The novels form as it came into being then, with its action concentrated in a narrow time span, at a crossroads where many stories of many characters intersect, demanded a minutely calculated scheme of the plot lines and scenes: before beginning to write, the novelist therefore drafted and redrafted the scheme of the novel, calculated and recalculated it, designed and redesigned as that had never been done before. One need only leaf through Dostoyevsky's notes for The Possessed: in the seven notebooks that take up 400 pages of the Pleiade edition (the novel itself takes up 750), motifs look for characters, characters look for motifs, characters vie for the status of protagonist; Stavrogin should be married, but "to whom?" wonders Dostoyevsky, and he tries to marry him successively to three women; and so on. (A paradox that only seems one: the more calculated the construction machinery, the more real and natural the characters. The prejudice against constructional thinking as a "nonartistic" element that mutilates the "living" quality of characters is just sentimental naivete from people who have never understood art.)

The novelist in our time who is nostalgic for the art of the old masters of the novel cannot retie the thread where it was cut; he cannot leap over the enormous experience of the nineteenth century; if he wants to connect with the easygoing freedom of Rabelais or Sterne, he must reconcile it with the requirements of composition.

I remember my first reading of Jacques le Fataliste;delighted by its boldly heterogeneous richness, where ideas mingle with anecdote, where one story frames another; delighted by a freedom of composition that utterly ignores the rule about unity of action, I asked myself: Is this magnificent disorder the effect of admirable construction, subtly calculated, or is it due to the euphoria of pure improvisation? Without a doubt, it is improvisation that prevails here; but the question I spontaneously asked showed me that a prodigious architectural potential exists within such intoxicated improvisation, the potential for a complex, rich structure that would also be as perfectly calculated, calibrated, and premeditated as even the most exuberant architectural fantasy of a cathedral was necessarily premeditated.