Strange, is it not, to find what I may term a first version of the queer relationship between Ivan Karamazov the thinker and Smerdiakov the lackey in _Crime and Punishment_, the first of his great novels? Dostoevsky tells us of one Filka, a serf, Svidrigaïlov’s servant, who hanged himself to escape, not blows, but his master’s mockery of him. “Filka was a sort of hypochondriac, a sort of domestic philosopher.” The other servants used to say “he read himself silly.”[107] These lackeys, these shadows, these puppets that act in place of the thinking beings, have one and all a love amounting to veritable devotion for the diabolical superiority of intellect. Stavrogin’s prestige in the eyes of Pyotr Stepanovitch is as exaggerated as that intellectual’s scorn for his miserable inferior. “‘Do you want the whole truth?’ said Pyotr Stepanovitch to Stavrogin. ‘You see the idea really did cross my mind--you hinted it yourself, not seriously, but teasing me (for of course you would not hint it seriously); but I couldn’t bring myself to it, and wouldn’t bring myself to it for anything, not for a hundred roubles....’ “In the heat of his talk, he went close up to Stavrogin and took hold of the revers of his coat (really, it may have been on purpose). With a violent movement Stavrogin struck him on the arm: ‘Come, what is it? ... give over, you’ll break my arm.’”[108] (Ivan Karamazov’s conduct towards Smerdiakov is marked by like brutality.) “Nicolay Vsyevolodovitch, tell me, as before God, are you guilty or not, and I’ll swear I’ll believe your word as though it were God’s, and I’ll follow you to the end of the earth. Yes, I will, I’ll follow you like a dog.... I am a buffoon, but I don’t want you, my better half, to be one! Do you understand me?”[109] The thinking being enjoys his domination of the other: yet this very domination is a source of constant exasperation. For his creature’s fumbling actions are served up as the caricature of his own thoughts. Dostoevsky’s letters enlighten us concerning the elaboration of his novels, _The Possessed_ in particular. Personally, I judge this work to be most extraordinarily powerful and wonderful. In it we are vouchsafed to witness a rare literary phenomenon. The book Dostoevsky planned to write was very different from that we actually have. While he was putting it into shape a new character, of which at first he had scarcely dreamed, asserted itself, gradually took front rank, and ousted the intended hero!