Research ends and writing begins

The novelist's research ended when he had defined the narrative form and chosen the narrator, in short, with the selection of a definite form of composition. The natural antinomy between thought and writing had been resolved: it was an end and a beginning.

It was an end, because this choice was made only after the appearance of totality, only after the idea of the novel had crystallised and been passionately tested by experiment, only after the ideal structure of the Dostoyevskian novel, with its explosion, dispersal and spatial development, reflecting the ‘broad nature’, and its rending of the human architecture, had been set in place, only after the main hero had been selected. The decision about composition did not mean that everything had been decided; on the contrary, the testing of the Idea of the novel by its final gestures and the precise distribution of secondary characters went on after the writing had begun. In the notebooks of A Raw Youth, Prince Sergey Sokolsky is a typical case; the first chapters had already been written, but Dostoyevsky still did not know the nature of his love affairs with the beautiful Akhmakova, the gentle Liza or the intriguer Anna Andreyevna, how he was going to die (suicide? madness?) or whether he was going to be a political spy.