The Notebooks for A Raw Youth (1874)

Dostoevsky admires the skill of prominent authors of his day, writers like Leo Tolstoy, but he’s dissatisfied with their understanding of human capability.  In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, when Bolkonsky sees his rival’s leg being amputated, he discovers he is able to forgive him.

Dostoevsky says, that’s great for Bolkonsky, but most people aren’t like that.  Most people know what goodness is, they desire to be good, and yet they’re unable to achieve it.  “What can sustain those who do try to improve themselves?” he writes.  “A reward, faith?  Nobody is offering any reward, and in whom could one have faith?”

Dostoevsky believes that most Russians, including himself, have become so enamored with the idea that they could improve themselves through reasoning and effort that they have become cut off from the Living Image on which all goodness is dependent.

No, perhaps cut off is too strong.  The Image has become blurred, but it is still visible in some people at some times.  The human soul contains sincerity, goodness, gaiety—they have been muffled by our deluded self-improvement projects, but we can still catch glimmers.  The most reliable test for this, Dostoevsky says, is laughter.  It’s rare for someone to be in touch with the sincerity, goodness, and gaiety hidden in their soul, but you can hear them when such a person laughs.  Dostoevsky likes to listen to how people laugh to better understand them.

Dostoevsky’s belief that progress is not achieved primarily through reasoning and effort affected his writing process.  Not that reasoning and effort aren’t involved, but they can’t be the starting point if he wants to write something containing goodness and truth.  There must be two different approaches to writing that go on simultaneously within a novelist.  He calls these two approaches the Poet and the Artist.

The Poet is concerned with images or impressions that come from deep within.  “In order to write a novel,” Dostoevsky says, “one must acquire, first of all, one or several strong impressions actually experienced by the author’s heart.  This is the Poet’s job.”  Dostoevsky believes that a novelist can’t make great art simply through conscious planning, but he must allow images to arise “from the bottom of his soul.”  

But conscious planning, of course, is also part of novel writing.  This is where the Artist comes in.  The impressions must be arranged into a harmonious whole.  The way the Poet and the Artist interact is on display in Dostoevsky’s working notebooks for his novel, A Raw Youth (also translated The Adolescent).  

First, an image shows up on the page, presumably supplied by the Poet.  Sometimes these images are visual aids for character traits.  For example, he experiments with one of the characters being “a pillow,” by which he means an extremely passive person.  Sometimes the images are prototypes of characters.  For example, “Abishai” becomes shorthand for a character who encourages violence.  Sometimes the images are telling gestures that reveals something essential about characters.  For example, across the notebooks, one character is continuously mentioned to be “chopping icons.”  This gesture reveals an extreme loss of faith.  

The Poet supplies a new image every so often, and then the Artist works the new image through the other accumulated elements of the novel, experimenting with how to weave the images together.  This often involves a continuous recasting and reordering of plot and motive in the effort to find something consistant, elegant, and unexpected.  The Artist often steps back into little outlines of a character’s chains of motive across the whole book, or else, when a theme arises, he outlines the structure to see how it could orbit around that theme.  The Artist is an organizer, and his goal is to thread the images into a unity.

Dostoevsky’s artistic process is characterized by making space for images that arise from within himself beyond his control.  This belief that humans couldn’t merely think and will themselves into goodness, not even the goodness of a novel, is summed up by one of his characters in these notebooks:

“The deeper the mystery becomes, the nearer it takes you to God.  But whosoever will say, in his pride: ‘There is no more mystery, I have learned everything,’ forsakes God and the true light and falls into darkness, and is having a bad time of it in the darkness. . . [I]n the meantime the mystery continues inviolate.”