Chapter IX

. and Dostoevsky’s creative activity generally, and also with _The Possessed_ as an artistic whole.

The motif of a cruelly insulted little girl, developed in Stavrogin’s Confession, is evidently one of Dostoevsky’s long-standing and enduring ideas. In the year 1866, at the time of his friendship with the family of the Korvin-Krukovskys, Dostoevsky told this idea of his as “a scene from a novel planned by him in his youth.” The hero of the novel one morning goes over all his recollections in memory, and “suddenly in the very heat ... of pleasant dreams and bygone experiences begins to feel an awkwardness—something like an inner pain, an alarm.... It appears to him that he must recollect something, and he makes efforts, strains his memory.... And suddenly, he actually called to mind, as vividly and realistically as if it had happened yesterday ... whereas for all these twenty years it had not worried him at all. He remembered how once, after a night of debauchery and under provocation from his friends, he had raped a little girl of ten.”[93]

Footnote 93:

_Reminiscences of Childhood_, by Sophie Kovalevsky.

The connection between this idea and Stavrogin’s Confession is indisputable. The recollection of a sin after a long forgetfulness leads straight to the closing scene of Stavrogin’s Confession and to the last “vision.”

But there are several connecting links between that idea (which in 1866 he thought of as of long standing and remote) and