Chapter IX

. was not accidentally omitted, but did not belong to the novel. It is a variant of the manuscript, but nothing more. How then are we to reconcile this conclusion with the one which tells in favour of the opposite solution? Surely Dostoevsky’s letter of October 8, 1870, to Katkov clearly refers to our fragment as a necessary part of the novel.

The date, although it coincides with the beginning of the publication of the novel, does not fix the final moment of the conception of _The Possessed_. The autumn of 1870 is the time when the idea of _The Possessed_ had become closely related in Dostoevsky’s mind with the idea of _The Life of a Great Sinner_. Stavrogin is almost identified with the hero of _The Life_. And since the crisis of that Life, as it was planned, was the repentance of the sinner and his conversion to God with Tikhon’s help, Dostoevsky had then planned the same conversion for Stavrogin. At that moment (the final moment in the creation of the novel, for the first part was already being published) Dostoevsky might, indeed, have thought that