But he cherished throughout his life the belief that with more time and freedom he could have given better expression to his thought. “There is one consideration that troubles one greatly: if I spent a year writing the novel beforehand, and then two or three months in copying and revising it, I guarantee the result would be very different.” Self-delusion, maybe? Who can tell? With greater leisure, to what could he have attained? After what was he still striving? Greater simplicity, no doubt, and a more complete subordination of detail. As they are, his best works rise, almost throughout, to a degree of precision and clarity that it is not easy to imagine excelled. And to reach this, what expenditure of effort! It is only now and again that sudden inspiration is vouchsafed; everything else means painful toil. To his brother, who doubtless had reproached him with not writing “simply” enough, meaning to say “quickly” enough, and with not “surrendering himself to inspiration,” he replied, young as he was: “It is clear that you are confusing, as often happens, inspiration, that is, the first momentary creation of the picture, or the stirring of the soul, with work. Thus, for instance, I make note at once of a scene just as it appeared to me, and I am delighted: then, for months, for a year even, I work at it ... and believe me, the finished article is much superior. Provided, of course, that the inspiration is vouchsafed! Naturally without inspiration nothing can be accomplished....” Must I crave pardon for this prodigality of quotation, or will you not rather be grateful to me for allowing Dostoevsky to be his own spokesman as much as possible? “At the beginning, that is at the end of last year, I thought the novel (he refers to _The Possessed_) very _made_ and artificial and rather scorned it. But later I was overtaken by real enthusiasm. I fell in love with my work of a sudden, and made a big effort to get all that I had written into good trim....”[13] “The whole year,” he goes on to say (1870), “I have done nothing but destroy.... I have altered my plan at least ten times, and I’ve re-written the first part entirely. Two or three months ago I was in despair. Now everything has fallen into place together and cannot be changed.” And again the ever-present obsession: “If I had had time to write without hurrying myself, without a time-limit in view, it is possible that something good might have developed out of it.”[14]