Humiliated and Insulted

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  But he had scarcely returned to Semipalatinsk when Maria Dmitrievna wrote to him that she was “sad and in tears” and loved Vergunov more than him. Dostoevsky was again absolutely distraught, but still found it in him to continue

  to stand by the love of his life. He would seek to obtain

  for her an assistance grant on the basis of her deceased husband’s government service record, try to enrol her son in the cadet corps and even assist Vergunov in securing a better position.

  In those turbulent times, when Dostoevsky imagined he had lost Maria Dmitrievna for ever, there was suddenly new hope. On 1st October 1856 he was promoted to officer, and his dream of being able to return to St Petersburg became a distinct reality. It is unlikely that this was the only cause – Maria Dmitrievna had probably always loved him after a fashion, though obviously never as strongly as he loved her – but her resistance to him suddenly broke down to the extent that Vergunov simply melted into the background and was heard of no more. Later that month Dostoevsky went to Kuznetsk, sought and obtained Maria Dmitrievna’s hand and was married to her on 6th February 1857.

  His happiness knew no bounds, but a major blow was just round the corner. On their way back to Semipalatinsk, when the newly-weds had stopped in Barnaul, Dostoevsky, as a result of all the emotional upheaval, had a severe epileptic fit. This had a shattering effect on Maria Dmitrievna. The sight of her husband staring wildly ahead, foaming at the mouth and kicking convulsively on the floor must have been disconcerting and frightening in the extreme. She burst into tears and began to reproach him for concealing his ailment. He was actually innocent; he had been convinced that what he suffered from were ordinary nervous attacks, not epilepsy – at least that’s what doctors had told him previously. All the same, he hadn’t told her even that much.

  They settled in St Petersburg, but the local climate was too uncongenial for her, and she moved to Tver. From then on they saw each other only sporadically, moving, as they did, from town to town and from flat to flat. On 7th June 1862 he made his first trip abroad – alone. He felt he had his own life to lead. Maria Dmitrievna had little to do with it, and she was fast approaching death as she had contracted tuberculosis.

  Dostoevsky returned to Russia in September. At the be­ginning of November 1863 the couple settled in Moscow. Maria Dmitrievna was fighting for her life, but on her deathbed she was getting more and more irritable and demanding. Dostoevsky looked after her assiduously, yet at the same time he was riveted to his writing desk. Her suffering and moodiness are reflected in the description of Marmeladov’s wife in Crime and Punishment and of Ippolit in The Idiot. Maria Dmitrievna died on 14th April 1864.

  On his return from Siberia in 1859 Dostoevsky published Uncle’s Dream and The Village of Stepanchikovo, neither of which met with much success. Notes from the House of the Dead began its life in 1860 in the daily newspaper The Russian World (Русский мир), but only the introduction and the first chapter were printed, for Dostoevsky had to keep a wary eye on the censor, as he had pointed out to his brother Mikhail in a letter in 1859: “It could all turn out nasty… If they ban it, it can all be broken up into separate articles and published in journals serially… but that would be a calamity!” Chapters 2–4 were published in subsequent issues in 1861, but it was serialized no further in The Russian World. With some notable alterations, the early chapters were reprinted in the 1861 April issue of Time (Время), a journal he founded jointly with his brother, and the concluding chapter of Part II came out in May 1862. Certain passages, deemed subversive, were excised on the grounds that “morally regressive individuals, who are held back from crime by the severity of punishment alone, may be misled by the Notes to form a distorted impression as to the lack of efficacy of the legally prescribed sanctions” (Baron N.V. Medem, Chairman of the St Petersburg Board of Censors.) Humiliated and Insulted was also serialized in Time during 1861, and Notes from the Underground in Epoch (Эпоха), the second journal that the Dostoevsky brothers had founded in 1864.

  In 1866 Dostoevsky was in dire financial straits and, in what could have been a moment of carelessness, but more likely for fear of being thrown in a debtors’ jail, he concluded one of the most dishonest and unfavourable contracts in recorded literary history. The other contracting party was the publisher Fyodor Timofeyevich Stellovsky, by all accounts a ruthless and unprincipled money-grubber. According to the terms of the contract Dostoevsky had to deliver a brand-new novel by 1st November 1866, or lose all rights in all his subsequent compositions for a period of the next nine years. Dostoevsky was to receive three thousand roubles, but contingently on the new novel being completed and delivered within the prescribed period. Over half of this money was already spoken for; it was needed for the discharge of promissory notes, the irony being that most of these – unbeknown to Dostoevsky – were already in Stellovsky’s hands. The wily Stellovsky knew perfectly well that Dostoevsky was a sick man and that the epileptic attacks, which occurred on a regular basis, made him unfit for work for days on end; besides, he was also aware that Dostoevsky was committed to completing Crime and Punishment and would be unable to write two novels simultaneously. It was very much in Stellovsky’s interests that the contract was not fulfilled.

  Right up to the end of September Dostoevsky worked flat out on Crime and Punishment. This was a novel on which many of his hopes were pinned. It was to be a heavyweight: most of the fiction he had written previously was shot through with humour and had a tongue-in-cheek quality about it, but for whatever reason his best efforts had failed to find wide acceptance, let alone a demand for more either from the public or the critics. He was not giving his readers what they wanted, so Crime and Punishment was to change all that. But then came the end of September, and not a word of the contractual novel had yet been penned. The significance of this suddenly hit him. The as yet non-existent – and very likely to remain such – novel was, not inappropriately, to be called The Gambler. His friend, the writer Alexander Milyukov, on hearing the sad story, suggested that a few of his fellow writers should pool their efforts and write a chapter or so each, the more so since Dostoevsky had already sketched out a plan; or, if he didn’t wish to sacrifice that plan and wanted to keep it for his own use later, they’d work out something new themselves.

  Dostoevsky declined, saying that he wouldn’t put his name under anything he hadn’t written himself. Milyukov then came up with the idea of using a stenographer. It was thus that the twenty-year-old Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who by chance had just recently completed a course in the new-fangled (for Russia, at all events) skill of stenography, came on the scene. They started work on 4th October 1866, and on 30th October the manuscript was ready for delivery, the deadline being midnight.

  But Stellovsky had one more dastardly trick up his sleeve. He arranged to be out of his office on the day, and there was no one to receive the manuscript. On legal advice, they found out that it would be enough for the script to be lodged at a police station and signed for by a senior officer. Dostoevsky and Snitkina rushed to a police station, and luckily found an officer – usually, come the afternoon, senior officers were in the habit of disappearing without notice. Even so it was not till after 10 p.m. that they obtained the sought-after receipt. And so the novel – a manic, surcharged paean to reckless abandon and desperation – was finished from scratch in twenty-six days flat.

  Dostoevsky married Anna Snitkina, twenty-five years his junior, on 15th February 1867. Exactly two months after their wedding, they both went abroad. Anna had taken charge of Dostoevsky’s business affairs efficiently, and by and large successfully. She was proving herself indispensable on a second major front, making up for Dostoevsky’s inadequacy in dealing with day-to-day practical affairs. But there was a limit even to her frugality, acumen and, above all, the positive influence she could exercise, when she encountered Dostoevsky’s incurable penchant for gambling. This had manifested itself during his previous European tour with his m
istress Apollinaria Suslova, immortalized as the enigmatic tease in The Gambler, whose story Anna was herself ironically obliged to set down on paper from the lips of her future husband.

  While gambling with the devil-may-care Apollinaria had a romantic edge to it, indulging the habit on honeymoon with his level-headed, home-making wife Anna – impecunious as they were – became a cruel and pathetic, not to say sordid, human tragedy. He would find himself down to the last penny, dashing over to the tables, staking that very penny, losing it, running back home to pawn his cufflinks, his last remaining possessions, his wedding ring, his winter overcoat, his young wife’s lace cloak, on his knees in front of her, beating his breast, with tears in his eyes accusing himself and imploring for forgiveness, and yet begging for just another louis or two from their common purse to go and break even. And it was in these circumstances, his frame continually convulsed by epilepsy, constantly on the move across Europe – like a veritable Flying Dutchman, flitting from one foreign resort to another – that he deliberated over, planned and eventually completed The Idiot. Not least of his handicaps was separation from Russia and its living language, which he himself considered essential in maintaining the momentum of his creative

  process.

  On 5th March 1868 the couple experienced their first joys of parenthood with the birth of their daughter Sofia, but two months later followed the devastating blow of the infant’s death on 24th May. On 26th September 1869 their second daughter Lyubov was born (d.1926). The Dostoevskys had two more children: Fyodor, born 16th July 1871 (d.1922), and Alexei, born 10th August 1875, who died before he reached the age of three on 16th May 1878.

  On their return from abroad to St Petersburg the Dosto­evskys were beset by creditors for debts incurred before their departure. Fortunately the plucky and quick-witted Anna was able to fight them off, and the author went on to embark upon and complete the last four of his great works more or less undisturbed. Devils was published in 1871; The Writer’s Diary was begun in 1876 and, at intervals, continued till 1881; The Adolescent came out in 1875, followed by The Karamazov Brothers in 1880.

  On 8th June 1880 Dostoevsky delivered his famous speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow organized by the Society of the Friends of Russian Letters. It had a most electrifying effect upon his audience, and has been subsequently referred to as “well nigh the most famous speech in Russian history”. Tolstoy declared it a farce, and point-blank refused to attend. It therefore fell to the two remaining pillars of Russian literature, the arch rivals Dostoevsky and Turgenev – who had had it in for each other ever since they first met some thirty years previously – to occupy the centre stage.

  Of the two, his imposing, patrician-like physical presence apart, it was Turgenev who, by dint of his reputation abroad, coupled with his progressive, enlightened Western ideology at home, felt that precedence to occupy the throne of Russian literature should be accorded to him, rather than to the reactionary, stick-in-the-mud Slavophile Dostoevsky. Moreover the replies to such RSVP messages as had been received from Western celebrities, notably Victor Hugo, Berthold Auerbach and Alfred Lord Tennyson, were all addressed to Turgenev – doubtless confirming him as the only Russian writer known abroad – though it later transpired that all the three prospective guests from abroad had politely declined the honour to attend.

  Still, home-grown honours were not to be spurned, and the two writers, in true prize-fighter fashion, retired to their

  respective camps to prepare and hone their speeches – Turgenev to his magnificent country seat Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, Dostoevsky to his modest house in Staraya Russa.

  The festivities were spread over two days. Turgenev spoke on the seventh of June, Dostoevsky on the eighth. Of all the numerous speakers on the occasion, it was only Turgenev’s and, above all, Dostoevsky’s performances that have gone down in history. Turgenev, ever the aristocrat, did not indulge in any personal gibes in his speech. But what he did, as far as Dostoevsky was concerned, was equally hurtful. Having given Pushkin his rightful due, he permitted himself to express some doubt as to whether the author of Eugene Onegin may be regarded as a truly national and consequently world poet such as Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe. This question, Turgenev remarked, “we shall leave open by and by for now”. Subsequently in his letter home to his wife, Dostoevsky remarked that Turgenev had humiliated Pushkin by depriving him of the title of national poet.

  Dostoevsky himself was not present at this speech – he had been preparing his own. His famous speech took place the next day. He delivered an electrifying performance, passionately arguing for the greatness of Pushkin as the national writer. He claimed that Pushkin was not only an independent literary genius, but a prophet who marked the beginning of Russian self-consciousness and provided the paramount illustration of the archetypal Russian citizen as a wanderer and sufferer in his own land. Dostoevsky’s speech culminated in a plea for universal brotherhood and was met with rapturous applause.

  That evening, Anna Grigoryevna records in her Remi­niscences, after Dostoevsky returned to his hotel late at night, utterly exhausted but happy, he took a short nap and then went out to catch a cab to the Pushkin Memorial. It was a warm June night. He placed the huge laurel wreath at the foot of the memorial and made a deep, reverential bow to his great mentor.

  On his return from Moscow in the summer of 1880, Dostoevsky embarked on a burst of writing activity that knows no precedent in Russian literature. There in a course of a few months he finished the bulk of The Karamazov Brothers, continued his Writer’s Diary and kept up an intensive correspondence, while all this time suffering shattering, debilitating fits of epilepsy. But it was not all doom and gloom. The summer of 1880 was particularly warm, perhaps reminding him of gentler climates. His correspondence, going back to these balmy, final days, is characterized by being written in bursts – several letters at a time without a break – during strategic gaps in his work. On completion of The Karamazov Brothers in 1880, Dostoevsky made far-reaching plans for 1881–82 and beyond, the principal task being an ambitious sequel to the novel; yet at other moments at the end of that year, he confessed of a premonition that his days were numbered.

  Tolstoy, says Igor Volgin, left the world defiantly, with a loud bang of the door, which reverberated throughout the world. By contrast, Dostoevsky’s death was very low key. The author Boleslav Markovich, who came to see Dostoevsky just before he died, wrote: “He was lying on a sofa, his head propped up on a cushion, at the far end of an unpretentious, dismal room – his study. The light of a lamp, or candles, I can’t remember, standing on a little table nearby, fell directly on his face, which was as white as a sheet, with a dark-red spot of blood that had not been wiped off his chin… His breath escaped from his throat with a soft whistle and a spasmodic opening and shutting of his lips.” Dostoevsky died on 28th January 1881, at 8:36 p.m., according to Markovich’s watch.

  Dostoevsky’s own universal legacy is, of course, indisputable, in the way that Shakespeare’s is – meaning that, adulators apart, both have their eminent detractors too. Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, to mention but three, famously disliked Dostoevsky.

  Among the lesser known of Dostoevsky’s legacies in the West is what is termed in Russian достоевщина (Dosto­evshchina). A dictionary definition of достоевщина would be: psychological analysis in the manner of Dostoevsky (in a deprecating sense); tendency to perversion, moral licence and degradation in society. This topic falls outside the scope of this account, but readers of his novels would see how in a traditional society, dominated by religion, such as was the case in nineteenth-century Russia, and also in the eyes of such fastidious arbiters as Turgenev, his repeated delving into the seedier aspects of human behaviour could easily attract severe censure. It is therefore fitting to end with the words – expressing Dostoevsky’s essential ambiguity – of Innokenty Annensky, one of Russia’s foremost Silver Age poets and literati: “Keep
reading Dostoevsky, keep loving him, if you can – but if you can’t, blame him for all you’re worth, only keep reading him… and only him, mostly.”

  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Works

  Poor Folk (Бедные люди, 1846), Dostoevsky’s debut epistolary novel, with which he conquered Belinsky’s heart and entered upon the St Petersburg literary stage, is in choice of subject firmly rooted in Gogol. However, in emotional substance and character delineation it goes way beyond anything that the author of The Overcoat ever attempted. “People (Belinsky and others) have detected in me a radically new approach, of analysis rather than synthesis, that is, I dig deep and, delving to the level of the atoms, I reach further down to the heart of the matter, whereas Gogol’s point of departure is the heart of the matter itself; consequently he is less profound.” Although Dostoevsky’s self-analysis may not be altogether convincing, the novel itself – an exchange of heart-rending letters between two lost souls – is artistically persuasive. It is set wholly in the stifling bureaucratic, class-ridden Russia of the early-nineteenth century, but in spite of the passage of time has lost none of its universal appeal. The events could easily have been taking place in any epoch, in any society – a lowly official exchanging messages with some unfortunate, repressed female living in the house across the way – but the novel is inherently slow and short on action, which arguably limits its appeal to the reader.