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
