Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Stavrogin’s Confession And The Plan Of The Life Of A Great Sinner – Contents
< < < Introduction to the Unpublished Chapter of The Possessed. By V. Komarovich
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The Unfulfilled Idea: Note on The Life of a Great Sinner. By N. Brodsky
147THE 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 148for 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 149within.” … 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 150he 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]
151On 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 152gets 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 153(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 154boy 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] 155(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 156summing 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 157of 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.
158The 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 159confirmed 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 160impressions 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 161very 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 162most 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 163letter 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. 164They 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 165to 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 166Dostoevsky 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, 167for 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 168into 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 169The 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
< < < Introduction to the Unpublished Chapter of The Possessed. By V. Komarovich
Footnotes > > >
Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Stavrogin’s Confession And The Plan Of The Life Of A Great Sinner – Contents
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