Chapter IX

. of _The Possessed_. Putting aside _Crime and Punishment_, where Svidrigailov’s vision before his death is also an echo of that idea, _The Life of a Great Sinner_, which was conceived by him in the years 1869 and 1870, was without doubt to have developed the theme of the injured girl.

The hero of _The Life_ was meant to show by the whole course of his existence the religious consistency of life in general, and the inevitability of the acceptance of God. _The Life_ in its first parts was to tell the story of the constant and increasing immersion of man in sin. To the artist this utter absorption of the hero in sin was a necessity. Here Dostoevsky by artistic experiment tested one of his dearest and most secret ideas—his belief that each personality and man’s life on earth generally will not desert, nor can desert, the kingdom of the Grace of the Spirit so long as it preserves itself entire; that sin has nothing ontological in itself; that man’s soul is by its very nature a “Christian.” If the notes of _The Life_ are read attentively, one sees how Dostoevsky tries to bring the sin and downfall of his hero to the utmost limits, to the last boundary—and this is in order that Dostoevsky’s optimistic belief in the essential illumination of life through Grace should be more strikingly justified, and should prevail in the end of _The Life_ where “everything is becoming clear,” and the (“great”) sinner turns to God and dies confessing his crime.

Sin, the deepest sin, is not innate in, but accidental to, man—this belief of Dostoevsky’s dominated _The Life_, and led the artist to contrive situations in which the extremes of sin could be shown. To Dostoevsky the violation of the little girl was an extreme of this sort. This theme was provided by the writer with a view to the religious trials of the hero of _The Life_, for among the notes of the plan there is the following: “He makes an attempt on the lame girl....”

It should be plain that Dostoevsky’s interest in this conception had risen not from personal recollections, and was not maintained by them, but by the artist’s desire to find some adequate way of expressing in the plot his religious conception of the world.

But it is not only the conception of