The question which has to be answered first by the student of this fragment is the question of its relation to the text of the finished novel, _The Possessed_. Is this Chapter IX. a part of the artistic whole, which, against the artist’s wish, has accidentally been omitted, and which therefore must now be restored to its proper place in that whole? Or is it one of those numerous fragments of Dostoevsky’s, which, corresponding to some early but subsequently altered scheme of the novel, have been detached from the finished novel, and have not been included in the final text by the artist, but are now preserved only in Dostoevsky’s rough manuscripts as curious examples of the complex origin of his books? As to the first of these suppositions, the words of N. Strakhov, which there is no reason to distrust, speak quite clearly. “The scene from Stavrogin (the rape, etc.) Katkov did not want to publish.” Thus the omission of the chapter “At Tikhon’s” from the novel did not arise from the artist’s decision, but from an external cause, the request of the editor of the _Russkìi Vèstnik_ where _The Possessed_ was appearing. Strakhov’s evidence is confirmed by the connection which exists between the omitted Chapter IX. and Dostoevsky’s creative activity generally, and also with _The Possessed_ as an artistic whole. The motif of a cruelly insulted little girl, developed in Stavrogin’s Confession, is evidently one of Dostoevsky’s long-standing and enduring ideas. In the year 1866, at the time of his friendship with the family of the Korvin-Krukovskys, Dostoevsky told this idea of his as “a scene from a novel planned by him in his youth.” The hero of the novel one morning goes over all his recollections in memory, and “suddenly in the very heat ... of pleasant dreams and bygone experiences begins to feel an awkwardness—something like an inner pain, an alarm.... It appears to him that he must recollect something, and he makes efforts, strains his memory.... And suddenly, he actually called to mind, as vividly and realistically as if it had happened yesterday ... whereas for all these twenty years it had not worried him at all. He remembered how once, after a night of debauchery and under provocation from his friends, he had raped a little girl of ten.”[93] Footnote 93: _Reminiscences of Childhood_, by Sophie Kovalevsky. The connection between this idea and Stavrogin’s Confession is indisputable. The recollection of a sin after a long forgetfulness leads straight to the closing scene of Stavrogin’s Confession and to the last “vision.” But there are several connecting links between that idea (which in 1866 he thought of as of long standing and remote) and Chapter IX. of _The Possessed_. Putting aside _Crime and Punishment_, where Svidrigailov’s vision before his death is also an echo of that idea, _The Life of a Great Sinner_, which was conceived by him in the years 1869 and 1870, was without doubt to have developed the theme of the injured girl.