‘At the very moment when our professor was insisting that life is thoroughly unpredictable and unplannable, and I was wondering “then why are his lectures so perfectly structured?”, this person came in from the hallway and shouted rudely that the professor was lecturing too loudly and he couldn’t study next door. I wondered if that was part of the lecture, too, but the professor was so surprised it clearly wasn’t. Well, you had to be there.’
‘Yes, well something similar happened to me. Our philosophy professor told us grandly that the most important thing to remember in reading Nietzsche is that God is dead! – and just at that minute . . .’
‘Don’t tell me. There was a giant thunderclap.’
‘Well, you had to be there.’
(Overheard)
You had to be there: when do we say this? It is usually when we narrate an incident that is just like a story even though there was no author. It really happened! If the professor had planned the rude student’s interruption, he would not have created the same experience of life actually turning out like a story. Such events are striking because events happen as if already narrated and so evoke the eerie suspicion that we are like fictional characters.
In Through the Looking Glass, when Alice contemplates the sleeping king, Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell her that she is ‘only a sort of thing in his dream’ and that if he were to awake ‘you’d go out – bang! – just like a candle!’ When she cries at this suggestion, and then observes that if she were not real, she could not cry, Tweedledum asks rhetorically: ‘I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?’ This passage is usually taken as an allusion to the idea that we exist only in the mind of God, but it might equally well serve to illustrate what it would be like to imagine oneself as a mere character in an already-written story. What happens to us when the author takes a break from writing? If he abandons the story altogether, do we go out like a candle or do we remain forever in an unmoving present? We cannot persuade the author to let us go on living, for he exists in a time totally inaccessible to us: when Alice tells the pair of Tweedles not to shout, lest they wake the king, Tweedledum replies, ‘Well, it’s no use your talking of waking him when you’re only one of the things in his dream.’ But we cannot believe any of this, because we sense our existence, sense above all that we can do something unexpected and unscripted by someone else: but then, maybe Raskolnikov did, too, and he was a character, after all.1
When life resembles a story, it feels distinctly strange. In War and Peace, Tolstoi evokes such a moment when the genuine moans of the wounded soldiers somehow sound feigned to the young Rostov. One expects real experiences to be unlike stories, and these cries seem artificial precisely because they are too much like the way he has heard them described. On the other hand, do we maybe moan the way we do because we have been taught to do so by stories – something like the Underground Man’s description of the man with a toothache who moans with ‘trills and flourishes’ – in which case our very expressions of pain are both real and artificial, spontaneous and cited?
Tolstoi is always raising questions like these. War and Peace constantly contrasts the neatness of narrative accounts with the messiness of lived events. The only times when events resemble narratives take place when people who have read too much history try to behave ‘historically’, by which they mean ‘as is written in histories’. Then their behaviour becomes both absurd and ineffective. The Tsar and Napoleon, who repeatedly act out striking moments for future narratives, thus become comic figures, and even the Austrian Emperor Franz, who can only ask what time something happened, at least seems more serious and more rooted in the present. In this context, the passage about feigned moans seems to go to the heart of Tolstoi’s method and evokes sceptical thoughts even about War and Peace itself.
Dostoevskii was keenly aware of Tolstoi’s contrast between narrative and life. This theme partially explains his love for Don Quixote and why he had Nastasia Filippovna read Madame Bovary. It appears in his works from Poor Folk and White Nights to Notes from Underground and The Gambler; in The Brothers Karamazov, it surfaces repeatedly in the descriptions of Kolia and of Dmitrii’s trial. Indeed, one reason the gambler loves roulette is that the moment of winning, and the thrill of anticipation, have not been already determined and written down in advance. They are utterly, and he believes metaphysically, unpredictable: pure chance. Unlike a story, the outcome of roulette is not predetermined, but really depends on the movements of that little ball around the wheel, which no one can foresee in any particular case. The money he might win does not interest him: when he does win, he immediately squanders it. No, what he loves is the metaphysical jolt, the intensity of presentness, which is stronger even than in his erotic encounters. Play conquers all. If only God would play dice with the universe!
‘You had to be there’: this comment evokes the inadequacy of any account of an event. We always say these words with a gesture or tone of frustration at not being able to convey the sense of gratuitous appropriateness that made the incident so memorable. Upon reflection, we see just why such an event must be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to convey adequately. The very fact that we are narrating it, have made a story or anecdote out of it, already promises in advance that something narrative-worthy has taken place, and yet the whole point of the story is that just when we had no reason to expect life to resemble a story it did. The listener cannot be surprised as we were because he cannot help anticipating a story. You might as well try to catch time by the tail.
Some thinkers and movements have had a profound belief in the storiness of the world. I do not want to evaluate the cliché that, with the Hebrew prophets, the West invented a linear, storyline time as opposed to a cyclical one, but it is worth mentioning that linear time confers more value on present events than its rival does. For if the cycles repeat, then nothing has a unique determining influence. To be sure, cyclical time mitigates remorse, but by the same token it weakens the sense that what we do now really matters. The devil mocks Ivan Karamazov with precisely this devaluing aspect of eternal recurrence.
But for thinkers who believe in the supreme value of present action, even narrative time does not place enough emphasis on it. You had to have been there: for in narrative, the event is already over. As a child, I once read an encyclopaedia account of the Hundred Years War and cheered for the English. I won’t elaborate on the discomfort that Joan of Arc caused my younger self. I delighted in Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, adored that thug the Black Prince, and was profoundly disappointed when, at last, my team lost. And then I reflected: how could I have read a historical account and hoped for an outcome, when the outcome was long since determined (not that it would matter if it were only just determined). I thought of the joke about the boy who asks God that Toronto should be the capital of Canada because that is what he answered on his geography test. There are circumstances in which hope is out of place.
Yet the experience of reading a novel depends on our intermittent forgetting of this fact. Insofar as we identify with a character, we place ourselves in the character’s time, and so vicariously share hopes and fears. On the other hand, we also step back, and, observing the emergent structure of the whole story, anticipate the outcome already written down. Any successful reading does both. We hope that the Underground Man will marry Liza, but we also know that the structure precludes it. What we hope for would not please us if we got it, because it would violate that structure and make the work a bad one.
This divergence between the desire of identification and the desire for aesthetic coherence testifies to the radical disjunction between presentness and structure. Literary works demand both, but life affords only presentness. And so with our hunger for narrative we embrace prophets, from Moses to Marx. We know that prophets limit our freedom, that if the future is already given as surely as the end of a novel is already written, our actions matter less. No matter what we do, we are doomed to victory. We want to be free (or feel we are free) but also, as the Grand Inquisitor insists, have the future decided for us. The burden of genuine uncertainty is too great and so we embrace unfreedom that calls itself the reverse. And we read novels.
If there ever was a writer who believed in human freedom, it was Dostoevskii. Laws of Nature and history do not provide an exhaustive account of what people do: they choose, and might choose otherwise. If that were not so, there would be no morality and life would have no meaning: we would be nothing but sentient puppets. Of course, such a view put Dostoevskii at odds with the materialism and scientism of his age, with its ‘moral Newtonianism’, as Elie Halévy famously called the dream of a social science.2 Less obviously, it also put him at odds with the dominant Christian theological tradition, which, from Augustine to Leibniz and beyond, insisted upon divine omniscient knowledge of the future. In the famous thirteenth chapter of the Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz contends that every last thing we are to do is already contained in our ‘concept’, which God knows from eternity. To say that the future could be more than one thing would be to assume either that God could be mistaken or that he could change his mind. In either case, he would then be a being in history, not outside it – a being in time who could be affected by events. God does not suffer through a succession of wills, is not determined by events, but has one perfect will from eternity to eternity. He is not like Zeus – or, we might add, the God actually depicted in the Hebrew Bible, who does frequently get angry, express surprise and disappointment, and change his mind. The theologians typically explained such passages away as metaphorical concessions to the limited capacities of a vulgar people from an ancient tribe. Materialist determinism essentially posits the same position as Leibniz: everything is given in advance by the laws of Nature and society. In fact, we may refer to moral Newtonianism as a God substitute.
Peter Damian drew the logical conclusion that, since God is outside history, he must possess as much power to change the past as to change the future, and if he did not do one – that is, admit a mistake – he would not do the other. From this position, it is difficult to understand why we pray, let alone hope, regret, condemn and praise. In much the same way, we know, when halfway through reading a published novel, that the author will not alter the ending we are approaching any more than he will change the beginning we have encountered. Woody Allen notwithstanding, that’s not what we mean when we say that the novel is different every time we read it. Raskolnikov kills the old lady every time, and no hope or fear on our part will persuade Anna to avoid railway.
If the future is given, how can we be free, as both Augustine and Leibniz, as well as most of their God-substituting materialist followers, insist we are? The most common answer, in both its theological and secular form, is to redefine freedom so that it means absence of external compulsion. God knows, and the laws of nature ensure, what we will freely choose. Milton’s formulation of this idea is perhaps the most memorable. In Book III of Paradise Lost, God explains:
So will fallHee and his faithless Progeny: whose fault?Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of meeAll he could have; I made him just and right,Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.[. . .]They therefore as to right belong’d,So were created, nor can justly accuseThir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate;As if Predestination over-rul’dThir will, disposed by absolute DecreeOr high foreknowledge; they themselves decreedThir own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,Which had no less prov’d certain unforeknown.So without the least impulse or shadow of Fate,Or aught by me immutably foreseen,They trespass, Authors to themselves in all . . .3
I find it intriguing that in this very passage the God outside of time intervenes in the ongoing seventeenth-century theological debates that so engaged – shall we say, His creator? In Milton’s theology, people are like characters in a novel who freely choose what the pattern demands. The literary equivalent of ‘Fate’ in these lines would be a gratuitous deus ex machina, a sort of miracle resolving the story by means other than its own unfolding pattern, that would be sensed as a flaw. But in a well-structured novel, the author’s foreknowledge has no influence on the characters’ fault. Though immutably foreseen, the characters’ actions are decreed by the characters themselves.
The author of Notes from Underground, The Gambler and The Idiot found both this world-view and its literary analogue entirely unacceptable. Everyone knows that Dostoevskii fought the materialists of his time and insisted on free choice. The theological dimensions of Dostoevskii’s position are less widely appreciated, but they have no less significant consequences for his narrative practice. The God who foreknows all – God the Father – has little, and grudging, place in Dostoevskii’s Christianity. Rather, he stresses the Son, who participated in history and suffered with us, and, in The Brothers Karamazov, the Holy Spirit, which does indeed intervene in the world. Dostoevskii’s is a strange heresy, which to my knowledge never developed a name: stressing both the second and third persons of the Trinity at the expense of the first. God willing, there is no God, only his Only Begotten Son born of a virgin, and the Holy Ghost.
To understand Dostoevskii’s most remarkable innovations in narrative, we must appreciate his conviction that at any moment of time more than one thing (though not everything) is possible. And if there are just two possibilities – not thousands, just two – at even a single moment, then determinism and Leibnizianism fall to the ground. In fact, multiple possibilities characterise most, if not all, moments. Novels must not therefore be written with a structure that tacitly affirms closed time by tying events together so closely and making the ending seem so inevitable that any alternative would be absurd. Here, then, is the central problem of Dostoevskii’s thought and quest for form: how to conceive and represent people as genuinely free in this sense?
I would like to discuss four methods Dostoevskii derived. The first may be discussed briefly, because it is relatively obvious and because Mikhail Bakhtin explored it so brilliantly: the intensification of the present moment of choice. We are placed so deeply in the character’s moment that we experience the agonies of his indecision: and, from such a perspective, the idea that somehow the decision has already been made for all eternity seems palpably absurd. When Dmitrii Karamazov, obscured in the shadow and with pestle in pocket, stands beside the window out of which his father has stuck his loathsome face, we are given such an inside perspective on his thoughts and feelings. He lives an extraordinarily intensified present, a moment in which he must decide once and for all whether to kill his father:
Mitia [Dmitrii] looked at him from the side without stirring. The old man’s profile that he loathed so, his pendant Adam’s apple, his hooked nose, his lips that smiled in greedy expectation, were all brightly lighted up by the slanting lamplight falling on the left from the room. A horrible fury of hatred suddenly surged up in Mitia’s heart, ‘There he was, his rival, the man who had tormented him, had ruined his life!’ It was a rush of that sudden, furious, revengeful anger of which he had spoken, as though foreseeing it, to Alesha four days ago in the arbour, when, in answer to Alesha’s question, ‘How can you say you’ll kill our father?’: ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he had said then. ‘Perhaps I shall not kill him, perhaps I shall. I’m afraid he’ll suddenly be so loathsome to me at that moment. I hate his double chin, his nose, his eyes, his shameless grin. I feel a personal repulsion. That’s what I’m afraid of, that’s what may be too much for me . . .’ This personal repulsion was growing unendurable. Mitia was beside himself. He suddenly pulled the brass pestle out of his pocket.
(XIV, 354–5; Bk 8, Sec. 4)
Perhaps I shall not kill him, perhaps I shall: what we are given here is the intensity of a choice, entirely unpredetermined, that must be taken now, one way or the other. Now is not already given, and now happens only once: if not me, who? and if not now, when? This passage takes us deeper and deeper into Dmitrii’s consciousness, beginning in third-person language expressing Dmitrii’s own thought – the sort of language Bakhtin analysed so well – and then merging entirely into inner quotation. We see here a reason for Dostoevskii’s compulsive use of ‘suddenlys’ as they further intensify the sense of a moment outside of time, a singularity of pure choice, a pure now. Bakhtin is not quite correct when he observes that such moments in Dostoevskii totally obliterate the past because awareness of a past would detract from the intensity of the present. Dmitrii remembers his conversation with Alesha. The past does play a role here, but it is one of redoubling the present. In this moment Dmitrii remembers (and we do, too) what he said to Alesha about such a moment should it ever come: and this means that he is both experiencing the intense division he has described and remembering the description at the same time. For this reason, the moment of choice is even more intense than he anticipated because he did not anticipate remembering the anticipation.
The intensity, the repulsion and the attempted restraint, are growing ‘unendurable’. The intolerability of a moment so intense is, of course, a common theme in Dostoevskii. In The Idiot Myshkin’s epileptic fits, for instance, include such an instant in which he suddenly understands the extraordinary saying from the Apocalypse that there shall be time no longer. He lives the moment when there was not time enough for a drop of water to fall from Mohammed’s pitcher while ‘the epileptic prophet had time to gaze on all the habitations of Allah’ (VIII, 189; Pt 2, Sec. 5). At executions, the sheer intensity of the horrible expectation provokes the victim to wish he could be shot more quickly: surely a Dostoevskian thought if ever there was one. And in a scene in Crime and Punishment that looks forward to Dmitrii’s choice, Raskolnikov – agonisingly aware that Koch is outside the door latched from inside, knowing that Koch suspects that a perpetrator of foul play is just on the other side of the keyhole, and watching in blank terror as Koch shakes the door so hard it could tear the latch right out of the wall – thinks several times that he should ‘end it all at once and shout to them through the door. Now and then he was tempted to swear at them, to jeer at them, while they could not open the door’ (VI, 68; Pt 1, Sec. 7). Here and later, he longs to be found out more quickly!
What is Dmitrii to do? Whatever he does will be a free choice, and yet once done, irrevocable. The intensity of the experience, along with the use of the internal perspective, makes us share his anticipation: and then the text breaks. For a second – how long is an instant? – we are left in our own agony of doubt and anticipation. Dostoevskii uses breaks in the text frequently, but this one, which places the reader in the character’s position, is doubtless his most effective.
Thus suspense, exaggerated as only Dostoevskii knew how, becomes one way to make us feel the reality of choice – phenomenologically, so to speak. It almost overcomes ‘you had to be there’, almost puts us there. Having felt that way, can we believe in determinism?
Dostoevskii’s second narrative method demonstrates the untenability of determinism in a way apparently opposite to the first. Since I have described it in detail elsewhere,4 let me here just offer one example. In The Devils, the young and wealthy reprobates of the town visit the mad ‘prophet’ Semen Iakovlevich. Just as they are leaving, Liza Nikolaevna and Stavrogin appear to jostle each other in the doorway, and the chronicler goes on:
I fancied they both stood still for an instant and looked, as it were, strangely at one another, but I may not have seen rightly in the crowd. It is asserted, on the contrary, and quite seriously, that Liza, glancing at Nikolai Vsevolodovich [Stavrogin], quickly raised her hand to the level of his face, and would certainly have struck him if he had not drawn back in time. Perhaps she was displeased with the expression of his face, or the way he smiled, particularly just after such an episode with [her fiancé] Mavrikii Nikolaevich. I must admit I saw nothing myself, but all the others declared they had, though they certainly could not all have seen it in such a crush, though perhaps some may have. I remember, however, that Nikolai Vsevolodovich was rather pale all the way home.
(X, 260–1; Pt 2, Ch. 5)
‘Perhaps’, ‘on the contrary’, ‘I may not have seen rightly’, ‘I fancied’: language like this is irritatingly common in Dostoevskii’s narrative. Something may or may not have happened; and if it did (which is by no means certain, though perhaps it could have happened, though many doubt it, but then they are unreliable, though not always mistaken . . .) – if it did happen, it might be part of many sequences, each of which may suggest an endless series of ramifications. In any case, the action that may or may not have happened was itself a non-action, a slap that could have been given, but was not. The narrator tries to decide whether Liza meant to slap Stavrogin but did not or, on the contrary, simply did not slap him.
As in so many of such descriptions in Dostoevskii, the point is not what did happen: it is that any of the suggested events could have happened. Sometimes Dostoevskii suggests a haze of rumours, each suggesting a possibility that, whether or not it is true, could be. We gradually learn to see time not as a line of single points but as a field of possibilities. If the tape were played over again, a different possibility might be realised. Contrary to the determinists or Leibnizians, we live in a world where more than one thing is possible at any moment. Possibilities exceed actualities. Whatever happens, something else might have, and to understand a moment is to grasp that ‘something else.’ By the same token, each of us is capable of living more lives than one, and to understand a person is to intuit what else he or she might have been or done. Dmitrii might have been a murderer, and Alesha, we are told, might easily have been a revolutionary.
Such suggestions are also made at the global level. Consider: in The Devils we never learn whether Petr Stepanovich killed Fedka; whether the workers rebel; whether this town’s group of five is or is not the only one in Russia; whether Petr Stepanovich is in fact a police agent; and, oddly enough, whether he is Stepan Trofimovich’s son (he points out that his mother had taken up with a Pole at the time, which Stepan Trofimovich almost confirms). The political significance of the novel obviously depends on several of these suggestions, and the very nature of what has happened depends on all of them. The suggestion of ‘another father’ threatens the entire fathers-and-sons theme; which is also the case in The Brothers Karamazov, when we are offered the tantalising possibility, unlikely but never refuted, that not Fedor Pavlovich but an escaped convict named Karp might just be Smerdiakov’s father. No, time is not linear, we can do many different things, and the world could easily have been different.
But is it really possible that, if the tape were played over, we might behave differently, even with the very same influences working on us? Could the same set of causes produce varying results? If it could, determinism would be refuted, and the whole idea of a social ‘science’ – whether of the mind, of history or of morals – would go down the drain.
To prove this contention, so contrary to the main tradition of European philosophy from Leibniz on, Dostoevskii turns to his strong suit, psychology. He examines the nature of intention, so intimately related to that of free choice. In the May 1876 Diary of a Writer, Dostoevskii reports on the trial of a woman, Kairova, accused of attempted murder. Attempted murder, like an attempted slap, concerns what might have happened. Is it one and only one thing? Kairova discovered that her lover was asleep with his wife, Velikanova, in Kairova’s own bed, procured a razor, and attacked the wife; but the couple awoke and prevented the attack from going further. If the couple had not awoken, would she have killed Velikanova? Was that ‘her purpose’ in slashing her, as the prosecution contends? For Dostoevskii, the question presumes that an action necessarily depends on a prior, fully formed intention: then, if no obstacle intervenes, the intention is carried out. That, by the way, was John Locke’s description: we may change our will many times, but our actions follow from the ‘last determination’ of the will. In some cases, that is true, Dostoevskii argues, but in others it is sheer, linear nonsense.
Kairova may not have formed an intention at the outset. She was angry, murderously angry, and purchased a razor, but with what precise purpose she had not determined – just as, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitrii seizes a pestle without yet knowing what he will do with it, if anything:
Most likely she hadn’t the slightest idea of this even when sitting on the steps with the razor in her hand, while just behind her, on her own bed, lay her lover and her rival. No one, no one in the world could have the slightest idea of this. Moreover, even though it may seem absurd, I can state that even when she had begun slashing her rival, she might still not have known whether she wanted to kill her or not and whether this was her purpose in slashing her.
(XXIII, 9)
The jury has been asked to decide whether ‘this’ – that is, murder – ‘was her purpose’, her intention; but according to Dostoevskii she had no formed intention. Her intention was not a thing, but a process: evolving moment by moment, always entertaining several possibilities and looking for others, changing in response to things outside and to its own development, and always capable of moving in different directions. Nor can it be said that Kairova was acting unconsciously: no, she was in fact intensely aware of what she was doing at each moment. But she was never sure what she would do the next moment. Unlike the intentionality assumed by the prosecutor, and defended by Locke, this kind of intention exists in open time. It is not already over and merely being carried out. The actions Kairova takes are part of the process, not just the result of it.
If Kairova had not been restrained, she might have done many things. Perhaps she would have simply passed the razor over Velikanova’s throat ‘and then cried out, shuddered, and run off as fast as she could’. Or she might have turned the razor on herself. Or – this is Dostoevskii we are reading – she might have become enraged ‘and not only murdered Velikanova but even begun to abuse the body, cutting off the head, the nose, the lips; and only later, suddenly, when someone took that head away from her, realised what she had done’ (XXIII, 10).
Dostoevskii’s ‘perhaps’ and his list of possibilities express not our lack of knowledge of what would have happened – as if only a single thing could and we simply must guess what it is – as the prosecutor assumed. No, this ‘perhaps’ is genuine: any of these very different things ‘could have happened and been done by the very same woman and sprung from the very same soul, in the very same mood and under the very same circumstances’. Play the tape over, get a different ending. Identical situations leading to different outcomes: this is precisely what the determinist world-view denies and the belief in open time affirms. Human intention need not be linear.
If human intentions are not linear, if time is open, and if the possibilities for each moment are more than one, then the traditional forms of narrative must be regarded as seriously wanting. For, with very few exceptions, they create a sense of time in which one and only one thing is possible at any given moment. In determinism, the only thing possible is the actual; but in a world of open time, there is always (as Bakhtin might have said) a surplus of possibilities. Structure tacitly favours the determinists; we derive a pleasing sense of inevitability, a fatalism of form. (This is what I understand Bakhtin to mean when he speaks of ‘aesthetic necessity’.)
The ‘rightness’ of an ending depends on our sense that, yes, it had to happen in just that way. As the author paraphrases the hero of The Double in its concluding line, ‘Alas! For a long while he had been haunted by a presentiment of this’ (I, 229). And for all the Underground Man’s attempt to prove his freedom, the very structure of the whole indicates that the dynamics of this very attempt are governed by laws. The fatalism of form is isomorphic with the determinism of action. Thus, the words of the ‘editor’, voicing the implications of the form, carry a heavy irony: ‘The author of these “Notes” and the notes themselves are of course imaginary. Nevertheless, such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, considering those circumstances under which society was in general formed’ (V, 99; Pt 1, Sec. 1). It would seem that the hero’s very revolt against determinism was inevitable; and we are left to imagine his sense of insult should he read this commentary.
Why should structure create a sense of inevitability? Why is there, so to speak, a ‘bias of the artefact’ towards inevitability and closed time? The answer, I think, lies in the very idea of structure, as it has governed most theory and practice at least since Aristotle. Behind Aristotle’s idea that action must be a unity, and that episodic plots are therefore the worst, lies the belief that in a well-constructed story actions should all tend to a single result, which we feel to be the inevitable outcome of what came before. No ending but what happens was ever possible; events that seem to tend elsewhere ironically contribute to the ending that does take place. Otherwise, the work would lack a satisfying sense of what we have come to call closure. Closure and structure are twin concepts, and where one is weak, so is the other.
Consider how, in approaching the end of a novel, we mentally pair off all the unmarried young males and females and guess how things will work out. In life, we do not assume that there is a moment at which all pairings will take place, but in novels and plays double or triple weddings, and simultaneous resolutions of conflicts, are surprisingly common. Or rather, unsurprisingly common, because we know that there is a structure, which is producing this result. Our confidence in such prediction is dependent on our awareness that a skilled author will have designed a satisfying structure in just this way. It is based primarily not on events in the depicted world but on the structuring activity that has made it.
Structure in literature makes time symmetrical, as it is not in life. In life, events are caused by prior events, but in novels, they are caused both by prior and by subsequent ones – by the end to which they are tending. Every reader knows to look for tacit or explicit foreshadowing – the backward causation effected by the pre-given end. When the reader identifies solely with characters, he or she appreciates time as open and identifies with hope and fear: Oh, Oedipus, do not say that! But when a reader stands back to contemplate the whole, hope and fear diminish as he contemplates the perfect pattern. The moral concomitant of structure is stoicism. It is certainly no accident that religious consolation, and the comfort provided by prophetic theories of history, so often take the form of a divine or quasi-divine story, guided to a providential end. We are invited to contemplate the structure of time, the over-arching design that justifies all. In surrendering to such a view from outside, we anticipate the structure of time as a whole. In effect, we see the world not only as characters in it but also (we suppose) as readers outside it, readers of the historical novel that is life. Evil then becomes, like an Aristotelian peripety, a step that, ironically, leads to the predestined end it tries to thwart. The moment in Book III of Paradise Lost, when God describes the pattern of history and views Satan rushing off to de-rail a plan he is in fact fulfilling, joins both the theological and the narratological point. We view the author of the poem and the Author of All, together, describing not only what will happen, but what has really already happened, happened outside of time. And when Ivan Karamazov rejects all such theories on moral grounds, he insists both on the presentness of suffering that no larger story can justify and on the falsity of all narrative consolations. ‘I want to stick to the fact’, he repeats: the fact, not the story; the moment in its presentness not as part of a larger design. Narratology is theology.
Narrative structure was therefore deeply disturbing to Dostoevskii, and he sought yet another way around it. He tried to find a literary form that would not implicitly endorse the wrong theology and the wrong view of life. In short, he needed to find an alternative to structure. He attempted several experiments at a work coherent enough to read but lacking an over-arching standpoint. He needed to dispense with a time outside of time and find a story in which there would be no equivalent to either Milton’s God or Milton.
His idea was this: what if the author did not plan the work in advance, but instead created rich situations and let the work proceed as it would? – something I have referred to elsewhere as ‘algorithmic’ creation or as ‘creation by potential’.5 Would that not be closer to life? Would such a method not refuse both the consolation and the threat to freedom implicit in an over-arching design?
In that case, the intentionality responsible for the work would resemble Kairova’s: it would be evolving, bit by bit. Like the God of the Hebrew Bible but not of the theologians, it would manifest a succession of wills. At every moment the author would know what he was doing, but not what he was going to do. He would be guided not by a single design but by an evolving set of possibilities, not by a drive towards closure but by an intense focus on the opportunities of the present moment. In such a work, there could never be an ending, if by an ending we mean a point at which all loose ends are tied up and the pattern governing the whole is revealed. For there is no pattern governing the whole, and while some conflicts might be resolved, others would remain: as in life. Recall, for instance, how much is left unresolved in The Devils. The first work in which Dostoevskii tried out his new method was The Idiot; but he developed the technique further in The Devils and, in most extreme form, in the Diary of a Writer. The Brothers Karamazov manages to combine structure and process in a unique and remarkably satisfying synthesis.
In creating his new processual form, Dostoevskii exploited a number of opportunities. To begin with, he discovered in his very frenetic and desperate style of working an opportunity. He made a virtue of circumstance. To recall the conditions of composition: Dostoevskii and his new wife went abroad in 1867 because he thought that the journey might ameliorate his epileptic seizures and to escape from his creditors. In dire poverty, the couple pawned their wedding rings, the presents he had given her, and (many times) clothing. Special poignancy characterises the letters in which he describes having sold their linen. The author suffered one of his seizures while his wife was in labour, and when the baby Sonia died, he blamed himself. He tried to win at roulette and, as always, lost. In these circumstances, he absolutely had to produce a novel, but insisted that he would not cheapen his work – ‘worst of all I fear mediocrity’.6 Yet had no time for careful planning.
He began writing the novel in August 1867 and produced several outlines and plans, which bear almost no relation to the work as we know it, except that a character resembling Nastasia Filippovna appears and the hero is both an expert in calligraphy and called ‘the idiot’. He is not at all like Prince Myshkin. Dissatisfied with what he had achieved, and rushing to submit something for publication, Dostoevskii hit on a new approach, which he liked enough to send in an opening with no idea how the novel would develop. ‘I turned things over in my mind from 4 December to 18 December’, he wrote to his friend Maikov on 31 December. ‘I would say that on the average I came up with six plans a day (at least that). My head was in a whirl. It’s a wonder I did not go out of my mind. At last, on 18 December, I sat down and started writing a novel’ (XXVIII/2, 240). The ‘idea’ of this novel, he explained further, ‘used to flash through my mind in a somewhat artistic form, but only somewhat, not in the full-blown form that was needed. It was only the desperate situation in which I found myself that made me embark upon an idea that had not yet reached full maturity. I took a chance, as at roulette: “Maybe it will develop as I write it!” This is unforgivable’ (XXVIII/2, 240–1). Writing like roulette: a great deal was at stake, and the outcome was left in great measure to chance, to what one could not predict. Could the necessity of writing that way be turned to advantage?
Even the most cursory reading of the novel makes the lack of an overall plan apparent. It is filled with loose ends, inconsistencies, sudden eruptions of new ideas that have not been prepared for but which seem to have occurred on the spur of the moment – as, indeed, they usually did. The Idiot may stand as the opposite of Bleak House, with its amazingly complicated plotting in which the fates of many dozens of characters and incidents are resolved into an overall pattern. As Dickens is the greatest designer of plots in the history of the novel, Dostoevskii is the greatest improviser. If Bleak House cannot be read without being aware of an overall plan (for Dickens, the analogue of Providence), The Idiot cannot be read without sensing a succession of wills, an author tinkering with his material with no idea – or with many changing ideas – where he is going. He makes a lot of mistakes, of course, but that only makes the flashes of inspiration, at which readers are virtually present, all the more compelling. The heroic efforts of the best scholars to explain this effect away, to deny mistakes and discover structure, only testify to its pervading presence.7
There are notable inconsistencies. In Part 1, Myshkin appears childlike and he himself comments on this quality, but in Part 2, when Lebedev tries to deceive him, Myshkin remarks: ‘You take me for a child, Lebedev’ and, as with the young nihilists, shows some remarkable worldly wisdom. On the other hand, Part 1 gives no hint that Myshkin is an epileptic. So marked are these and other changes that Joseph Frank observes, with considerable justice, that Part 1 ‘perhaps may best be read as an independent novella’ (Frank, The Miraculous Years, p. 325).
In Part 1 of the novel, Gania is a major character, and everything points to a major future conflict between him and Myshkin. No less than three times he calls the Prince ominously, and eponymously, ‘an idiot’; and Gania swears that they will be either great friends or great enemies. They turn out to be neither. In Part 2 Gania has somehow become a sort of private secretary to the idiot, and thereafter he plays almost no role at all. Gania’s is but one of many aborted plot lines, too many to list here. Some seem to be plants or, perhaps, what I like to call hats. They suggest a future complication or revelation, to which the author can turn whenever he has run out of ideas: they are hats out of which he can pull a needed rabbit. But many of these hats remain on the rack. Myshkin tells us that his father died in prison, and he would like to know why: but his father’s imprisonment is never explained. The reader senses that, had Dostoevskii needed some secret from the idiot’s past, he would have invented a story to suit. In the same way, we learn that, in addition to Myshkin’s guardian Pavlishchev, there is ‘another Pavlishchev’ – surely a plot nugget – but as Myshkin’s father dies in a physical prison, this shadowy figure languishes in a narratological one, never to see the light of storytelling day. I picture a storytelling Bastille from which all such figures (and there are many) long to escape but never do. Yet the text records their existence, as if they had made their marks on the wall. The most noticeable ‘hat’ in this novel is the six-month hiatus between Parts 1 and 2, which turns out to have all sorts of incidents that come in handy to ‘explain’ some new plot line that has evidently just occurred to the author; a sort of interim ex machina. In The Devils, the characters’ time in ‘Switzerland’ before the novel begins plays a similar role.
The novel’s sensational ending, the murder of Nastasia Filippovna and Myshkin’s insane night with Rogozhin by the corpse, has seemed to some readers as fully foreshadowed by earlier events. The opening is there because the conclusion is there. After all in the opening scene of the novel, Myshkin and Rogozhin meet on a train and the author observes: ‘If they had both known what was remarkable in one another at that moment, they would have been surprised at the chance which had so strangely brought them together’ (VIII, 5). Is this not a case of foreshadowing? To argue in this way is to commit what Tolstoi referred to as the ‘fallacy of retrospection’.8 After the fact, we look for, and inevitably discover, some tendency leading to the outcome that we know happened, and see in it the sign of the later event. And since there are always signs leading in every direction, it is not difficult to find one pointing in the desired direction. The method is well known to fortune-tellers, astrologers and economists.
The way to see whether there is genuine foreshadowing or only a ‘retrospection’ is to examine whether, if something else had happened, one could have found equally strong signs presaging that event. In this case, the answer is obvious: if the final conflict had been between Myshkin and Gania, whether over Nastasia Filippovna or Aglaia, surely Gania’s threats in Part 1 would have been seen as an even more powerful case of ‘foreshadowing’. What is really happening is that Dostoevskii, here as in The Devils, creates a sense of mystery whenever he has the chance. Then he can exploit the mystery or not as occasion dictates. These mysteries are as mysterious to the author as they are to the readers; that is, they are real mysteries, not a mere device.
If the test I have proposed fails to convince, consider the evidence of the notebooks. As scholars have repeatedly noted, the ending that the believers in structure find foreshadowed in the novel’s opening scene did not even occur to the author until he was writing Part 3 (of four). Even after that, right up through Part Four, Dostoevskii continued to explore other possibilities. He does not appear to have definitively chosen Nastasia Filippovna’s murder any sooner than Rogozhin. Like Kairova’s, Dostoevskii’s intention was continually in process, and the notebook shows him repeatedly exploring multiple possible developments (‘six plots a day’).
As we read the notebooks for Parts 2 and 3, we may be amazed that, for the author, this plot was so open. In some versions Nastasia Filippovna commits suicide, in others dies a natural death. Aglaia either goes off with Rogozhin or marries Gania out of spite or murders Nastasia Filippovna or is saved by Myshkin. Myshkin falls in love with Adelaida, Nastasia Filippovna seduces Radomskii, and Ippolit kills someone. And so on. ‘N.B. Should the novel end with a confession? Publish it openly’; ‘Aglaia marries the Prince – or else the Prince dies’; ‘Again orgies’.9 To paraphrase the Kairova article, all these actions could have been taken by the very same people in the same initial circumstances. Time is radically open in The Idiot. There is no structure, there are only impulse, possibilities, experimentation – and process.
At some point in his writing, Dostoevskii evidently realised that time and process were in fact his central themes. The book, he discovered, was about the implications of how it was written. In Part 3, Ippolit, until then a minor character, delivers a forty-page confession that has just about no relevance to the plot. In any structuralist’s abridgement, in any version of The Idiot Rewritten by Henry James (as Robert Graves ‘improved’ David Copperfield), this whole passage would have to be left out. And yet it is justly regarded as the novel’s high point. It contains the lines that best express its self-referential theme of an open process:
Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered [otkryl] America but while he was discovering [otkryval] it. Take my word for it, the highest moment of his happiness was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn’t the New World that mattered, even if it had fallen to pieces. [. . .] It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.
(VIII, 327; Pt 3, Sec. 5)
And we best appreciate The Idiot not when we have read it, but while we are reading it. Otkryl, otkryval – perfective, imperfective: The Idiot cultivates the aesthetics of the imperfective aspect.
In most works, knowledge of the ending allows us to contemplate the structure of the whole and so to understand the work most fully. In this sense, such works are directed not so much at reading as at rereading, at the God’s-eye view; and even a first reading often becomes an anticipated rereading, as we try to place details into a structure whose outlines we will know but which we now must limn. Or, to translate the point into politics and theology: in a first reading of a structured work, we are like Marxists or Leibnizians, guessing at the pattern of the whole, both experiencing a process and thinking it as a piece of structure. But The Idiot is not at all like that, and it tells us not to live like that either. We best understand this work when we are reading, not rereading; when we appreciate moments rich in possibilities and capable of multiple outcomes; and when we experience without thinking away an intense presentness. The Idiot is but one of many possible novels that could have arisen from the same material, and that is part of its point. It’s life that matters, nothing but life, the everlasting and perpetual process, and not the outcome at all.
‘On this narrow mountain pass in Norway, with sheer cliff rising on one side of me and falling into the fjord on the other, a truck suddenly came around a curve at top speed, occupying the whole road. There was no escape!’
‘And did you survive?’
Dostoevskii therefore exploited the serialisation of his works to intensify the sense of presentness and open time. Serialisation is, of course, entirely compatible with structure, as we immediately see with Dickens and Trollope. But it is also understandable that Dostoevskii thought to exploit the dynamics of serialisation as a kind of processual form of publishing. He realised he could use it to signal that he knew no more of the characters’ destiny than they did. Their fate was open or, rather, they had no fate. The work’s sections were to be understood as tending to no predetermined result, not as the mere unfolding of a plan in several parts. We are not surprised to discover that Dickens’s notebooks contain detailed outlines for Bleak House, but it would be amazing if anyone should discover such outlines for The Idiot. Quite the contrary: the novel’s notebooks betray a drama of their own, as the author, no less than his characters, thrashes about to decide what he will do next.
Critics usually cite the real-world, recent crimes on which Dostoevskii drew for details of his novel, but they usually fail to appreciate that the novel responds to and is shaped by events in the press published after its opening sections appeared. And in case we miss the point, the characters themselves (Myshkin, Nastasia Filippovna, Kolia and Lebedev) quote from these articles! The repeated references to the Gorskii case, in Part 2 and after, describe incidents Dostoevskii first encountered in The Voice in March 1868, months after the opening chapters were submitted and had appeared. Readers could not help being aware that the novel was responding to events that took place between instalments.
To describe the famous Mazurin and Gorskii cases as ‘sources’ of the novel, while true, misses the most important point. Characters in novels are usually unaware of their sources, and their resemblance to them does not result from conscious imitation. Otherwise every novelistic murderer would be a copycat killer. But Nastasia Filippovna reads about the Mazurin case, in which a man eerily like Rogozhin – both came from merchants’ families, lived with their mother, and inherited two million rubles – commits a murder. She wonders if Rogozhin will do the same to her, and, perhaps aware of the story from Nastasia Filippovna herself, Rogozhin does kill her in the Mazurin way, covering her body with oilcloth and dispersing the smell of decay with ‘Zhdanov’s fluid’. The Gorskii case also inspires characters to react to its ongoing events. Original readers therefore knew that the incidents of this serialised novel cannot have been part of any original plan. The book had to be the product of a succession of wills, not a single design. For the author reacts to events beyond his control, much as the characters do.
Indeed, it could almost be said that the author – and I mean the real author, not the narrator or implied author – is another character in the novel. He is a chronicler in the real sense, recording events as they are happening, not after the fact. Presentness is not a mere literary device, but real – which makes it all the more effective as a device. Usually, suspense in a novel, however intense, is mitigated by our awareness of structure: the hero cannot die when three quarters of the novel remain. When we remember the fact of artefact, the sense of immediacy and presentness diminishes. But when the author himself literally does not know what is going to happen, when he must be guided by internal events as he has already written and published them and external ones he cannot control, then we have something more than the usual literary suspense. Unlike the God of Peter Damian, such an author can act only in the present, he cannot change the past to enable a future. We have genuine uncertainty of outcome. That, indeed, may be another secret for the intensity of suspense in Dostoevskii’s works. Not just the character, but also the plot, indeed the novel itself, hangs in the balance.
Dostoevskii exploited but did not invent many of these devices. His most obvious inspiration was War and Peace. Tolstoi’s book was still being serialised when Dostoevskii was publishing The Idiot, which takes sly glances at Tolstoi. Dostoevskii’s previous novel, Crime and Punishment, was serialised in the same journal as the early sections of War and Peace; at one point, Porfirii Petrovich seems to quote from it. Life is fundamentally unpredictable, the detective explains to Raskolnikov: in thinking you could plan a perfect crime by pure reason, you resemble the unfortunate Austrian General Mack who (in Tolstoi’s just-published account) thought he could plan a perfect battle (VI, 263; Pt 4, Sec. 5).
War and Peace was a processual work in the full sense. Like The Idiot, it was the product of a succession of wills, not a single will, and as a result lacks foreshadowing, closure and structure. It is deliberately replete with loose ends. Tolstoi made this technique explicit in his draft introductions to the book and in his published essay, ‘Some Words about the Book War and Peace’. He insisted that his work ‘can least of all be called a novel – with a plot that has growing complexity, and a happy or unhappy dénouement, with which interest in the narration ceases’ (Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XIII, 54). What has come to be regarded as the greatest novel ever written denies being one – because a novel, in Tolstoi’s view, has what we have come to call structure.
Far from having in mind a conclusion to which all events are tending, or designing an overall structure to which each successive instalment will contribute, Tolstoi insists that ‘in printing the beginning of my proposed work I promise neither a continuation or a conclusion for it’ (ibid.). Precisely because the work is written so as to lack structure, closure and dénouement, no matter how long it might turn out to be, the author may arbitrarily stop it at any point without damage to the whole. Contrast that with Edwin Drood, which lacks an ending only because Dickens did not live to write it: people have been guessing about its predetermined but unknown outcome ever since. Tolstoi stresses that his work could never be complete. It cannot lack an ending because it would not tolerate one. The work will of course have to be of some length, but in principle it could always be longer. Strictly speaking, War and Peace is not a very long book but a book of indeterminate length.
Tolstoi writes that he may – or may not – guide his characters through a series of ‘epochs’ (1805, 1807, 1812, 1825, 1856 – needless to say, he never came close to 1856) and watch what happens to them in each. ‘I do not foresee the outcome of these [fictional] characters’ relationships in even a single one of these epochs’ (ibid., 55). He knows their future no more than they do. No part of the work looks forward to, or foreshadows, subsequent parts: ‘I strove only so that each part of the work would have an independent interest.’ Tolstoi then wrote and struck out the following remarkable words: ‘ . . . which would consist not in the development of events, but in development [itself]’ (ibid.). War and Peace not only discusses but also manifests development itself, not development toward something: presentness is neither pulled forward to a conclusion nor subservient to an overall structure.
As Dostoevskii extended Tolstoi’s method, so Tolstoi evidently borrowed from a number of predecessors who had written works of process. Clearly, he relied on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which in turn was inspired by Byron’s and Sterne’s processual experiments, Don Juan and Tristram Shandy; and these were in turn indebted to some lesser-known precedents, such as Samuel Butler’s seventeenth-century mock epic, Hudibras. This line of development, and its significance, are usually obscure to modern critics because we have no genuine poetics of process at our disposal, one that does not somehow impose some sort of structure ‘by retrospection’.
Such a poetics is urgently needed. For not only do the processual works just mentioned include some of the greatest masterpieces of world literature, but there is also a strong processual element in a number of other works that manage to combine structure and process in a way we cannot even begin to understand without a better grasp of what process involves. A work may have a succession of wills because the author, either gradually or suddenly, alters his plan in response to external circumstances, as Dickens does in Martin Chuzzlewit; or he may, after the fact, decide to write a second volume, as with Don Quixote; and although it may fairly be said that each novel in Trollope’s six-volume Palliser series is governed by a structure, an overall sense of process governs the whole. Indeed, it is easily possible to read the Hebrew Bible not as the rabbis did, as a simultaneous expression in which every part glosses every other, but as a composite work of process. That would have been much more to Dostoevskii’s taste.
‘Development itself’: Tolstoi posits the radical unpredictability of the world. No one can foresee the outcome of what Prince Andrei calls ‘a hundred million diverse chances that will be decided on the spur of the moment’ (War and Peace, p. 930). On the spur of the moment: since laws are all illusions, and the world is radically unpredictable, not science but an educated attentiveness pays off best, in battle and in the rest of life. That is why Kutuzov maintains that the best preparation for a battle is not a strategic plan but ‘a good night’s sleep’. Moreover, each moment possesses countless potential consequences for the next moment, and no one can foresee the consequences of consequences of consequences. There can be no social science, only social pseudo-science.
Tolstoi wavers between two reasons for this unpredictability of the world. Is human freedom one reason for our necessary uncertainty about the future? Sometimes Tolstoi endorses determinism. Unpredictability, he contends, has a quite different source. When Tolstoi argues in this way, he tries to break the traditional link between acceptance of determinism and belief that laws of society, analogous to those of planetary motion, can be discovered. Everything may be determined, but we are in principle forever ignorant of the determining laws, for many reasons. One example must suffice. Moral Newtonians assume that, in history as in the solar system, countless phenomena can be reduced to a few laws; but it is entirely possible – indeed, likely – that in history (which, after all, includes everything that happens) there are as many laws as there are phenomena. If so, then even if we could know the laws, our knowledge would do us no good. We may as well act as if there were no laws.
In other passages, Tolstoi does allow for human freedom: determinism, he writes, comes in degrees and binds the more strongly the higher one is in the chain of power and authority. Napoleon has no freedom, but Rostov does, and Lavrushka still more. In that case, there is a second reason for unpredictability. War and Peace alternates between these two positions in an unresolved dialogue. In either case, any narrative form that shows an overall structure will misrepresent reality.
Dostoevskii, by contrast, accepted both reasons for unpredictability. Ippolit enunciates the first reason when he explains: ‘You know, it’s a matter of a whole lifetime, an infinite multitude of ramifications hidden from us. The most skilful chess-player, the cleverest of them, can only look a few moves ahead [. . .] how can you tell what part you may have in the future determination of the destinies of humanity?’ (VIII, 336; Pt 3, Sec. 6). In The Brothers Karamazov, Zosima echoes this view and makes it the basis of a prosaic theory of morality focussed on goodness in the present, not a foreseeable utilitarian outcome: cast a little bread upon the waters.
But Dostoevskii also believed in free will. Play the tape over, and something else might result. The future is unpredictable not only because of innumerable causal factors but also because the past does not wholly determine the present. It shapes, but does not make, our choices. That is why it was crucial to him not to close down time with structure, but to exploit the techniques of process literature to dramatise human freedom. Choice has weight, presentness matters, and to understand an event you must grasp the ‘something else’ that could have happened. You must not look back at the result and imagine that it was inevitable: you must immerse yourself in the moment in all its intensity. You have to be there.
Translations from Dostoevskii’s novels are based on the Constance Garnett versions, tacitly amended by comparison with the Russian text. Translations from the Diary of a Writer are from Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary: A Monthly Publication, trans. Kenneth Lantz, Vol. 1 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
1 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), pp. 189–90.
2 Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (Boston: Beacon, 1955).
3 John Milton, Paradise Lost in Merritt Y. Hughes (ed.), Complete Poems and Prose (New York: Odyssey, 1957), pp. 260–1 (Book III, lines 95–122).
4 In Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), Chapter 4 (‘Sideshadowing’).
5 See Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s ‘Diary of a Writer’ and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); and Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’ (Stanford University Press, 1987).
6 As cited in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 245.
7 See, for example, Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and ‘The Idiot’: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
8 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet, 1968), p. 854. Translations from War and Peace are tacitly corrected by comparison with the Jubilee edition of his works: V. G. Chertkov et al. (eds.), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1929–58). Further references to War and Peace in the text are to this translation.
9 Edward Wasiolek (ed.), Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Notebooks for ‘The Idiot’, trans. Katherine Strelsky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 170, 177, 208. See also Wasiolek’s introductions to the volume and its specific sections.