Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Displays of such extreme emotion between the parents were probably rare. Nothing was more important for the Dostoevskys than to present an image of well-bred propriety and gentry refinement to the world; it is impossible to imagine them in their cramped apartment, with a household staff in the kitchen and neighboring hospital families all around, indulging in the violent quarrels and scandalous outbursts that Dostoevsky later so often depicted in his novels. Dr. Dostoevsky probably alternated between a grim and ominous silence and endless censoriousness about the minutiae of daily life. His reluctance to speak out openly in the instance of Alexandra may be taken as typical, and when Marya Feodorovna stated the issue bluntly, he rebuked her for writing to him so directly and possibly revealing his secret suspicions to prying eyes. The impulse to cover and conceal is manifest, and was certainly operative in his personal behavior as well. It is therefore probable that the household in which Dostoevsky grew up was characterized far more by order, regularity, and routine, and by a deceptively calm surface of domestic tranquility, than by the familial chaos that so preoccupied him half a century later.

  But we can hardly doubt that the gifted and perceptive boy would become aware of the stresses underlying the routine of his early years, and that he learned to feel it as beset with hidden antagonisms—as subject to extreme fluctuations between intimacy and withdrawal. Family life for Dostoevsky would always be a battleground and a struggle of wills, just as he had first learned to sense it from the secret life of his parents. And for a boy and youth destined to become famous for his understanding of the intricacies of human psychology, it was excellent training to have been reared in a household where the significance of behavior was kept hidden from view, and where his curiosity was stimulated to intuit and unravel its concealed meanings. One may perhaps see here the origin of Dostoevsky’s profound sense of the mystery of personality and his tendency to explore it, as it were, from the outside in, always moving from the exterior to deeper and deeper subterranean levels that are only gradually brought to light.

  Life in the Dostoevsky family was carefully organized around the pattern of Dr. Dostoevsky’s daily routine. The family awakened promptly at six in the morning. At eight Dr. Dostoevsky went to the hospital and the children were put to their lessons. Dr. Dostoevsky returned around twelve and inquired about the work that had been accomplished, and lunch was served at one o’clock. After lunch a deathly silence was maintained for two hours while the paterfamilias napped on the couch in the living room before returning to the hospital. The evenings were spent in the living room, and each evening before dinner, if Dr. Dostoevsky was not too busy with his sick lists, he read aloud to the children. At nine in the evening the family had dinner, and the children, after saying their prayers in front of the icon, then went to bed. “The day was spent in our family,” Andrey comments, “according to a routine established once and for all, and repeated day after day, very monotonously.”18 Feodor was also subjected to this routine from his earliest years—one that combined the physical discomfort of crowded and gloomy quarters (“low ceilings and cramped rooms crush the mind and the spirit,” Raskolnikov tells Sonya) with the psychic discomfort of an unrelaxing pressure to work under the eye of a stern paternal overseer. The children were rarely allowed outdoors during the frigid Moscow winters.

  During the periods of mild weather, the Dostoevsky family went for walks in the early evening. Dr. Dostoevsky was in charge of these excursions, and the children were held in with a tight rein; any display of exuberance or animal spirits was out of the question. Andrey describes him taking the occasion to give them lessons in geometry, using the crazy-quilt pattern of the Moscow streets to illustrate the various types of angle. The importance of hard work and self-discipline was constantly drummed into their minds, and though their father did not terrorize them physically, his impatient vigilance constantly hung over their heads as a threat. It is probable that, when Dostoevsky spoke to his friend Dr. Yanovsky in the late 1840s about “the difficult and joyless circumstances of his childhood,”19 he was thinking of circumstances such as these.

  A great change occurred in the life of the Dostoevsky children when their parents acquired the small property at Darovoe in 1831. Feodor and Mikhail spent four months there with their mother every year for four years; after this time, because of their studies, they could come only for shorter stretches of a month or so. These were the sunniest periods in Dostoevsky’s boyhood. If he later told his second wife that he had had a “happy and placid childhood,”20 it was undoubtedly of these months in the country that he was thinking, free from the menace of paternal disapproval and from the oppressive confinement of life in the city. Evocations of a happy childhood are exceedingly rare in Dostoevsky’s novels and the one or two that exist are set either in a village or on a country estate; no pleasant memories were linked in his sensibility with life in the city. “Not only that first voyage to the village,” Andrey writes, “but all the following trips there always filled me with some kind of ecstatic excitement.”21 No doubt the high-spirited and impressionable Feodor experienced the same sensation even more intensely as the carriage to Darovoe pulled away every spring with bells tinkling on the horses’ harness and as the at first unfamiliar (and then beloved) rural sights began to unroll before his eyes, until they finally arrived at the family’s thatched-roof, three-room cottage sheltered by a grove of ancient linden trees.

  These sojourns in the country also offered Dostoevsky his first opportunity to become acquainted with the Russian peasantry at close quarters (the house serfs had acquired the manners and habits of servants). The children were allowed to roam freely and to enlist the aid of serf children in their games. The children were also allowed to mingle freely with the older peasants in the fields. Feodor once ran back two versts to the village, according to Andrey, to bring water to a peasant mother at work in the field who wished to give her baby a drink.22 This untroubled boyhood relation with the peasants certainly contributed to shaping Dostoevsky’s later social ideas; one may say that he aimed to bring about, on a national scale, the same harmonious unity between the educated classes and the peasantry that he remembered having known as a child. These childhood summers brought him—in the opinion of Dostoevsky’s friend Count Peter Semenov—“closer to the peasantry, their way of life, and the entire moral physiognomy of the Russian people” than most scions of the landed gentry, “whose parents purposely kept them from any association with the peasants.”23

  The country around Darovoe was crisscrossed with numerous ravines that provided a haunt for snakes and wandering wolves. The children were warned to avoid them by their mother, but this did not stop Feodor from plunging into the nearby birchwood (called “Fedya’s wood” by the family) with a delicious shudder of fear. He confided his sensations in a passage in the original version of Poor Folk, later eliminated. “I remember that at the back of our garden was a wood, thick, verdant, shadowy. . . . This wood was my favorite place to walk, but I was afraid to go into it very far . . . it seemed as if someone is calling there, as if someone is beckoning there . . . where the smooth stumps of trees are scattered about more blackly and thickly, where the ravine begins. . . . It becomes painful and terrifying, all around nothing but a dead silence; the heart shivers with some sort of obscure feeling, and you continue, you continue farther, carefully. . . . How sharply etched in my memory is that wood, those stealthly walks, and those feelings—a strange mixture of pleasure, childish curiosity and terror” (1: 443).

  Dostoevsky never forgot his summers in Darovoe, and in 1877, shortly after returning there to visit for the first time since his childhood, he wrote of “that tiny and unimportant spot [which] left a very deep and strong impression on me for the remainder of my life.”24 Names of places, and of people he knew there, constantly turn up in his work, most abundantly in The Brothers Karamazov, which he was beginning to think of at the time of his belated return to the scenes of his youth. The village harbored a durochka, a female half-wit named Ag
rafena, who lived out of doors for most of the year and, in the dead of winter, was forcibly taken in by one peasant family or another. She is the prototype of Lizaveta Smerdyakova, and suffered the same unhappy fate: despite her infirmity, she became pregnant and gave birth to a child who died shortly after birth. Andrey describes her as continually muttering something incomprehensible about her dead child in the cemetery, exactly like another Dostoevskian durochka, Marya Lebyadkina in Demons. Other echoes of these years appear in the dream sequence of Dimitry Karamazov of a village decimated by fire, like the one that broke out in Darovoe in the spring of 1833. “The whole estate,” writes Andrey, “looked like a desert, with charred posts sticking up here and there.”25 Each family was given fifty rubles as a loan (a considerable sum in those days) to help in the work of reconstruction, and it is doubtful whether it was ever repaid.

  In 1833, Mikhail and Feodor left home to go to Souchard’s day school; a year later they were sent to Chermak’s, the best boarding school in Moscow. The preparation for boarding school was tied up with a particularly trying experience for the two older boys. Mastery of Latin was required at Chermak’s, but Souchard’s had no such instruction, and Dr. Dostoevsky himself decided to fill in the deficiency. These lessons provide Andrey with the most graphic illustration of his father’s hair-trigger temper. “At the slightest error of [my] brothers, father always became angry, flew into a passion, called them sluggards and fools; in the most extreme, though rarer, instances, he even broke off the lesson without finishing it, which was considered worse than any punishment.”26 Dr. Dostoevsky required his sons to stand stiffly at attention throughout the Latin drill. From this we may conclude that he had already decided to enroll them in a military establishment and was trying to accustom them to the rigors of martial discipline. No doubt, as Andrey remarks, his “brothers were very much afraid of these lessons.”27

  The transition from home to school, and particularly to boarding school, came as a rude shock to Feodor. Despite his father’s flare-ups, home was still a comfortable and familiar place, and his mother a perpetual source of consolation. The words of the heroine of Poor Folk evoke what was probably Dostoevsky’s reaction to the new world of the school. “I would sit over my French translation or vocabularies, not daring to move and dreaming all the while of our little home, of father, of mother, of our old nurse, of nurse’s stories” (1: 28). Another reminiscence of this initiation may be contained in the image of Alyosha Karamazov surrounded by his schoolmates, who “forcibly held his hands from his ears, and shouted obscenities into them” (9: 23). The Dostoevsky children had lived in a peasant village and were certainly familiar with the facts of life, but they had been shielded from a knowledge of vice and perversity. Andrey remembers his own introduction to such matters by his schoolfellows with distaste. “There was no nastiness, no abominable vice, which was not taught to the innocent youngsters who had just left the paternal home.”28

  There is only one independent account that allows us to catch a glimpse of Dostoevsky in his school years. “On the first day I arrived,” writes a slightly younger student, “I gave way to a surge of childish despair on finding myself . . . exposed to their taunts. During the recreation period, . . . Dostoevsky . . . chased away the mocking scamps, and began to console me. . . . He often visited me after that in class, guided me in my work, and lightened my sadness by his exciting stories during the recreation period.”29 This pattern of behavior illustrates aspects of Dostoevsky’s character that remain constant: his staunch independence, and his willingness to intervene personally against a situation that offended his moral instincts. He was not afraid to spring to the defense of the helpless and persecuted. Dostoevsky’s independence and self-assertiveness were exhibited at home as well. Andrey tells us that Feodor was sometimes so unrestrained in maintaining his own point of view that Dr. Dostoevsky would say, with the wisdom of experience, “Really, Fedya, control yourself, you’ll get into trouble . . . and end up under the red cap,”30 that is, wearing the headgear of the convict regiments of the Russian Army. Dostoevsky did serve in such a regiment after his release from prison camp in 1854.

  The routine of these years of schooling was as invariable as those of early childhood. Every weekend the older boys returned home, and once the first excitement of reunion was over there was little else to do except read and supervise the assignments handed out the week before to their younger brothers and sisters. Visits were still restricted to the immediate family, nor were the older boys ever allowed to go out unaccompanied or given pocket money. Such restraints, however, were merely the custom of the times and the society.

  The last four years of Dostoevsky’s life in Moscow were darkened by his mother’s illness, which took a sharp turn for the worse in the fall of 1836. Medical consultations were held every day by the doctor and his colleagues, and the visits of relatives succeeded each other in a never-ending and exhausting file. “This was the bitterest time in the childhood period of our lives,” writes Andrey. “We were about to lose our mother any minute. . . . Father was totally destroyed.” Just before the end, Marya Feodorovna regained consciousness, called for the icon of the Savior, and then blessed her children and her husband. “It was a moving scene and we all wept,” Andrey recalls.31

  But it was not only the impending crisis in his family life that troubled Feodor during his last two years at home; he also knew that he was destined for a career repugnant to his deepest inclinations. Dr. Dostoevsky had decided that his two older sons were to be military engineers, and in the fall of 1836 he submitted a request through his hospital superior for their admission to the Academy of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg at government expense. Both Mikhail and Feodor were dreaming of literary fame and fortune, but once their father’s request was granted, the die was cast. No doubt this decision stirred up a good deal of resentment and hostility, particularly in the fiery Feodor; but this was blunted by the lesson so often hammered home to the Dostoevsky children by their father. “He often repeated that he was a poor man,” Andrey observes, “that his children, especially the younger ones, had to be ready to make their own way, that they would remain impoverished at his death, etc.”32 The post of military engineer offered solid financial advantages, and Dr. Dostoevsky believed he was doing the best he could for his offspring.

  What little we know of Dostoevsky in these years makes it likely that he began to chafe very early under the restricting atmosphere of his home life and the necessity of knuckling under to a rigidly inflexible and emotionally unstable father who tended to identify his own wishes with the sacred dictates of God himself. Such feelings of disaffection, however, were certainly counterbalanced both by the natural inclination to accept and revere paternal authority and, as Feodor grew older, by his growing awareness of Dr. Dostoevsky’s genuine dedication to the welfare of his family. For while the burdens that Dr. Dostoevsky imposed on his children were heavy indeed, their future, as they well knew, was at the center of his preoccupations; nor did he ever allow them to forget that his laborious life was devoted to their interests. Moreover, the adolescent Dostoevsky probably could sense his father’s anxieties behind the stiff and official authoritarian façade.

  Dostoevsky’s only direct utterance about his father while the latter was still alive is made in a letter to Mikhail; and its mixture of pity with some impatience reveals Dostoevsky’s ambivalence. “I feel sorry for our poor father,” he writes. “A strange character! Oh, how much unhappiness he has had to bear! I could weep from bitterness that there is nothing to console him. But, do you know, Papa doesn’t know the world at all. He has lived in it for 50 years and retains the same ideas about people as 30 years ago. Happy ignorance! But he is very disillusioned with it. That seems our common fate.”33 This was written after the death of Marya Feodorovna had deprived Dr. Dostoevsky of his sole sustaining support in the midst of his woes; but it surely represents an opinion that his son had begun to form long before.

  If we are to seek for some ima
ge of Dostoevsky’s father in his works, it is useless to go to the creations of his maturity; whatever father figures we find there are too much intertwined with later experiences and ideological motifs to have any biographical value. But the picture given of Varvara’s father in Poor Folk comes straight from Dostoevsky’s still-fresh memories of his youth, and is steeped in the details of his daily life. “I tried my very utmost to learn and please father. I saw he was spending his last farthing on me and God knows what straits he was in. Every day he grew more gloomy, more ill-humored, more angry. . . . Father would begin saying that I was no joy, no comfort to them; that they were depriving themselves of everything for my sake and I could not speak French yet; in fact all his failures, all his misfortunes were vented on me and mother. . . . I was to blame for everything, I was responsible for everything! And this was not because father did not love me; he was devoted to mother and me, but it was just his character” (1: 29). It is likely that Dostoevsky had heard just such reproaches on numerous occasions, and had tried to excuse them in his heart in the same way. He depicts his father not as a brutal and heartless despot but as a harassed and finally pitiable figure driven to desperation by the difficulties of his situation.

  Some of the traits of Dr. Dostoevsky, drawn at this time with a satirical rather than a pathetic pen, can also be found in the first version of another early work, Netotchka Nezvanova. A character named Feodor Ferapontovich, a minor civil service official, constantly reproaches his children for ingratitude. “Turning to his little children, he would ask them in a threatening and reproachful voice: ‘What have they done for all the kindness he had shown them? Have they recompensed him, by assiduous study and impeccable pronunciation of French, for all his sleepless nights, all his labors, all his blood, for anything? for anything?’ In other words, Feodor Ferapontovich . . . every evening turned his house into a little hell.” The qualities in his character held up to ridicule are attributed to some sort of hidden suffering: “whether from the fact that he had been hurt, or cut down by somebody, some kind of secret enemy who constantly insulted his self-respect,” and so forth (2: 444). One can imagine the young Dostoevsky speculating in much the same way about the sources of his father’s more galling peculiarities.