![]() ![]() Transcending the BoundariesĪfter the missing chapter turned up in Dostoevsky’s papers in 1921, it was translated into English and published a year later by Virginia Woolf and S.S. It’s the high point of the novel, the one indispensable passage, and it isn’t in the novel. In her introduction, Elizabeth Dalton refers to it as “this terrible story,” a “small, cruel masterpiece” that is “excruciating to read.” I agree, though I found it both disturbing and fascinating rather than “excruciating.” I’ve read it twice and I’ll read it again. Finally, after more than 50 years, I’ve been able to read “Stavrogin’s Confession” in the Barnes and Noble edition of The Possessed published in 2005, except it’s still not in its rightful place at the end of Part II but exiled to the back of the book as an appendix. It would have helped if I’d been able to read the chapter in which Stavrogin describes his crime, but it was considered too shocking to print in 1872 no matter how often Dostoevsky tried to tone it down. I was out of my depth, unprepared for the upgrade from a philosophical axe murderer named Raskolnikov to a charismatic child molestor named Stavrogin. I was 20 when I read The Possessed, older but not much wiser. Crime and Punishment was electric, fascinating, a new world. Going from Holden Caulfield in New York to a Russian student plotting an act of murder in St. I was still in my teens when I read Dostoevsky for the first time. ![]()
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