This anguish and this dissatisfaction with himself were gone through for every work that he wrote. “It is a long novel, in six parts (_Crime and Punishment_). At the end of November a large part of it was written and ready; I burned the lot! Now, I can frankly admit that it did not please me. A new form, a new plan hurried me along. I have made a fresh start. I am working night and day; still, progress is slow.”--“I am working hard and little comes of it,” he says elsewhere: “I am constantly tearing my work up. I am terribly discouraged.” And again: “I have done so much work that I’ve become stupid, and my head is dazed.”--“I am working here (Staraia Roussa) like a convict in spite of the fine weather to be taken advantage of; I am tied night and day to my task.” Sometimes a mere article gives him as much trouble as a book, because his conscientiousness is as rigid in little things as in great. “I have let it drag on till now” (i.e. a memoir on Bielinsky, which has not been traced), “and at last I’ve finished it, gnashing my teeth the while. Ten pages of a novel are more easily written than these two sheets. Consequently I’ve written, all in all, this confounded article five times at least, and even then I’ve scored everything out and changed what I’d written. Finally I’ve completed the article after a fashion, but it is so bad that I am full of disgust.”[15] For while he clings to the profound belief in his worth, in the worth of his ideas at least, he is always exacting while the work is in progress, and never pleased when it is completed. “I’ve seldom happened to have anything newer, more complete or more original. I can say this without being accused of pride, because I am speaking of the subject only, of the idea that has sprung up in my head, and not of its realization; as for the latter, it lies with God. I can make a complete mess of it--which has happened before to-day.” “However wretched and abominable what I’ve written may be,” he says in another passage, “the idea of the novel and the labour I expend on it are to me, its unhappy author, my most precious possession in life.” “My dissatisfaction with my novel amounts to disgust,” so he writes when working at _The Idiot_. “I have made a terrible effort to work, but simply could not; my heart is bad. Just now I am making a last effort for the third part. If I succeed in polishing off this book, I’ll get better: if not, it is all over with me.” Having already written not only the three books M. de Vogüé reckons his masterpieces, but _Notes from Underground_, _The Idiot_, and _The Eternal Husband_, he concentrates all his efforts on a new theme (_The Possessed_), exclaiming, “It’s high time I wrote something serious.”