PHILIP
RAHV
the fact that the narrative mode he had adopted after consid·
erable experimenting and much vacillation, the mode, that
is,
of telling the story from the standpoint of the "omniscient
author," justified itself in practice, allowing him to make the
most of his material without strain or hindrance.
The strain had indeed told on him
in
the late months of
1865, when while living in Wiesbaden he had written an
in·
complete draft of the novel in the form both of a diary and
of a murderer's confession. Those versions turned out to
be
so ·unsatisfactory, chiefly because of the cramping effects of the
method of narration
in
the first person, that he was forced to
scrap them. The economy of interest he had been trying to
enforce by means of that method proved to be too much of a
good thing, and he now took exactly the opposite tack, expand.
ing the interest where formerly he had compressed it. Into the
new expansive scheme he introduced the figures of Svidrigailov
and Porfiry Petrovitch, who have nothing in common besides
the fact that both represent possible attitudes toward Raskol·
nikov, viewpoints or perspectives enabling us to see at once
more clearly and more variously the significance of his case.
Dostoevsky also introduced into his revised scheme the basic
elements of a tale, entitled
The Drunkards,
which he had just
sketched out
in
outline and in which he was proposing to enter
into "all the ramifications" of the then rather topical subject
of alcoholism rampant among the city poor, with the emphasis
falling on "the picture of a family and the bringing up of
children under such circumstances." It is in this somewhat for–
tuitousmanner, or
SO
it would seem on the face of it, that the
Marmeladov. sequence, so reminiscent of the author's earlier
vein in its pathos of indigence and harrowing exposition of
the Petersburg misery, as the Russians are wont to call it, came
to be included
in
the account of Raskolnikov's crime.
But the fortuitousness is more apparent than real. There is
an inner logic, both of content and structure, in his combination
of subject matter from which the novel gains enormously-and
