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Note by the Russian Government

On November 12, 1921, in the presence of A. V. Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education, and M. N. Pokrovsky, Assistant Commissar of Education, in the Central Archive Department of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic there was opened a white tin case numbered 5038 from the State Archives containing F. M. Dostoevsky’s papers.

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

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

No. 1

(147 numbered pages)

1. Variant of the novel Crime and Punishment, under the title On Trial. (Raskolnikov tells his story.)

2. Materials for the novel Crime and Punishment.

3. Draft of letter to Katkov.

No. 2

(152 pages)

1. Variant of the novel Crime and Punishment.

2. Materials for the novel Crime and Punishment.

3. Materials for the tale The Crocodile.—Answers to Sovremennik.—Notes.

4. Letter to Katkov (1865) explaining the fundamental idea of Crime and Punishment.

No. 3

(154 pages)

1. Materials for the novel Crime and Punishment.

2. Materials for the novel The Idiot.

No. 4

(Pages not numbered)

Journal, 1876. January, February, March.

No. 5

(84 pages)

Journal, 1876. April, December.

No. 6

(58 pages)

Journal, 1881.

No. 10

(136 pages)

The Idiot.

No. 14

(56 pages)

The Possessed. Notes for the end of the novel.

No. 15

(62 pages)

The Possessed.

In addition to these note-books which were in A. G. Dostoevsky’s list, there were also found in the white case three other note-books not mentioned by her, namely, (1) containing materials for The Raw Youth, in a linen binding, 204 pages; (2) unbound, 33½ folios, also containing material for The Raw Youth (one of these may be either No. 7 or No. 8 above); (3) containing materials for The Idiot, 144 pages.^[1]

Everything of value in these note-books will be published in a book, now being prepared, which will include Dostoevsky’s letters found in the case; they cover the period 1839–1855, mostly to his brother, as well as the period 1866–1880, the latter being to his fiancée and future wife, A. G. Dostoevsky. The new note-books will make it possible to understand with some accuracy and completeness the method of work by which Dostoevsky produced such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment, The Raw Youth, and The Possessed. Besides these, there are scattered through the note-books subjects of stories (The Crank), long tales (The Seekings), poems (Imperator), which were planned but not written.

In addition to the list which Madame Dostoevsky gives in the note-book marked “en cas de ma mort, etc.,” she also mentions one other note-book in which fifteen proof-sheets of The Possessed had been pasted. This note-book was also found in the white case. On the first page of it A. G. Dostoevsky has written: “In this note-book (in proof-sheets) are a few chapters of the novel The Possessed, which were not included in it by F. M. Dostoevsky, when it was published in Russkìi Vèstnik. The first chapter (proof-sheets 1–5) was first published in the eighth volume of the jubilee edition of the Complete Works in the section ‘Materials for the novel The Possessed.’ ” (This last statement is not quite correct. In the “Materials,” to which A. G. Dostoevsky refers, the first chapter is not published in full, the first twenty lines not being included.) “The other chapters,” A. G. Dostoevsky continues, “have never been published.”

Below the reader will find the text of these two hitherto unpublished chapters of The Possessed. We have thought it necessary also to republish the first chapter, because all these chapters form a whole and should be given together, and also because the beginning of the first chapter was not published in the Supplement to Vol. VIII. of the jubilee edition. The fifteen proof-sheets pasted in the note-book—particularly after the first chapter—are covered, in the margins and the text itself, with a vast number of corrections, insertions, and additions in Dostoevsky’s handwriting.

We give below the text of the proofs with only a few of the author’s corrections. We have omitted passages which Dostoevsky struck out without substituting a variant, though we give such passages in the footnotes. We have made a few corrections about which there could be no doubt. All the other corrections and additions, which are extremely numerous, will be given in a book of new materials on Dostoevsky which is under preparation. It is clear that the author himself did not consider that these marginal corrections and additions were final. This is shown by the fact that there are several mistakes in the text and the punctuation is not always correct, while often there are several different corrections of the text in the margin and it is not clear which correction is to be preferred; other passages are incompletely corrected, and, lastly, several corrections inserted in the text give a rough version in which the same idea is expressed more than once in different words.

The plan of The Life of a Great Sinner, which we give below, is taken from F. M. Dostoevsky’s note-book which is in the Historical Museum. This plan has recently been published by L. P. Grossman in his book on Dostoevsky,^[2] but not in full nor accurately, with such important omissions that the text given below can alone be considered accurately to reproduce the original.