thinks—I want to reach the same end without flattery.
Page 12.
I myself am God, and he makes Katya worship him. (God knows what he
does with her. “I shall love you then when you can do everything.”)
—In the vagaries of his imagination he has endless dreams, up to the
overthrow of God and putting himself in the place of God. (Kulikov had a
strong influence.)
Problem. Memento.
To find the mean Act 1. Early Childhood, the old man and
proportional. woman.
" 2. The family, Sushar, the running away and
Kulikov—
" 3. Chermak—exams.
" 4. The Country and Katya, debauchery with
Albert.
20 Childhood.
20 Monastery.
40 Before deportation.
20 Woman and Satan.
40 Heroic Acts.

—Repulsion for people from the very first consciousness as a child
(through the passion of a proud and domineering nature). Out of contempt:
—“I will carry it with a high hand, shan’t degrade myself with the
flattery and dexterity of a Brin.”
—And this too is from repulsion for people and from contempt for them
from the earliest years of childhood—

—“Oh, if I only took upon myself the rôle of a flatterer like Brin,—what
could I not achieve!”
—And begins at times to reason: “Shall I not become a flatterer? (he
consults the lame girl about it). This too is a power of the spirit—to endure
oneself as a flatterer. But no, I do not want it, it is foul—besides I shall
have an instrument—money, so that they, willy-nilly, whether they choose
or not, will all come to me and bow to me.”
With Kulikov he displays his
spiritual power.

Kulikov does not kill him; but the
murderer, the runaway soldier, they
killed together.

13
2
27
12
3
5
—
35 years ago
born in 1835.

If any one overheard his dreams, he believes he would die; but he
confesses himself in everything to the lame girl.
—Whatever he reads, he tells in a peculiar way of his own to the lame
girl.
—“A slap in the face is the greatest offence.” With blood.—
—The first organized dream of the significance of money.
—The lame girl keeps everything he is telling her secret—she does it
without thinking, without his command, having subtly realized it for

herself, so that in most cases he does not remind her of the necessity of
keeping things secret.
The lame girl does not agree to become an atheist.
He does not beat her for that.
Page 13.
—A single, but detailed psychological analysis of how writers, for
instance, “The Hero of Our Time” (Lermontov), affect a child.
—The indignation of a child at the guests as they arrive; at the frankness
and impertinence which they allow themselves. (Uvar) “How dare they?”—
the child thinks.
—The fall of the old couple.
—The theatre. Sit on my knees—
—They flog him for his repulsion.
—When he and the little girl come to live with the Alfonskys, he tells her
not to say a word about Gogol or about what concerns us, about travels. She
should not say a word.—
—He has read an immense amount (Walter Scott, etc.).
—At the Alfonskys—not brothers. He is made to feel it.
—He pretends to be rude, undeveloped, and a fool.
—With the men-servants.
—Mrs. Alfonsky suggests the idea that they should not mix with the
children.
—At Sushar’s. Alfonsky flogs him. It turns out to be for no fault.
—Mrs. Alfonsky has invented, the running away. With Kulikov—
Caught.
—A guest: they call him. They examine him. Candid thoughts.
The guest is surprised.—The house is set on fire, or something—illness.
—Alfonsky delivers speeches.

—At Chermak’s. Progress in studies, reading. Exam.
—After Exam. Alfonsky makes some one fall in love with—Alfonsky
questions.
For the lame girl. With Katya. A cornfield.—Family scenes—Alfonsky,
his friend, a box on the ear.
In Moscow, Lambert—
About classical education at Chermak’s (Herr Teider).

Jan. 27
He is astonished that all these (grown up) people completely believe in
their nonsense, and are much more stupid and insignificant than they seem
from the outside.
(One of the scholarly guests, falls down intoxicated and goes with
gypsies in the Maryin Woods.)
A period of unbelief in God. Essential to write how the New Testament
had affected him. He agrees with the Gospel.
The chief thing meantime is his own I and his interests. Philosophical
questions engage him in so far as they touch him.
Page 14.[79]
Lambert.
The lame girl: and I will tell how you said that you will be a king (or
something ludicrous).
—He wounds her for this—
Lambert and he—a complete Of what does he speak with the lame
picture of depravity. But Lambert girl? Of all his dreams—
is intoxicated with it and finds
nothing higher than this. National
levity.
But he plunges into debauchery When I am grown up, I shall marry
with an irresistible desire, but also not you. So that it is not necessary to

with fear. The hollowness, dirt, say he dreamt of this or that, but he
and absurdity of immorality went to the lame girl and said to her
astonish him. He gives it all up this or that. Of what he will be and of
and after terrible crimes he money. He beat her because the
denounces himself with bitterness. money did not increase.
He talked to her about the reading of
Karamzin, tales, etc. He was taught
French and German by the young
lady, the old, etc. They went for their
lessons to other children (there they
made fun of him).
Because the lame girl did not flare
into a passion for Karamzin—he beat
her.
He knew the whole Bible—he told
her.
—The history of the world—but was
weak in geography.
(Dreams of travels, Kul and the He meets Umnov who proves that he
lame girl.) They read novels.—He knows more than he. Coming home
is highly developed and knows a he tells the lame girl that Umnov is a
great deal about many things. He fool and knows nothing and gave the
knows Gogol and Pushkin. He lame girl a slight beating; after that
never pretends tenderness for the he pays great attention to Umnov.
lame girl until the time when he
carried her in his arms.—
―――――――――――――――
Do it—cut me off, I don’t want you to study together with my children.
—When the old couple used to be very drunk and roll about, the lame
girl used to cry over them. At first he beat her, but then ceased.
—They killed a goose.—
—The Bible. Jacob bowed three times. He gets muddled with the Bible.
The lame girl laughs.

—The habit of beating her; he did not want to kiss her.
(The lame girl was not frozen to
death.
They found her. But she disappeared
from the house of the Alfonskys.)
His incessant thinking. From the time he began to remember himself:
What shall I be and how shall I do it all?
Then doubt: is power alone worth everything and could one not be the
slave of all the strongest.
He began training his will power. He is stung by passions.

Page 16.
That in each line should be heard: I know what I am writing and I am not
writing in vain.
1. The First Pages.—(1) The tone, (2) ideas to be artistically and
concisely fitted in.
The First N.B.—The Tone (the story is a life—i.e. although from the
author, it must be concise, without being meagre in explanations, but also
representing by means of scenes. In this harmony is needed). The concision
of the story is at times that of Gil Blas. As though no importance is attached
(by the author) to dramatic and scenic passages.
But the dominating idea of the Life should be seen,—i.e. although the
whole dominating idea is not explained and is always left vague, the reader
should always realize that the idea is religious, that the Life is of such
importance that it is worth while to begin even from the years of extreme
childhood—also, in the selection of that in which the story consists, of all
facts, there is continuously displayed (something) and the man to be is
constantly exhibited and set on a pedestal.

Chief Nota Bene: He began saving money
from a vague idea, but that idea was all the

time becoming solid, and showing itself to
him in the further development of the affair.
But the chief impulse was his coming to
live at Alfonsky’s.

(1) Caught a mouse.
The lame girl.
The old couple.
The nurse, bathing, the badge, and
retirement.
Anna and Vasilissa ran away.
The last communion (the Italian,
money from pocket)—
When I shall be grown up. The first idea.
The teacher (drunk).
The first confession, what has he
got there in the little boxes, and
in the cup? Is there a God?
To convert the Devil.
The beating of the lame girl. The corpse by the hedge. Kilyan.
Vasilissa was sold—
Interest on money and conversations
with the guest.
Readings. On Suvorov. Arabian tales.
Dreams.—Umnov and Gogol—(the
lame girl laughs).
—The old couple grow weaker and
weaker.
He locked them in. He got drunk.
Stole with the boy. Thrashed him.
Fighting with older boys.
—Complete depravity.

He beats the lame girl to make her
fight the boys.
She would like to come out, but she
was thrashed and she cried—
Dreams of power and will. Umnov
(looks at naked girls, tries to
assault the lame girl).
When the old couple died—he is eleven years old, and the lame girl is
ten,—Alfonsky—The old man and woman. Death. He makes a speech to
the lame girl upon how to behave.
—Before that: They teased the lady—fell on her, they were dragged
home, flogging—He was afraid to complain.
The first fight, he rushed to beat the gentleman with the badge.
I shall never play the coward.
—I’ll learn not to play the coward. (He was afraid, but thrashed the boy.)
—He cut himself for a test.
—Instruction from the boy as to fornic...on (Therese-Philosophe gave
him a beating for it).
But the book she took away from him.
He began to save money.
To amass (he tells the lame girl).
The lame girl was taken into the Alfonsky family before.[80]
He, directly he arrived, puts her through an examination. (Advice to her:
do not speak of Gogol and of nothing of ours.)
First part. The boy is wild, but thinks a tremendous lot of himself.

Page 18.
—The man-servant Osip—at first he was taken into the house to amuse
them by telling stories, by his jovial character. Alfonsky had whipped Osip’s
brother to death, then he took Osip and pressed him for the army.

Immediately Osip escaped (he is also Kulikov). They killed Orlov. They
part. Kulikov (Osip) let him off.
—In a year and a half’s time the hero’s step-mother weeps at Alfonsky’s
betrayal of her. He keeps a mistress openly. Osip’s sister (for that reason he
whipped Osip’s brother to death). Alfonsky is killed by the peasants (?).
The Canvas of the Novel.—The hero’s step-mother, Alfonsky’s wife (a
society lady), when she pined, becoming an old maid, had a fiancé (an
officer or some one—teacher).
But she married Alfonsky. Unhappy and offended by Alfonsky (she
slapped his mistress in the face) she renewed relations with her first lover
who happened to turn up at that time. The boy saw them kissing. “You may
report it to your father,” and then begged him not to tell. The boy kept
silence; but Alfonsky knows that his son knows that he has horns and that
the step-mother has a lover.
He made a row in the village on account of the lame girl. He mocked
Katya. The mother was beside herself because of Katya. In town with
Lambert—and so on.
Here (Al——y) who made a row in the village, the peasants might have
killed him, which the boy might witness,—and—
(I may make up about the step-
mother and her lover, and to what
extent and degree the boy is involved
in that liaison.)
—Alfonsky has a benefactor—and indeed his chief enemy, because he is
a benefactor. All the benefactor’s favours humiliate his pride. The
benefactor does not like to live unless he can act the part of benefactor, but
for one inch of favour demands three yards of gratitude. Both humiliate
themselves, humiliate each other, and hate each other to the verge of illness.

Page 17.
—The extraordinary pride of the boy has the result that he can neither
pity nor despise these men.

Nor can he be very indignant with them. He cannot sympathize either
with his father or mother. At the exam, he distinguished himself
unexpectedly,—he wanted to appear an imbecile. He despises himself
greatly because he could not restrain himself and distinguished himself.
—The dangerous and uncommon idea that he is to become an
extraordinary man possessed him from his first childhood. He thinks of it
incessantly. Cleverness, skill, learning—all these he wishes to acquire as a
means to being extraordinary in the future.
Again money seems to him at least not unnecessary, a power useful on all
occasions, and he decides on money:
Knowledge appears to him terribly difficult.
Now again it seems to him that even if he is not to be an extraordinary
man, but most ordinary, money will give him everything,—i.e. power and
the right to despise—
And at last he repents and is tormented in his conscience because he
wishes so basely to be extraordinary.
But he himself does not know what he will be.
The pure ideal of a free man flashes across him at times; all this when at
the boarding school.
―――――――――――――――――
—He made friends with Osip, about the Khlysti, they almost sleep
together.
—Umnov; he knows Gogol by heart.

Page 70.
Monastery—God give us and all animals a good night—(To make a
study of Humboldt’s description of animals, Buffon and the Russians.)
—Science as worship.
—About the bear.
—Of his first love and how he became a monk—(chastity).

—On the nature of Satan?
—Anikita goes to Chaadaev to exhort him. He calls Tikhon: the latter
comes, argues, and then asks to be forgiven.
—On little insects and the universal joy of Living Life, Tikhon’s
inspiriting stories.
—His friendship with the boy, who allows himself to torment Tikhon by
pranks. (The devil is in him.)
—Tikhon learns of Therese-Philosophe—He blesses him in his downfall
and revolt.
—Tikhon’s clear stories about life and happiness on earth. Of his family,
father, mother, brothers. Extraordinarily simple and therefore moving
stories from Tikhon of his transgressions against his people, of pride,
ambition, mockery (I wish I could unmake all this again now, Tikhon says).
This alone is in itself moving, that he has become friends with the boy.
Tikhon’s story of his first love, of children, it is lower to live as a Monk;
one must have children, and it is higher when one has a vocation.
—Therese-Philosophe disturbed Tikhon. And I thought that he had
already been hardened. He vowed obedience to the boy. He obeys him.
(Loftily, vigorously, and movingly.)
Tikhon says to a certain lady that she is a traitor to Russia as well as a
malefactor towards her children; of how they are deprived of childish
visions even from their very childhood. The study of them (by Leo Tolstoi
and Turgenev), although they are exact, reveals an alien life. Pushkin alone
is a real Russian.
The boy has at times a low opinion of Tikhon: he is so funny, he does not
know things, he is so weak and helpless, he comes to me for advice, but at
last he perceives that Tikhon’s mind is as strong as a babe is pure; that he
cannot have an evil thought, cannot be tempted, and therefore all his acts
are clear and beautiful.

Page 71.

Tikhon. On humility (how mighty humility is).
All about humility and free will.
—Of forgiving the unforgivable sinner (that this torment is the most
tormenting).
Page 19.
The Main Idea.
May 3/15.
After the Monastery and Tikhon the Great Sinner comes out into the
world in order to be the greatest of men. He is sure that he will be the
greatest of men. And in that way he behaves: he is the proudest of the proud
and behaves with the greatest haughtiness towards people. The vagueness
as to the form of his future greatness coincides perfectly with his youth. But
he (and this is cardinal) has through Tikhon got hold of the idea (conviction)
that in order to conquer the whole world one must conquer oneself only.
Conquer thyself and thou shalt conquer the world. Does not choose a career,
but neither has he the time: he begins to watch himself profoundly. But
along with this there are also certain contradictions:
(1) Gold (amassing) (a family on his hands); amassing money was
suggested to him by a usurer, a terrible man, the antithesis of Tikhon. (2)
Education (Comte—Atheism—Friends). Education—He is tormented by
ideas and philosophy but he masters that which is essential.
Suddenly youth and debauchery. A martyr’s act and terrible crimes. Self-
renunciation. But out of mad pride he becomes an ascetic and pilgrim.
Travels in Russia. (Romance of love. Thirst for humiliation), etc., etc., and
so on.
(The canvas is rich.)
Fallings and risings.
Extraordinary man—but what has he done and achieved.
Traits.—Out of pride and infinite haughtiness towards people he
becomes meek and charitable to all because he is already higher than all.
He wanted to shoot himself (a child was exposed at his door).

He ends with establishing a Foundling Hospital and becomes a Haase.[81]
Everything is becoming clear.
He dies confessing a crime.

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 [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.”
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.

FOOTNOTES

1. This is almost certainly No. 11 above, since it contains, besides notes for The Idiot, notes for
The Eternal Husband.

2. Dostoevsky’s Genius, Odessa, 1921.

3. Originally “Chapter IX.”

4. After “madman” is struck out: “and at any rate, a perfectly talentless creature.”

5. After the words “wicker chair” there stood originally: “Nikolai Vsevolodovich was still much
distracted by some inner overpowering agitation.”

6. After the words “looked at” originally stood: “he thought and, certainly, did not know of
what.”

7. There is struck out “ridiculous.”

8. There is struck out “and rubbish.”

9. After “And about the duel” there followed originally: “You did hear a great deal here.”

10. Originally “This is not a bad account.”

11. Originally “No, I am not well.”

12. Originally “were cured.”

13. After “although I do see it ... and sometimes” there originally followed “I am not sure that I
see.”

14. After “smile” there is struck out: “And do you know, it does not suit you at all to cast your eyes
down: it is unnatural, ridiculous, and affected.”

15. After “all” there is struck out: “You must be awfully glad.”

16. After “perhaps” there is struck out: “That’s not bad. Why do you have doubts, then?”—“I
believe imperfectly.”

17. After “his head still lower” there is struck out: “the corners of his lips suddenly began
twitching, quickly and nervously.”

18. After “unbelief” is struck out: “Oh, parson!”

19. After “I do” is struck out: “They are fascinating words.”—“‘Fascinating,’ these are strange
words for a bishop; you are altogether a queer fellow.”

20. After “Stavrogin cut him short” is struck out: “this is for those in the middle, this is for the
indifferent ones, isn’t it?”

21. Instead of “perfectly, etc.,” the original had “I don’t need you in the least.”

22. After “tell everything” there is struck out: “for which you came here.”

23. After “guessed” there is struck out: “from your face.”

24. After “chronicle” there is struck out: “it must be supposed that it is now known to many.”

25. After the words “above all not a man of letters” there is written in Dostoevsky’s hand on the
proofs “one remark, only one.” In the text of the opening of Chapter I., published as a
Supplement to Vol. VIII. of the Jubilee Edition of 1906 of Dostoevsky’s Works, there is the
following passage, which is not in the proofs:
“I shall allow myself one more remark, although I am straying in advance of my story. This
document is, in my opinion, a morbid work, a work of the devil who took hold of that
gentleman. It is like this: as if a man were suffering from acute pain and tossing about in bed,
trying to find a position to relieve his pain even for a moment. Not even to relieve the pain, but
only to change it, momentarily, for another. In a situation like that, one of course does not
bother about the becomingness or good sense of the position. The fundamental idea of the
document is a terrible, undisguised craving for self-punishment, the need for the cross, for
immolation in the eyes of all. And yet this need for the cross in a man who does not believe in
the cross, does not this in itself form ‘an idea,’ as Stepan Trofimovich expressed himself once,
on a different occasion though. On the other hand, the document is at the same time something
wild and random, although evidently written with a different intention. The author declares that
he could not help writing it, that he was ‘compelled,’ and this is quite likely; he would have
been glad to let that cup pass him by, if only he could; but he indeed, so it seems, could not do
so, and he merely snatched at a convenient excuse for a fresh outburst. Yes, the sick man tosses
about in his bed and wishes to exchange one pain for another, and now the struggle with
society appears to him the easiest position, and he throws out a challenge to it.
“Indeed, in the very fact of such a document is implied a new, unexpected, and unforgivable
defiance of society—only to find some enemy to pick a quarrel with!
“And who can say? perhaps all this, the sheets and their intended publication, are but the same
as the Governor’s bitten ear, only in a different shape. But why this should come into my mind
now, when so much has already been explained, I can’t understand. I bring forward no proof,
nor do I at all assert that the document is false, that is, completely made up and fabricated.
Most likely the truth ought to be sought somewhere midway. However, I have already
wandered too far in advance; it is safer to turn to the document itself. This is what Tikhon
read.”
Here ends the first chapter in the Supplement to Vol. VIII. of Dostoevsky’s Works, Jubilee
Edition, 1906.

26. After “should meet, etc.,” there is struck out: “in the presence of my friends and of her
husband.”

27. After “with their daughter” is struck out: “I think her age was about fourteen.”

28. After “I do not remember” is struck out: “who they are, from where they come, and where they
are now, I don’t know in the least.”

29. After “girl” is struck out: “(I lived with them on familiar terms, and they stood on no
ceremonies with me).”

30. After “always called forth” there is struck out: “Having indulged up to the age of sixteen with
extraordinary immoderation in the vice to which J. J. Rousseau confessed, I stopped it at the
very moment which I had fixed, at the age of seventeen.”

31. After “presence” is struck out: “she did not cry, but only sobbed under the blows, certainly
because I stood there and saw everything.”

32. After “herself” is struck out: “up till now she perhaps only feared me, not personally, but as a
lodger, a stranger, and, I believe, she was very timid.”

33. Originally “As soon as the three days were over.”

34. After “beating” is struck out: “but then I suddenly asked myself: can I stop now, and I instantly
answered that I can.”

35. Originally “I kissed her face and legs: when I kissed her legs.”

36. Originally “I wished to get up and go away—so unpleasant was this to me in such a tiny child,
from a sense of pity. But I overcame the sudden sense of my fear and remained.”

37. After “cuff” is struck out: “twice on her cheek.”

38. After “no longer” is struck out: “I rose and moved close to her.”

39. After “room” is struck out: “to see if everything was in its place as before.”

40. After “what I wanted” is struck out: “I wanted all the while to be completely sure.”

41. Instead of “at last, etc.,” originally stood: “I finally decided that I could leave and I went
downstairs.”

42. After “beat her head” is struck out: “there was a commotion.”

43. After “stood” is struck out: “in the lobby.”

44. There is struck out “I heard nothing of the result of the medical evidence.”

45. The words “after she had been long buried” are struck out.

46. After the word “imagine” is struck out: “I will not decide one way or another whether into my
resolution there entered even unconsciously (of course, unconsciously) anger for the wild
cowardice which had possessed me after the affair with Matryosha. Really, I do not think so.”

47. After “distract” is struck out: “and because it had become intolerable.”

48. After “creature” is struck out: “of ten years.”

49. After “even now” is struck out: “The recollection of the deed itself is perhaps not even now
loathsome to me. Perhaps the memory of it even now contains something which is gratifying to
my passions.”

50. After “hallucination” is struck out: “I have other old memories, perhaps, worse than this. There
was a woman whom I treated worse, and she died of it. I killed two men in a duel who had
done me no harm. I was once mortally insulted, and did not avenge myself. I have it to my
account that I poisoned some one, deliberately and successfully, without being found out. If
necessary, I will confess it all.”

51. After “shall” is struck out: “of this I am perfectly sure.”

52. Originally “In Switzerland I was able two months after that to fall in love with a girl, or, to
speak more accurately, I experienced a fit, etc.”

53. Originally “And the more of those, the better.”

54. This is how the chapter is numbered in the original.

55. After “motionless” the following is struck out: “It is strange that the signs of impatience,
absentmindedness, and even of delirium, that had been in his face all that morning, almost
disappeared, and gave place to calmness and a kind of sincerity, that gave him an air almost of
dignity.”

56. After “coaxing” is struck out: “he added, as though he could no longer keep it up, and suddenly
fell again for a moment into his former tone, but he immediately smiled sadly at his words.”

57. Before the words “I wrote sincerely” there is struck out: “This seems to me a subtlety; does
this really matter....”

58. The phrase “Make myself out, etc.,” is struck out.

59. After “he did not finish” is struck out: “You mean you would like me immediately to express to
you my contempt,” Tikhon said firmly.

60. There is struck out: “I am somewhat surprised at your opinion about other people and about the
ordinariness of such a crime.”

61. After the sentence “Tikhon, etc.,” is struck out: “Stavrogin had no thought of going away; on
the contrary he began again for some minutes to fall into a reverie.”

62. After “lady” is struck out: “very timidly.”

63. All this passage, from “Well” to “easier for me,” is struck out.

64. After the words “Tikhon murmured, etc.,” there is struck out: “For what? What have you done
to me? Ah, yes, it is the monastic formula!”—“For voluntary and involuntary sin. Every man
who commits a sin has already sinned against all, and every man is in some way guilty for
another’s sin. There is no solitary sin. As for me I am a great sinner, and perhaps worse than
you.”

65. After “I could not” is struck out: “You understand very finely, but....”

66. After “Why do you” is struck out: “do this.”

67. After “endure” is struck out: “with humility.”

68. After the word “document” is struck out: “in spite of all the tragedy.”

69. After “the laughter will be universal” is struck out: “and add to it the remark of the philosopher
that in other people’s misfortune there is always something gratifying to us.”—“That is
true.”—“Yet ... you ... yourself.”

70. After “form” is struck out: “in the style.”

71. After “dirty little girl” is struck out: “and all that I said about my temperament and, well, all the
rest ... I see.”

72. After “Tikhon was silent” is struck out: “Yes, you know people, that is, you know that I shan’t
bear this.”

73. The fourteenth proof-sheet ends here—there appears to be something missing.

74. After the word “monk” is struck out: “However much I respect you, I ought to have expected
this. Well, I must confess to you, that in moments of cowardice this idea has occurred to me—
once having made these pages universally known, to hide from people in a monastery, be it
only for a time. But I blushed at the meanness of it. But to take orders as a monk, that did not
occur to me even in moments of most cowardly fear.”

75. The words “Stavrogin, etc.,” are struck out and several variants substituted, none of which,
evidently, satisfied Dostoevsky.

76. This is in Roman letters in Dostoevsky’s MS.

77. Throughout the MS. Dostoevsky writes this name and Lambert (see below) in Roman
characters.

78. At the top of page 11 is the sentence: “Scenes (cows, tigers, horses, etc.).”

79. On this sheet Dostoevsky noted: To begin to send out on Feb. 22, Jan. 27. Under the name of
Lambert stands the name of the author. On the top are several dates—Feb. 10, 15, 22.

80. On the left-hand margin Dostoevsky wrote, beginning at the words “They caught a mouse” and
continuing to this point, “To squeeze all this into four folios (maximum).”

81. F. M. Dostoevsky had evidently in mind the famous Russian doctor and philanthropist Haase.

82. I.e. the idea of Stavrogin’s going away with Dasha to Switzerland and living there as a Swiss
citizen.

83. Lisa, i.e. Elisabeth Nikolaevna Drosdov.

84. Nechaev became Peter Verkhovensky.

85. Stavrogin.

86. Stepan Trofimovich, Peter Verkhovensky’s father.

87. Dasha or Darya Pavlovna.

88. Elisabeth Nikolaevna.

89. Stavrogin’s marriage to the lame girl.

90. Below is added: “The prince buries the lame girl, and Kuleshov (Fedka the murderer)
confesses that it was he who did it.... And the beauty quickly went out of her mind.”

91. See Turgenev’s letter of Sept. 24, 1882, to Schedrin; also N. N. Strakhov’s letter of Nov. 28,
1883, to Leo Tolstoi.

92. The author of this article, published in Builoe, No. 18, 1922, seems at the time of writing to
have been ignorant of the version of Stavrogin’s Confession published by the Central Archives.
—Translators.

93. Reminiscences of Childhood, by Sophie Kovalevsky.

94. See Dostoevsky’s Biography, Letters, etc., pp. 202, 233, etc., in the original.

95. See “Dostoevsky as contributor to Russkìi Vèstnik” in Builoe, No. 14, 1919; F. M. D.’s
unpublished letters from 1866 to 1873.

96. See The Possessed (original), Edition 1888, vol. vii. pp. 212-213.

97. See ibid. p. 238.

98. Compare the passage in Stavrogin’s Confession from “A year ago, in the spring, going through
Germany, I absentmindedly left the station behind me,” to the words “A whole shaft of bright
slanting rays from the setting sun rushed out and poured their light over me,” with the
corresponding passage of Chapter VII., Part III., of The Raw Youth, third edition, 1888, pp.
461-462.

99. Prince V. M., Reminiscences of F. M. Dostoevsky, “Dobro,” No. 2-3, 1881.

100. From unpublished materials.

101. “This future novel has been tormenting me now for more than three years.”

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.

103. Editor of the journal of the old faith, Istina, in the ’60’s; embraced orthodoxy under the
influence of the monk Pavel.

104. Author of the book in three volumes, The Story of My Wanderings in Russia, Moldavia, Turkey,
and the Holy Land; Moscow, 1856.

105. Dostoevsky was at that time in Dresden.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

110. “I am now nearly drunk with my own fame.” (F. D.’s letter of Nov. 16, 1845.)

111. The wife of Michael Dostoevsky.

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).

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Transcriber’s Notes:
Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
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