SOURCE: Guerard, Albert J. “On the Composition of Dostoevsky's The Idiot.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 8, no. 1 (fall 1974): 201-15.

In the following essay, Guerard analyzes Dostoevsky's Notebooks, evaluating the changes that the writer chose to make in developing the final published version of The Idiot.

Why scrutinize the process of creating great complex novelistic masterpieces such as The Idiot, with due recourse to the Notebooks, when to read and interpret the finished texts is a more than sufficient task? One may reply that this is at the least pure science and pleasure: to follow rich minds able to articulate the twists and turns of imaginative discovery, repression, rediscovery. Applied science too, for those who desire it, since Dostoevsky not only offers his bundle of neuroses turned to good account, but also a fuller access to a dynamic preconscious and even unconscious than nearly anyone...