[In the following essay, Guerard analyzes Dostoevsky's Notebooks, evaluating the changes that the writer chose to make in developing the final published version of The Idiot.]

Why scrutinize the process of creating great complex novelistic masterpieces such as The Idiot, with due recourse to the Notebooks, when to read and interpret the finished texts is a more than sufficient task? One may reply that this is at the least pure science and pleasure: to follow rich minds able to articulate the twists and turns of imaginative discovery, repression, rediscovery. Applied science too, for those who desire it, since Dostoevsky not only offers his bundle of neuroses turned to good account, but also a fuller access to a dynamic preconscious and even unconscious than nearly anyone for whom records are available. The literary critic, to be sure, must always beware of interpreting or evaluating a novel in terms of its stated intentions. It is entirely possible to become so bemused by the rich political speculations of the Notebooks for The Possessed as to go on to discover them unimpaired in the novel itself, though in fact many have disappeared.

Many writers, moreover, are unwilling or incapable of understanding what they have done. Conrad's evasive prefaces reflect a fear of his own subversive and skeptical side, and want us to believe his narratives simpler than they are. And even the greatest post facto statements of conscious intention, say Malcolm Lowry's marathon letter on Under the Volcano, must be read in terms of one of its intentions, which was to persuade a publisher that the novel should not be cut since everything there had its place in an elaborate meaningful design. Even Dostoevsky's Notebooks, the greatest of all documents on novel writing, can be misleading. That is, something very essential to the dreaming of the novel may be undertreated or even omitted, either because the material was already fixed in Dostoevsky's mind and under full control, or because the threatening material was half-censored. A diary entry “Suicide” or “Cut her throat” may be quite as much, by way of memorandum, as Dostoevsky needed at a given moment. Notebook allusions to the violation of children are as a rule very brief. And the material may be even more threatening than Dostoevsky himself realized, as Edward Wasiolek shrewdly comments of a particular plan:

It is just possible that Dostoevsky is experimenting with various structural doublings as a way of expressing what is painful to express directly: the seduction of a daughter by a father. This was a factor in the Umetsky case, and there are some hints that Umetsky slept with Ustinia. The seduction of the ward by the general, and his lascivious relationship with Ustinia, may be an indirect analogue to the seduction of Nastia and her impregnation. It is possible, in other words, that Totsky's seduction of Nastasia Filipovna in the final version, is a symbolic displacement of the father's seduction of a child.¹

But even evasions and displacements take us close to a mind in movement, and offer their own rewards. There is a still more essential reason for studying the process of dreaming and writing novels. This is that nearly all criticism, be it new or old, structuralist or phenomenological or serenely historical, is to some extent based on inferences about the way novels are made. The critic, it may be against his will, can hardly avoid inferring the presence of a human writer at his desk, one who laid plans and made choices, designed structures and conceived meanings. But these inferences are usually both overelaborate and oversimplified: overelaborate in positing structures of symbolism, or in implying that writers think consciously in terms of a poetics of space, or in dwelling on the connotations of proper names. But the other tendency is to vastly oversimplify psychological content, and reduce a rich congeries of ideas to paraphraseable theme, and discover an overall harmony and order very far from what an alert unbiased (e.g. unprofessional) reader would experience. Thus at an extreme, and because a final ordering and subduing of the intractable seemed to him artistically necessary, and because he wanted to honor a writer he loved—thus Mochulsky's conclusion that everything in the great chaotic The Possessed has its place. “We cannot go to The Idiot,” Wasiolek remarks, “with theories of the organic fitness of every part, of the necessity of every positioning, every image, every sound. … Structure, I hazard, is never as exquisite as our current theories would have it, at least not in this novel.”² Much historical criticism of Dostoevsky, moreover—say a criticism that describes him as remote from the radicals satirized in The Possessed—similarly makes false inferences because it fails to discern the real biographical situation: what the imagination was up against, had to go through, do. Seldom mentioned is the indispensable psychological fact that the Nechaev who was responsible for the murder of the student Ivanov was at large, his fate unknown, through most of the period Dostoevsky was writing his book. Significant too is the fact that he continued to frequent, in Geneva, the theorists he would put to scorn.

What we propose then, so far from encouraging a discredited intentionalism or crude biographical approach, should counteract the oversimplifying intentionalism on which so much criticism really rests. To study the creative process behind a complex novel makes us more aware of how wayward and wandering and difficult that process can be, of how much goes into the dreaming of a fiction; and thereby enables us to see and enjoy, in the finished work, more of what is discoverably there.

The brief comments that follow will suggest only a few of the creative challenges Dostoevsky faced in The Idiot. Dostoevsky saw his plans for the first part of The Possessed as a “terrible disorder.” But The Idiot long remained even more unsubduable. By contrast the planning and writing of Crime and Punishment and even The Brothers Karamazov were relatively straightforward. The Notebooks for The Idiot, moreover, reflect preliminary dreamings, prolonged gropings for character and theme, rather than the structural manipulation of material already fairly clearly conceived. The Notebooks are thus essential to an understanding of the earliest processes of creation. But to discern the ultimate creative problems and choices we must look instead to the completed novel. Somewhere between the two kinds of evidence one may look “outside,” as to the famous January 1868 letter to the niece S. A. Ivanovna, where Dostoevsky declares his intention to depict “a positively beautiful individual” and, with allusions to Don Quixote and Pickwick, “beautiful simply because at the same time he is also comic.”³ But this intention was discovered very late indeed.

One obvious difficulty, with The Idiot, was that Dostoevsky long failed to see who his characters were, or who were the main ones. Even in very late notes Ipolit (who like Kirilov came late in the planning, and whose narrative is as detachable as Father Zossima's or The Grand Inquisitor), was briefly seen as “the main axis of the whole novel.” Edward Wasiolek has described succinctly the great oddity: that only in the Seventh Plan did the Idiot become “humble, forgiving, sincere, Christian … in short, the Myshkin of the final version. …”⁴ “The pure, noble Christ-like traits that had existed from the very beginning and had been given at different times to the uncle's son, to Ganechka, and to the Idiot's wife, are now centered in the Idiot himself.”⁵ Much earlier in the Notebooks Myshkin was double in the way that Stavrogin would be double, with the potentialities for salvation of a Great Sinner. “N.B. The Idiot's basic character. Domination of himself out of pride (not morality) and rabid self-license in everything. As yet, however, self-license is but a dream, whereas at the moment he has only convulsive impulses. Consequently, he could turn into a monster, but love saves him. He becomes imbued with the most profound compassion and he forgives faults in others.”⁶ He has raped “Mignon”/Umetskaia and “pushes the heroine toward the diplomat out of secret jealousy. He would like (paroxysm) to cover the heroine with shame, make her a whore.”⁷ Less than two months before Dostoevsky was to submit the first part of the novel, Wasiolek notes, the Idiot “has a wife, rapes Umetskaia, burns his finger, sets fire to a house, loves the heroine and torments his wife.”⁸

The Idiot's redemption, after long authorial resistance, occurs within the Notebooks not the novel, where he is noble from the start, and is accomplished by the simple (simple!) splitting of self into two—the coarse, brutal, sensual, proud, self-willed traits being transferred to Roghozhin, while the Christian humility and compassion is retained. Dostoevsky was fully aware of this transference of traits, and onto others beside Roghozhin, but did not perhaps see clearly that one human being had become two or, it may be, that his two personages must ultimately be united. Granted that he disliked explanations in his novels, much in the hold that Roghozhin had over Myshkin may have remained mysterious to Dostoevsky himself. Their reunion at Nastasya's deathbed, Roghozhin's insistence that they sleep side by side at her feet, Myshkin's instant seeming acceptance of the crime, his total identification in a word—all this may indeed suggest, as Simon Lesser argues, that Dostoevsky was capable of understanding, if only at an unconscious level, the homosexuality latent in his narrative.⁹ Or we may use René Girard's terms of mediation and triangular desire. For Mochulsky, who stresses a religious myth-plot of perdition and redemption, deathly seducer and potential liberator have alike failed Nastasya and are therefore accomplices who have killed her by their “love.”¹⁰ At the very least we can say that at Nastasya's deathbed two beings were reunited, two sides of a single self, that had been rather violently torn asunder.

Such, briefly, are a few bare essentials of the evolution of Myshkin in the Notebooks. But if we turn to the novel (looking only incidentally to the Notebooks for help) we may see the creative problem in larger terms. They are terms which often apply to Dickens and Faulkner as well, and to other writers whose conscious conceptions and half-conscious or unconscious intuitions are alike very strong.

THE CONFLICT OF COMMON-SENSE AND DYNAMIC PSYCHOLOGIES

We may discern, even more than in Dickens, fictional worlds within worlds; or, more usefully, the gradual narrowing of a pictured Russian world, the world of “social realism,” to the intense interpersonal relations of six or seven persons, then four, then three, then two who are ultimately one. In the background, barely noticed, is ordinary Russian life: the drunken poor in Petersburg, the vacationers in the park at Pavlovsk, the bystanders in the hotel where Myshkin has his fit, the virtually anonymous community shocked at the prospect of the marriage to Nastasya, and as hostile as those at Lucetta's wedding in Casterbridge or Sutpen's in Jefferson. Nearer to the reader is the novel's accepted social circle of ordinary named persons—not so ordinary, after all, since they are Russians and Dostoevskyan Russians. Some are virtually Dickensian eccentrics (Ivolgin, Roghozhin's rowdies and the radicals who protest Myshkin's inheritance). But there are also the relatively well-balanced aristocrats and nobodies at the betrothal party, and the wonderfully vivacious women of the Epanchin household. Dostoevsky's scenic, uninterpreted, unflaggingly inventive presentation of Myshkin's first day in Petersburg, more than a fourth of the novel in length, makes of Part One one of the great triumphs of realistic narrative.

There is a conspicuous narrowing of the lens, and of the fictional world, as we experience what I will call the central Quartet: Myshkin, Roghozhin, Nastasya, Aglaia. On the one hand Dostoevsky saw their desires and anxieties and neuroses in common-sense terms, and their ballet of shifting relationships, and reasoned about them in the Notebooks. Who is to marry whom? Who is to murder whom? Even Aglaia, even Ipolit are seen capable of murder, and the Idiot himself from very early in the plans. A far more coherent common-sense psychology is apparent at this level, as we turn to the novel, and most critics never go beyond it. Myshkin's Christ-like humility and compassion for the ‘fallen’ yet pure Nastasya, living in her hell of suffering and madness, and a normal fascination with her beauty, may account for much of his eccentric behavior. And Christian forgiveness of the ‘brother’ Roghozhin he had hoped to save, and with whom he had exchanged crosses, might lead to that reconciliation at Nastasya's death-bed. In such naturalistic terms his several fits may be attributed to reasonable anxiety and his final madness to extreme strain and grief. There is a hint, for the alert eye, such as Gide's, that impotence may be one reason for his behavior. And Yevegeny Pavlovitch at one point, “with great psychological insight,” contributes just such an analysis as a cautious modern critic might come up with: the interest in the woman's question, the curiosity concerning Russia, the heart-rending story of Nastasya heard on the first day, her beauty. … “Add to that your nerves, your epilepsy, add to that our Petersburg thaw which shatters the nerves, add all that day, in an unknown and to you almost fantastic town, a day of scenes and meetings.”¹¹

In such common-sense terms Roghozhin's behavior, if reduced to summary, may also seem explicable: a proud man intoxicated by his new riches, eager to revenge himself for past humiliations, infatuated by Nastasya, at times respectful of Myshkin and at times deeply jealous, driven at last to murder by the loved one's exasperating oscillations and withdrawals. Aglaia is simply and plausibly a vivacious, fun-loving, teasing young woman, as proud as any of the others and so vulnerable to humiliation; and very jealous of Nastasya. The portrait of the hysterical self-lacerating Nastasya is entirely convincing. Really discovered by her guardian Totsky at twelve, his mistress at sixteen, her life now seems devoted to humiliating him and humiliating herself. With others she seems compelled to provoke then repudiate sexual desires, as though in reenactment of her years with Totsky. She is a poignant victim of manic and depressed moods, of the folie circulaire. It is “as though she had a stone for a heart and her feelings had been withered and dried up for ever.” More precisely she does have a genuine passion, which is for self-destruction. Her noblest impulse is to save Myshkin from herself; her strongest one is to reenact her degradation, as Myshkin himself sees. She “ran away because she had an irresistible inner craving to do something shameful, so as to say to herself at once: ‘There, you've done something shameful again, so you're a degraded creature!’”¹² To save Myshkin she tries to marry him off to Aglaia, which only adds to the latter's rage. Myshkin regards Nastasya as literally mad, and therefore needing his care—what some see as his fatal generosity and compassion. It would appear she went to Roghozhin at the end with full knowledge that she was going to her death.

Such are the intense personages in an explicit drama of interpersonal relations, with three neurotics tearing at each other and at themselves. The relatively sane and almost child-like Aglaia is drawn into the furnace of this interior drama helplessly, as such people often are in ‘real life,’ while Ganya and other suitors remain outside and watch aghast. At times Myshkin not merely desires both Nastasya and Aglaia—the dark depraved beauty and the child-like one—but seems almost to believe he can have them both: an illusion which might be attributed, simply, to his estranged “innocence.” It is evident that on one level of consciousness Dostoevsky thought about his story in these more or less clear terms. He might, that is, have conceived a novel by Flaubert or James.

But this summary scarcely touches on the deeper intensities of The Idiot, which is obviously “about” much more. Once we look at the strangest scenes of the book, at its moments of “illuminating distortion,”¹³ we are concerned with darker matters, and poor Aglaia simply drops out of the picture. At another, still conscious level, Dostoevsky saw his triad of lovers, but Myshkin and Roghozhin especially, in terms of mysterious connections. A more intuitive psychology, that is, was operating parallel to and sometimes in conflict with the one formulated by Jamesian common-sense, and outward happenings often seem to be psychic events. The shifting of partners within the triangle, for one thing, sometimes involves the complicity of all three. The first meetings of Roghozhin and Myshkin, of Myshkin and Nastasya, are “uncanny,” as though someone known long before had been recognized, someone (Freud would say) who had sprung from within. (This is, for Mochulsky, a mystical meeting of two exiles from paradise, who “remember their heavenly homeland … as ‘in a dream.’”)¹⁴ Roghozhin sets a recurring pattern at the start when he proposes, and although he doesn't know why he is so drawn to Myshkin, that they visit Nastasya together. Much later Myshkin assures Roghozhin that he will not stand in their way, though he believes marriage with Nastasya would be perdition for them both. Immediately prior to Roghozhin's attempt to kill Myshkin in the hotel, and with the familiar symptoms of a fit looming, the Prince dreams of going with Roghozhin to Nastasya. “His heart was pure; he was not Roghozhin's rival!” “And how could he have left her when she ran away from him to Roghozhin?” “Why, he himself had wanted to take Roghozhin by the hand and go there with him.” Later still, when Nastasya has sent Roghozhin to bring Myshkin to her, the Prince urges the messenger to come too. The drama of complicity, of a deep willingness and even eagerness to share the loved one, could hardly be more explicit.

Nastasya's pattern, in turn, is to move to the brink of marriage with one, then rush feverishly to the other, as though something essential were missing. It is much as though the three were drawn somnambulistically into meetings they themselves do not understand, through sudden repudiations and reconciliations, never satisfied for long. In the novel's last pages the three are indeed united, as it were against the outside world, the whole world of outside appearance and external events, not merely the world threatening punishment in Siberia, madness in Switzerland. The trivialities of rational dialogue, of everyday activities, of “social realism” are behind them. But by now there are really only two, since Nastasya Filipovna lies dead. On the way to the dark funeral house Roghozin had insisted that they walk on opposite sides of the street, as though to preserve a psychic separateness. But separation is overcome in the most extreme way, as Myshkin not only accepts Roghozhin's crime but wonders whether the knife that threatened him in the hotel was the one that killed Nastasya. He asks to see and hold the cards with which Roghozhin and Nastasya used to play. But even this symbolic sharing no longer satisfies. “A new feeling of hopeless sadness weighed on his heart; he realised suddenly that at that moment and a long time past he had been saying not what he was wanting to say and had been doing the wrong thing, and that the cards he was holding in his hands and was so pleased to see were no help, no help now.” Shortly thereafter Roghozhin shows first signs of hysteria, and Myshkin begins to stroke his head, his hair, his cheeks. “Quite a new sensation gnawed at his heart with infinite anguish.” (In the next to last Notebooks entry, where both are said to be “out of their heads,” Roghozhin caresses Myshkin: “If only you don't have a seizure?”) By morning, when people come, they find the murderer unconscious and raving, and Myshkin unable to understand questions or recognize the people around him. Before the immensity of such a scene any single explanation—be it latent homosexuality or ultimate spiritual brotherhood or the reunion of components of the self—would seem oversimple and reductive. But the spiritual drama has indeed now narrowed, in Hawthorne's terms, to “the interior of a heart.” The two are one, and the aftermath of separation—Roghozhin to Siberia, Myshkin to Switzerland—seems scarcely more plausible than the conclusion to Crime and Punishment.

By what process of invention could Dostoevsky render such deeply inward workings, more inward than the Secret Sharer's, without sacrificing the dramatic interest of two persons struggling for and sharing a third? One answer lies in a frank use of the occult: the more than mesmeric power of Roghozhin's eyes—more, because Myshkin is aware of those watchful, glittering eyes even where there is no possibility of his seeing them. His awareness of the eyes is associated, moreover, with his epileptic fits, and would seem similarly to come from within. To be sure Myshkin is not alone in succumbing to their power. Nastasya says that two terrible eyes are always gazing at her, and she knows their secret: that Roghozhin keeps a razor wrapped in silk as did a murderer in Moscow. And when she catches Roghozhin's eyes in the crowd collected for her wedding, she rushes to him as to a devil or robber bridegroom, and is whisked away as by a fairy tale coach. For the dying Ipolit, Roghozhin is much like the hallucinated devil/double of The Brothers Karamazov. He appears in Ipolit's locked room shortly after the dying man's vision of the almighty Power or Godhead as a “dull, dark, dumb force” taking the shape of a huge and loathsome spider.

We hear of Roghozhin's fiery eyes on the first page. But the first instance of their occult power comes at the railway station of Myshkin's return from Moscow: a “vision of strange glowing eyes fixed upon him in the crowd that met the train.” (There had been meetings between the two of which the novel tells us almost nothing, meetings that had “left a lasting memory in their hearts.”) Later that day Myshkin feels himself transfixed by Roghozhin's gaze and, for the first time, has warning signs of the fits he had five years before. They discuss Roghozhin's possible marriage. Myshkin, who says he is very fond of Roghozhin, will not stand in their way. But will it not be as though Nastasya, marrying, were deliberately asking to be drowned or murdered? Near the end of the chapter Myshkin twice picks up a knife from a table and Roghozhin twice takes it from his hands. It would seem related, psychologically, to the knife of Stavrogin's thoughts, of his will to see Mary Lebyadkin dead … which at once becomes a real knife in his agent Fedka's hand. In the next chapter, as though to combat Roghozhin's growing intention, Myshkin tells the story of a man who asks for God's forgiveness in the very act of cutting his friend's throat for a watch. And Roghozhin in turn proposes that they exchange crosses and be spiritual brothers; he introduces Myshkin to his mother. But Roghozhin's eyes glow at their parting. Is he driven against his will, as perhaps Coleridge's Geraldine with her snake's small eye? In the pages to follow the threat of a fit darkens, and Myshkin once again feels the way he had that morning, with the eyes fixed on him. An “insuperable inner loathing” gives way to remembrance of the moments of ecstasy that precede a seizure: harmonious joy, a sense that there shall be no more time. Now, as the mental darkness deepens, he has his vision of union with Nastasya and with a Roghozhin who would feel compassion for her. For “him, Myshkin, to love her with passion was almost unthinkable, would have been almost cruelty, inhumanity” … But

Why that shiver again, that cold sweat, that darkness and chill in his soul? Was it because he had once more seen those eyes? But he had gone out of the Summer Garden on purpose to see them! That was what his ‘sudden idea’ amounted to. He had intensely desired to see ‘those eyes’ again, so as to make quite certain that he would meet them there, at that house. He had desired it passionately, and why was he so crushed and overwhelmed now by the fact that he had actually just seen them?¹⁵

He longs to take Roghozhin by the hand and go with him to Nastasya's house. But instead on the staircase of the hotel, a man is waiting in a hollow niche, and the same two eyes meet his own. It is Roghozhin with the knife. Myshkin's long-anticipated epileptic fit now ensues, and presumably saves him from death.

Myshkin's forgiveness is total, and totally unexplained: Christian forgiveness or indulgence for the secret sharer? Myshkin even feels he has sinned in suspecting Roghozhin might attempt murder; he would virtually seem an accomplice in the attempt against himself. “We were feeling just the same. If you had not made that attack (which God averted), what should I have been then? I did suspect you of it, our sin was the same in fact.”¹⁶ Later in Pavlovsk an hallucinated impression of Roghozin's eyes precedes the appearance of Nastasya and, some minutes later, of Roghozhin himself, who leads her away. In the important sequence of the betrothal party (Part IV, Chapter VI) Myshkin's premonitions of a fit are accompanied by an “intense and unaccountable desire to see Roghozhin, to see him and say a great deal to him—what about he could not himself have said. …” This time the fit is associated with a compulsion to commit an act he has been warned against: not to knock over a Chinese vase. His illusion that he saw Roghozhin's eyes at the old general's funeral precede by only a few pages the wedding holocaust. Nastasya's own “great black eyes glowed upon the crowd like burning coals.” But they are no match for Roghozhin's. In the novel's next to last chapter Myshkin recalls the eyes as they had looked at him in the darkness. Was Roghozhin even in Petersburg? “He could not have explained if he had probed his own thought why he should be suddenly so necessary to Roghozhin, and why it was so impossible that they should not meet.” And now it seemed as though Roghozhin would appear if only Myshkin mentally summoned him. “What if he suddenly comes out of that corner and stops me at the stairs?” Minutes later, Roghozhin does appear: “follow me, brother, I want you.” He takes Myshkin to the house where the crime has already in some sense been committed by them both. “Roghozhin's face was pale as usual; his glittering eyes watched Myshkin intently with a fixed stare.”

The premonitions of fits and the fits themselves, the depression and inner loathing succeeded by a vision of ecstatic harmony outside time, the illusion of watchful eyes even when Myshkin is alone, the need to go to Roghozhin and be united with him (if only through the shared Nastasya, even through the dead Nastasya), the knife intuited and the knife in Roghozhin's hands, the remorse for having unjustly (!) thought Roghozhin capable of murder—so much intimately associated, connected material conveys a deeply inward psychological or spiritual experience, one that defies common sense. Even the broad elastic concept of the double seems to beg the question. The important creative fact, again, is that Dostoevsky did not permit his formulated common-sense reasonings to interfere with this rich intuitive imagining.¹⁷ The Notebooks touch on this dynamic material only briefly, and a single entry may combine the carefully reasoned and the intuitive: “N.B. At lunch before Roghozhin's arrival, about Roghozhin, that the feeling between him and the Prince is mutual; the word ‘take!’ uttered at the station is cherished in both their hearts, and that the Prince had an extraordinary influence on Roghozhin because of his noble bearing.” More fruitful for the writer, no doubt, were the notebook entries recording scraps of enigmatic dialogue: i.e. where no explanation is attempted: “After the knife. Roghozhin says to the Prince: ‘You know that my life is yours now; take it.’” The scene at Nastasya's deathbed, one of the greatest in novelistic literature, is once summarized in three lines, followed by two words of authorial self-approval:

Goes to Roghozhin in despair.

(He murders.) Summons the Prince.

Roghozhin and the Prince beside the corpse. Finale.

Not bad.¹⁸

SIGNIFICANT UNDERTREATMENT OR OMISSION

One other strategy, partly unconscious, protected the dynamic and mysterious inward drama: the omission or undertreatment of certain crucial events and even periods of Myshkin's life. It may well be Dostoevsky felt a fuller understanding, even a fuller visual imagining of this material would be crippling. We are given only the briefest allusions to Myshkin's month in the provinces with Nastasya, when he had been seeing her almost every day, though it “had had a fearful effect upon him, so much so that he sometimes tried to drive away all recollection of it.” “Oh, if you only knew with what horror I recall the time I spent with her!”—the horror of witnessing Nastasya's self-destructiveness, her “irresistible inner craving to do something shameful.” Earlier still, according to the shadowy rumors that open Part II, there had been an awful orgy at the Ekaterinhof Vauxhall, in which Nastasya had taken part, presumably with Roghozhin and his followers and (this more than rumor) that Myshkin had spent that night at Ekaterinhof, returning at six in the morning. This is the night following Nastasya's blatant “sale” of herself to Roghozhin for 100,000 roubles and her rejection of Myshkin's offer to marry her without dowry. Dostoevsky gives no details at all, leaves entirely in shadow what would have been, for Myshkin, an intensely traumatic, psychologically determinative experience. But even more significant may be the undertreatment (almost tantamount to repression) of Myshkin's six months in Moscow, a period perhaps as crucial as Stavrogin's shadowed time in Petersburg. For during three of those months there had been long hours spent with Roghozhin, and “meetings, moments of which had left a lasting memory in their hearts.” But of these meetings we learn next to nothing. They had talked, it appears, of work to be done “in our Russian world”; “they had been intimate, they had been like brothers”; they had read the whole of Pushkin together. Even Marlow reporting the discourse of Kurtz is more specific! The references to the Moscow period are so few and so sparse as to suggest Dostoevsky did not know what went on there (as with Fitzgerald's acknowledged ignorance of a whole period of Gatsby's life) or that he did not want to know (i.e. that genuine repression occurred) or, to be sure, that he wanted to avoid what James called “weak specification.” Significantly, Myshkin's recollection of the Moscow days immediately follows the breaking of the Chinese vase at the betrothal party and immediately precedes a fit. Association with Roghozhin thus shatters a primary sexual symbol and, because of the fit, makes marriage with Aglaia seem out of the question. But the exclusions are altogether extreme, and are perhaps related to the radical confusions of identity, or linkings of personality, that precede that confrontation in the hotel stairwell.¹⁹ The geography of union, separation, reunion, of dissociation and integration or incorporation, seems as important as in Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer; and infinitely more complex. It would appear the intimacy of the Moscow days could not be looked at in common-sense terms, or perhaps in any terms at all, without danger of major imaginative loss.

Such in brief, and in far simpler form than it is experienced in the novel's dense reality, is one essential drama of creative process in the writing of The Idiot. Even within the novel Dostoevsky admonishes himself not to explain: “Don't let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them. And these can rarely be distinctly defined. The best course for the story-teller at times is to confine himself to a simple narrative of events.”²⁰ There are, both in the Notebooks and in the novel, no small number of common-sense explanations. But Dostoevsky would not allow these “explanations,” these rational configurations, these ordered pictures of personal relationships, to destroy the deeper drama of Myshkin and his double/brother Roghozhin. And this deeper drama he explains almost not at all. He would seem to an unusual degree capable, simultaneously, of rational and intuitive creation.

A BURNED FINGER “DISPLACED”

Even this general description of the creative situation may seem excessively orderly, as we lose ourselves in The Idiot's first half-dozen plans. And the windings of conscious and unconscious understanding and creation will seem more than ever intricate, with ideas and dramatic events and persons whirling in ever-changing patterns. We may take, as a single instance, the burned finger that runs through the Notebooks, usually without explanation—the Idiot's finger until fairly late in the plans, ultimately Gania's. A recent fait divers, and one that fed Dostoevsky's long preoccupation with abused or violated young girls, is referred to in the first plans: the trial of the 15-year old Olga Umetskaia in September, 1867 for setting fires to buildings on her father's estate, and of the parents for neglecting her upbringing and for beating her savagely. The daughter may have been raped or seduced by the father; a finger had been broken by the mother. In one of Dostoevsky earliest fantasies the Idiot, teased by “Mignon” /Umetskaia, rapes her, sets fire to the house and on her command burns his finger; in a later plan he sets a house on fire with her. Oddly enough the rape, repeatedly re-imagined, scarcely disturbs Umetskaia, though on one occasion his “brutal defilement of her was both an overwhelming happiness to her, and death itself.” The fourth plan momentarily anticipates a major configuration of The Possessed: a raped young woman, a house set on fire, a loss of desire for “the heroine,” “a sudden total apathy,” suicide … and once again the unexplained burned finger.²¹ (In some places the burning appears to be a test of love.) The burned finger sometimes occurs before the rape, as though itself a glowing sexual object; sometimes after, as in token of self-punishment. And once it is associated with a greater crime: Gania strangling Aglaia. Little remains in the completed novel. Aglaia tells Myshkin that Gania burnt his hand before her eyes to show he loved her more than his life, and kept his finger in the fire for half an hour. But she has then to acknowledge this was a lie. An event referred to almost obsessively in the Notebooks thus comes to virtually nothing.

But a much more powerful association of money, sexuality and fire (with the violation of the young Nastasya in the background), occurs with the great scene that ends Part One. Roghozhin has met Nastasya's fierce challenge and arrives with the hundred thousand roubles she had set as her price. He lays the money on the table, a phallic roll six inches thick and eight inches long, wrapped in a copy of the Financial News. In her frenzy of rebellion and self-degradation Nastasya asks who will take her for nothing, and Myshkin offers to marry her. But this is only a diversion in the real movement and meaning of the scene. She says she cannot allow herself to ruin such a child; the ruin of children is more in Totsky's line. “I've been Totsky's concubine. …” Her challenge is rather to Ganya, who had planned to marry her for a dowry supplied by Totsky. She will throw the money in the fire; it will be Ganya's to keep if he is willing to snatch it out. “As soon as the fire has got it all alight, put your hands into the fire, only without gloves, with your bare hands and turn back your sleeves, and pull the bundle out of the fire. If you can pull it out, it's yours, the whole hundred thousand. You'll only burn your fingers a little—” All stare at the smouldering roll of notes. Ganya, his vanity stronger than his greed, resists saving the money; but faints. Thereupon Nastasya herself pulls out the notes; the inside of the roll was untouched. She lays the roll of notes beside Ganya, while Myshkin and the others watch. The common-sense interpretation—that she honors ironically Ganya's self-control and shows her scorn for the others—hardly touches the power of the scene. Rather this: she alone, who has withheld herself from Totsky for five years, after the years of adolescent concubinage, now controls sexual energies and will transfer them as she pleases. Ganya is impotent because unconscious, however; the watching Myshkin is also impotent, if only because a child. The money has been taken from the baffled Roghozhin, though he will moments later seem successful. Is there some hint that he too is impotent? On the ground floor of his gloomy house is a money-changer's shop owned by one of the Skoptsy sect of castrates. … And his Christian name Parfen, Richard Peace notes, is the Greek parthenos = virgin.²²

All this is but to say that Dostoevsky erected a powerful cluster of associations—burning finger / burning roll of money / sexual crime against a young girl / impotence / confusion of sexual partner and sexual role—without ever clearly explicating his meanings. Once again the unconscious, and half-conscious envisionings too, wrought better than he knew; or, for that matter, better than most of his critics. This doubtless accounts in part for the immense power and reality of a scene that, in bare summary, might seem implausible and even ridiculous.

Many writers resist their “true subjects” indefinitely, and so suffer from writer's block. Even for Dostoevsky the liberation of dynamic materials in The Idiot did not occur overnight.

AUTHORIAL EVASIONS AND RESISTANCES.

Edward Wasiolek's analyses of the Notebooks are succinct, scrupulous, often brilliant. His summaries of the various plans emphasize how “names and qualities live in these notes in a fluid relationship,”²³ with traits repeatedly redistributed as characters come to the forefront and recede. The Eighth Plan, he observes, reads like a step backward, and even the later notes (except for a few intense entries) remain far from the published novel. The next to last entry, however, takes us close to the scene at Nastasya's deathbed, referred to only very briefly in scattered earlier entries. This may suggest that Dostoevsky, once he had fully acknowledged and visualized this culminating scene, could go on with less difficulty and with little need for grouping analyses. In any event the Notebooks are throughout so confused, with so many plots in competition, and so many minor or irrelevant personages pressing forward to demand attention, and with both Gania and Ipolit conceived as of major importance until near the end, as to suggest that Dostoevsky long evaded and resisted his crucial preoccupations, especially the implications of the Myshkin-Roghozhin relationship.

Insight seems to have been momentarily achieved in the fourth plan, then quickly rejected. There complicity with “the son” (later Roghozin) is related to a queer and terrible love for him:

In surrendering her to the son, the Idiot does not ask any gratitude. His pride alienates him from them all. N.B. He has a terrible love for the son. A queer passion. N.B. Queerest of all, he loves the uncle too.²⁴

A cryptic entry for April 23, 1868, following closely on allusions to the murder of Nastasya and the planned death of Aglaia, with Myshkin at her side, may refer to the same central situation:

(“You gave her to me. You united us but you didn't separate us.”) “You watched over her.” N.B. (N.B. And at the same time Roghozhin was afraid of the other's arrival.)²⁵

Characteristically, Dostoevsky had achieved an initial insight in the First Plan, then repressed or cast it aside: “If she married another man, likely his reaction would be quite different from what one would expect: ‘Let her marry him, I will love her just the same.’ If she were a whore, it would come to much the same thing: ‘But I will love her just the same.’ Eventually he begins to lose all sense of reality. He even goes to the son and talks about her without concealing his own love, yet as if supporting the son, so that the latter marvels and begins to believe him out of his mind.”²⁶

The Idiot, like many great novels, has its share of lost subjects that preoccupied its author. Dostoevsky long clings to the changing Ganya as a central character, and to the Umetskaia story with which he had begun. There were multiple efforts, as Wasiolek remarks, to “use the theme of the maltreated child, the cruel and ugly environment of childhood and its effect upon the soul of the adult, the horrifying prospect of a father's betrayal of his God-like trust”²⁷—little of which gets into the published novel. There are recurring allusions to the Idiot and Mignon wandering the city and to Nastasya dying in a brothel. There are also a number of cryptic references to a children's club directed by Myshkin. On March 21, 1868 Dostoevsky boxed the word nevinyi in the manuscript—which may mean ‘innocent,’ ‘guiltless,’ possibly ‘virginal’²⁸—and follows it by an exclamation mark. Only a few lines later the club seems to have an extraordinary significance: “When at the end of the 4th Part N.F. again deserts the Prince and runs away with Roghozhin on her wedding day, the Prince is wholly absorbed with the club.” All that remains in the novel are the children of his Swiss memories, though the “club” may look ahead to The Brothers Karamazov and Alyosha. A number of entries also anticipate the later novel in imagining a father and son competing for the same woman.

Another great imminent novel intrudes now and then in the Notebooks to play its part in delaying a final discovery of theme: The Possessed. (The intrusion is natural enough, since Dostoevsky had already attended in September 1867 the Congress of the League for Peace and Freedom in Geneva, and heard Bakunin speak there, and associated with Herzen, Ogarev and other emigrés.) Ipolit, who appears so late in the planning of The Idiot, would seem to anticipate Kirilov and Camus' Meursault. For the man condemned to death “telling the truth or lying is absolutely the same. …” His confession and statement is far fuller and more coherent than Kirilov's. But there is much material for The Possessed that flickers to the surface in the Fifth and Sixth Plans, only to be submerged, with little or no place in the final text of The Idiot. There are a number of parallels between the Idiot and Stavrogin, who also returned from Switzerland: the Idiot filled with “morbid pride to such a degree that he cannot help considering himself a god, and yet at the same time he has so little esteem for himself (he analyzes himself with great clarity) that he cannot help despising himself intensely, infinitely, and unjustifiably.”²⁹ The Idiot like Stavrogin has made a secret and absurd marriage with an abused innocent, one who like Mary Lebyadkin has qualities of the Madonna. Is this abused innocent of the Notebooks the Marie of the novel, seduced by a commercial traveler and sheltered by Myshkin in Switzerland? Stavrogin's linked crimes of The Possessed (the murder of his wife, the violation of the child Matryosha and the passive attendance upon her suicide by hanging) are even more closely juxtaposed in the Notebooks for The Idiot. For there we see Myshkin's wife, in one plan, hanging herself, the repeatedly raped Mignon hanging herself too and even, for good measure, the “heroine,” who also had been raped.³⁰

At this point it is perhaps well to remark that the incidence of violence in the Notebooks is greater than in the finished The Idiot. As Dostoevsky rid himself of many political speculations in the Notebooks for The Possessed, so here he worked his way through no small number of imagined and reimagined crimes. The most remarkable fact, given so much confusion and turbulence, so many violently contradictory ideas, so much liberated fantasy subsequently diverted or repressed (and so much contemporary distress in his personal life) is that The Idiot got written at all. It should be consoling for aspiring novelists to know that Dostoevsky, when he had completed the 75,000 words of his very great Part One, had no real idea what was to happen next. This novel, like more than one of Conrad's, was saved by financial necessity: by the need, in spite of everything, to struggle on.

Notes

1. The Notebooks for The Idiot, edited with introduction by Edward Wasiolek, translated by Katherine Strelsky (Chicago, 1967), p. 134. Hereafter Notebooks.

2. Notebooks, p. 9.

3. Quoted in Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, translated with introduction by Michael A. Minihan (Princeton, 1967), p. 345.

4. Notebooks, p. 131.

5. Notebooks, p. 132.

6. Notebooks, p. 37.

7. Notebooks, p. 87.

8. Notebooks, p. 122.

9. Simon O. Lesser, “The Role of Unconscious Understanding in Flaubert and Dostoevsky,” Daedalus (Spring, 1963), 364-6.

10. Mochulsky, op. cit., p. 379.

11. The Idiot, Part 4, Chapter 9. Translated by Constance Garnett. In Heinemann edition (London, new impression 1948), p. 570.

12. The Idiot, Part 3, Chapter 8, p. 425.

13. Albert J. Guerard, “The Illuminating Distortion,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Winter, 1972), 101-121. “By illuminating distortion I refer to the oddity, the anomaly, the moment of strangeness which (if understood at last) may reveal a scene's or even a book's larger meaning, and the source of its creative energy and dynamic power over us,” p. 101.

14. Mochulsky, op. cit., p. 378. Dots are Mochulsky's.

15. The Idiot, Part 2, Chapter 5, p. 225.

16. The Idiot, Part 3, Chapter 3, p. 357. Crucial suspicion was expressed in Part II, Chapter 5, pp. 222-3.

17. The Christian common-sense, for instance, of an impulse to rehabilitate Nastasya: “The theory of practical Christianity” … (The Prince declares when he marries N.F. that it is far better to resurrect one woman than to perform the deeds of Alexander of Macedon.) Notebooks, pp. 222, 223.

18. Notebooks, p. 242.

19. As when he reflects on Roghozhin's eyes: “Yes, that morning Roghozhin had for some reason denied it and told a lie, but at the station he stood almost unconcealed. Indeed, it was rather he, Myshkin, had concealed himself, and not Roghozhin. And now at the house he stood on the other side of the street fifty paces away on the opposite pavement, waiting with his arms folded. There too he had been quite conspicuous and seemed to wish to be conspicuous on purpose. He stood like an accuser and a judge and not like … what?” (The Idiot, II, v), p. 226.

20. The Idiot, Part 4, Chapter 3, p. 473.

21. Notebooks, p. 82.

22. Richard Peace, Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge, England, 1971), p. 85.

23. Notebooks, p. 74.

24. Notebooks, p. 80. Mochulsky reverses the terms, calling Myshkin the son and Roghozhin the idiot with references to their early Notebook roles. Dostoevsky, p. 339. The problematic relationship remains the same, of course.

25. Notebooks, p. 221.

26. Notebooks, p. 41.

27. Notebooks, p. 149.

28. Notebooks, p. 191, note 8. (Wasiolek's interpretation.)

29. Notebooks, p. 101.

30. Notebooks, pp. 127, 33, 130.