Dostoevsky's Notebooks for Crime and Punishment*

The notebooks of a great author are a peculiar kind of biographical fact. A painful experience in childhood, a disappointing love, a cruel father, and numberless facts of personal biography may be windows on the work of the author, but notebooks such as these stand closer to the work than does any event. Dostoevsky's notebooks for Crime and Punishment are the embryo of the novel: his intentions, trials, mistakes, uncertainties. In the final version we have one book; in the notebooks we have the shadows of other books. The novel offers us what Dostoevsky finally chose to say, but the notebooks offer us what he considered, and what he discarded. The notebooks are a dialogue between Dostoevsky and his novel, and only here do we have the author interrogating himself.

But is not the work enough? Will we be committing the “intentional fallacy,” “the genetic fallacy,” “the psychological fallacy”— some kind of fallacy— if we go outside the work to the notebooks? Many have told us, again and again, that to go outside the work, whether to life or time or rough draft, is fruitless, unilluminating, perhaps even dishonest. The novel is before us, and it alone contains what Dostoevsky wanted to say. What we want, to use Ivanov Razumnik's† words, is “what was said” not “what was talked about.” The confusions of this view are legion. Everyone is interested in the