INTRODUCTIONTO THE UNPUBLISHED CHAPTEROFTHE POSSESSED
BYV. KOMAROVICH
BYV. KOMAROVICH
BY
V. KOMAROVICH
THE UNPUBLISHED CHAPTEROFTHE POSSESSED
THE UNPUBLISHED CHAPTEROFTHE POSSESSED
THE UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER
OF
THE POSSESSED
Thechapter ofThe 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 toThe Possessed. Her hesitation is understandable: Stavrogin’s terrible confession was not a complete secret even to Dostoevsky’s contemporaries. Excludedfrom 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 ofThe Possessedmust 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-bookof 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 inThe 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 isalready 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 fromStavrogin (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 theRusskìi VèstnikwhereThe Possessedwas appearing.
Strakhov’s evidence is confirmed by the connection which exists between the omitted Chapter IX. and Dostoevsky’s creative activity generally, and also withThe Possessedas 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. Heremembered 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. ofThe Possessed. Putting asideCrime 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 ofThe Lifewas 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 Lifein 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’slife 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 ofThe Lifeare 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 ofThe Lifewhere “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 dominatedThe 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 ofThe 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 adequateway 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 ofThe 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 ofThe Life, and in the plan is sketched out by independent notes.
It is at the same time the artistic skeleton of our Chapter IX. ofThe 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 humblylowers 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 ofThe Lifecan be explained by the history of the logical construction ofThe 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 ofThe Life, which had been conceived at the same time, but had not yet been executed. Stavrogin’s appearance inThe Possessedin 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 writeThe Life. Stavrogin’scharacter introduced into the novel the broad religious and artistic problems ofThe Life of a Great Sinner. The Great Sinner’s meeting with Tikhon and his confession was an organic part ofThe 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 ofThe 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 inThe Possessed, which was at that time being published in theRusskìi 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 betweenThe Life of a Great SinnerandThe Possessedexplains that necessity.
Turning to the completed text ofThe 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 whichthe 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, ashe 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 onThe 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.
AlthoughThe Possessedwas 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 ofThe Possessed: a considerable part of Stavrogin’s Confession was inserted by Dostoevsky almost without alteration in the confession ofVersilov (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 ofThe Possessed. The autumn of 1870 is the time when the idea ofThe Possessedhad become closely related in Dostoevsky’s mind with the idea ofThe Life of a Great Sinner. Stavrogin is almostidentified with the hero ofThe 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 ofThe 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 ofThe Life of a Great Sinnerthan to the form whichThe Possessedfinally 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 thecatastrophe 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 ofThe Possessedis shown, I think, the usual course of Dostoevsky’s artistic problems and their solution.The Idiot,The Raw Youth, andThe Brothers Karamazovhad all, likeThe 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, theartist, 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.