The architectural space which we are considering is simply the way in which the chaotic whole which has just appeared is organised, or, in material terms, the complex construction of relationships between the various characters. This is originally a random movement of particles, which is gradually organised by experiment into a formal arrangement directed by the Idea.

Gravitational disposition

The human architecture in Dostoyevsky's great novels is ordered, directly or indirectly, by the underground but fundamental dream of the broad nature, which is shown at its most brilliant in ‘The Life of a Great Sinner’, where Dostoyevsky was trying to rearrange the abundant growth of the universe by developing it geometrically within the immense soul of the hero with his impulses and his contradictory actions. At the extreme point, and we have caught a glimpse of this in the plan mentioned only in the letters, Dostoyevsky would have tried to include a large slice of the history of Russia, all the great eternal questions of God and humanity, and many burning contemporary problems, or in other words a history of thought, within the sum of this monstrous creature's experiences. His first impulse was to concentrate the world, the totality which had just appeared, in the one living cell of the broad nature. This enthusiastic plan was immediately doomed to failure, or at least so it seemed.

First, the novel about the broad nature could not take place in a desert peopled with abstract phantoms.