Notebooks for "Crime and Punishment"

his translation of the notebooks for Crime and Punishment is the first instalment of a long-needed project. Despite Dostoevsky's enormous popularity, the basic: scholarly material relevant to his work has not hitherto been accessible to English readers, though it has been available in Russian-and partially in French translations-for many years. Thus Professor Wasiolek can only be congratulated on his plan to translate all of Dostoevsky's notebooks for his major novels. (One assumes, though it is not mentioned in the announced list, that the recently-published notebooks for A Raw Youth will also be included.) If this plan is carried through, we shall have all of Dostoevsky's working notes, so far as they have been preserved, for the five major novels beginning with Crime and Punishment and ending with The Brothers Karamazov. This, to be sure, does not exhaust all the notebook material known to exist in Soviet archives-there are, for example notebooks dating from the important period of the early 1860′s, just before the composition of Notes from the Underground, which are certainly of the utmost interest. But the Russians so far have refused to publish these manuscripts themselves, and have barred foreign scholars from access to them.