For Dostoyevsky, the urge towards a new novel always began with vast and laborious rumination. Themes and characters from earlier works which he had failed to exorcise returned, accompanied by even more demanding themes and characters from the underground creative stream, of which ‘The Life of a Great Sinner’ is the boldest vision, all impetuously clamouring for life.

The new novel began by exploding other novels and gathering them together in one gigantic puzzle, into which unpublished pieces, prophetic of later works, tended to glide surreptitiously. This was not a mechanical process; it was the appearance of a whole universe. Like the poet Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky brings the formless back from his rumination. The unity of the work and the continuity of the creative interrogation are inscribed at the beginning of the notebooks, where identifiable relics from earlier works and the meteorites of future ones are crushed together. The novels of Dostoyevsky have an epilogue only for the reader, never for the writer, who is constantly deepening and resurrecting people he has killed or doomed to oblivion.

The fantastic novel-poem

The Devils, the satirical novel which caused Dostoyevsky to postpone his grandiose design of ‘The Life of a Great Sinner’ indefinitely and left it bloodless, reappeared in the very first lines of the notebooks of A Raw Youth.