Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  9 Waclaw Lednicki, Russia, Poland and the West (New York, 1954), 275. Lednicki’s book contains a translation of most of the chapter that Tokarzewski devotes to Dostoevsky in his Siedem lat katorgi (Warsaw, 1907).

  10 Ibid., 272–273.

  11 DW (1876), 206.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Ibid., 206–207.

  16 Ibid., 207.

  17 Ibid., 209.

  18 Ibid., 210.

  19 Ibid.

  20 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1929), 172.

  21 DW (1876), 202.

  22 Pis’ma, 1: 143; February 20, 1854.

  23 Ibid., 142.

  24 Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, 2 vols. (New York, 1962), 2: 138.

  25 Cited in Walter Ruttenbeck, Sören Kierkegaard, der Christliche Denker und sein Werk (Berlin, 1929), 225.

  CHAPTER 17

  Private Dostoevsky

  Dostoevsky was released from the Omsk stockade on February 15, 1854, but the freedom for which he had waited so long was still minimal. As he remarked in his letter to Mme Fonvizina, “In the overcoat of a soldier, I am just as much of a prisoner as before.”1 For reasons of health he was allowed to remain in Omsk for a month, and both he and Durov lived at the home of the hospitable Konstantin Ivanov and his wife.

  Dostoevsky’s letters give us a graphic picture of his plight as a lowly soldier. Completely dependent on the good will and even charity of others, he was forced to continually plead for help. What made his situation even worse was the conviction that he had emerged from prison camp with new powers as a writer and that, if he were only allowed to utilize his talents, all his problems could be solved at one stroke. In his letter to Mikhail written during his recuperation in Omsk, Dostoevsky makes no effort to conceal his personal agenda when he asks for a full report on all his relatives and on the exact state of Mikhail’s finances. (Mikhail had opened a small cigarette factory with his share of the distribution of the Dostoevsky family property.) Dostoevsky is determined to fight his way back into Russian literature and he knows this will involve a long campaign, during which his survival will depend on the help he can muster from family and friends. “I need money,” he tells Mikhail bluntly. “I have to live, brother. These years will not have passed without bearing their fruits. . . . What you spend for me—will not be lost. If I manage to live, I will return it with interest . . . and now I will no longer write trifles. You will hear of me being talked about.”2

  A further request to Mikhail, made in even more pressing terms, was for the dispatch of books. Even after Major Krivtsov had been toppled, Dostoevsky’s relation to literature had been too emotionally charged to allow him to pick up a book lightly. He recalls “the strange and agitating impression of the first book I read in prison”—one of the Russian “thick” periodicals containing literary works, criticism, and social commentary. “My former life rose up before me full of light and color and I tried from what I had read to conjecture how far I had dropped behind. . . . What emotions were agitating people now? What questions were occupying their minds? I pored over every word, tried to read between the lines and to find secret meanings and allusions to the past; I looked for traces of what had agitated us in my time. And how sad it was for me to realize how remote I was from this new life, how cut off I was from it all. I should have to get used to everything afresh, to make acquaintance with a new generation again” (4: 229).

  He thus begs Mikhail to send him what would constitute the contents of a small research library. As one might expect, he asks for the dispatch of “the magazines of this year, at least Notes of the Fatherland,” yet he seems even more anxious to plunge back into the past: “I need (badly need) ancient historians (in French translation) and the moderns—that is, Vico, Guizot, Thierry, Thiers, Ranke, etc., the economists, and the Church Fathers.”3 “Send me the Carus,” he continues, “Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and if you are able to send things clandestinely, slip Hegel in without fail, especially Hegel’s History of Philosophy. My entire future is tied up with that.”4 Dostoevsky warns Mikhail to burn his letter; but so great is his desire for books that he is willing to run the risk of violating regulations in order to obtain them. More than a year later, no books had yet arrived from Mikhail, although the latter had turned over a consignment to a mutual friend for shipment. Some may have reached their destination in the late spring of 1855, when Mikhail is thanked for the receipt of a package. But Dostoevsky could hardly have obtained everything he asked for: at that time he was sharing a cottage with Baron Wrangel, who refers to “the pitiful stock of our books” and pictures Dostoevsky rereading each of them a countless number of times.5

  Dostoevsky was mulling over several projects that he hoped would speed his rehabilitation. One was concerned, he writes, “with the mission of Christianity in art.” He intended to call this work Letters on Art and to dedicate it to Her Highness Maria Nikolaevna, the daughter of Nicholas I, who was then president of the Academy of Fine Arts. “I wish to demand the authorization to dedicate my article to her,” he explains, “and to publish it without signature.”6 The works of the Church Fathers would have supplied him with information on both theology and the attitude of the early Church toward art, while Kant and Hegel involved another plan to unobtrusively break into print again by translating. In a letter written in November 1854, the young Wrangel tells his father that he and his new-found friend intend “to translate Hegel’s Philosophy [?] and the Psyche of Carus.”7 Dostoevsky had asked for Carus’s once-famous treatise on psychology, sometimes considered a precursor of psychoanalysis, Psyche zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele (1846). Wrangel writes his father that Dostoevsky “did not know German”;8 no doubt this is why he enlisted the aid of someone for whom German would have been as much of a native tongue as Russian.

  What Dostoevsky would have admired in Carus, whose scientific credentials were impeccable, was a mind totally abreast of the very latest theories of biology and physiology but who interpreted them in the old-fashioned terms of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. Carus saw both nature and human life as originating in a Divine Idea and considered the individual soul to be immortal because it shared in the eternity of this divine creative principle. In the mid-1840s, in opposition to Belinsky’s “scientific” arguments in favor of atheism, materialism, and determinism, Dostoevsky would have eagerly seized on Carus’s book as proof that one could be up-to-date and “scientific,” without abandoning a belief in some sort of supernatural principle or in the precepts of Christian morality. For he could find in Carus a glowing tribute to the fundamental tenet of this morality—the law of love—supported by a quotation from the New Testament. It is the law of love, running through all of nature and beginning with sexual differentiation, that for Carus first stirs in mankind the impulse of devotion and self-sacrifice, and hence leads to the ultimate conquest of egoism (“the unconditional surrender to the godly that hovers above all consciousness, in a word, to the love of God”).9

  Dostoevsky’s deepened awareness of the power of the irrational in human existence would only have confirmed what he was now learning from Carus about the strength of the irrational and the unconscious: “The key to the understanding of the essence of the conscious life of the soul lies in the region of the unconscious.”10 By “unconscious,” though, Carus refers not only to psychic life but to all of nature, which he considers to be endowed with soul-life and to differ from the psyche only in degrees of consciousness and self-consciousness. Carus emphasizes that the higher forms of consciousness must be kept in equilibrium with the unconscious forces of existence if they are not to become unbalanced. One can see in this proto-Jungian schema some analogy to, and certainly an encouragement for, Dostoevsky’s ideology of pochvennichestvo, elaborated a few years later. This called for the fusion of an intelligentsia inspired by Western ideas of rationalism and enlightenment with the unconscious moral forces slumbering in the still uncorrupted bosom of
the Russian people.

  Carus compares moral evil to a state of physical illness; both are deviations from the normal condition of the unconscious forces that regulate the health of an organism. But, just as nature has means of restoring its own equilibrium in the case of physical illness, so the moral consciousness has its own “unconscious” means—the human “conscience”—that works to restore the moral health of the personality.11 This image of conscience as a natural and instinctive regulator of the human psyche, whose distortion or perversion leads to a literal “sickness” of the self, was to become one of the major themes of the great works of Dostoevsky that lay ahead.

  Whatever plans Dostoevsky may have had for literary activity, however, had to be abandoned in the face of the grim necessities of his existence. His leisure ended when he left the Ivanovs, whose kindness he praises to his brother with heartfelt words. “I would have died for good if I had not found people here,” he confesses. “K. I. I[vanov] has been a veritable brother to me. . . . And he was not alone. Brother, there are many noble people in the world.”12 In mid-March he made the journey to Semipalatinsk and joined the ranks of the Seventh Line Battalion of the Siberian Army Corps.

  Semipalatinsk turned out to be, as Baron Wrangel describes it, “a half-city, half-village,”13 sprawling amidst the ruins of an ancient Mongol town located on the steep right slope of the Irtish River. Most of the houses were unpainted, one-story constructions of wood; only the single Orthodox Church, forced to compete with seven mosques, was built of stone, and a huge covered marketplace sheltered the caravans of camels and packhorses that conducted the flourishing trade between Russia and Central Asia. On the opposite bank of the river could be seen the large felt tent dwellings of the half-nomad Khirghizes. Loose, drifting sand filled the streets, and Russian officers called the place “the Devil’s Sandbox.”14 Semipalatinsk was still part of a border region on the edge of the steppe, and incursions by raiding parties of Mongols and hostile Khirghizes into the area were by no means uncommon, although a garrison town would not have been directly threatened.

  Through some friends of the indefatigably charitable Ivanovs, Dostoevsky was given permission to live by himself in town. At last he would be able to snatch a few hours of that solitude he had so desperately craved in the prison camp! He found a one-room cottage near the barracks, owned by an elderly widow. The furnishings were of the simplest, and hordes of cockroaches, according to the fastidious Wrangel, roamed freely over the table, bed, and walls. The housekeeping was done by the elder daughter of the family, twenty-two years old and the widow of a soldier, who looked after him lovingly, and seemed to be constantly in his quarters. Wrangel recalls taking tea with Dostoevsky out-of-doors one day and being casually joined, as he puts it discreetly, by the housekeeper en grand négligé (just a smock tied at the waist with a red sash). After four years in the prison camp, could Dostoevsky have resisted such readily available female charms? Nothing would have been more natural, and we know that he exhibited a personal interest in the affairs of the family. For he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the mother not to allow the attractive younger daughter, sixteen years old, to supplement the family income by occasional prostitution with the army garrison.

  Gradually, the presence of an ex-convict named Dostoevsky, who had formerly enjoyed some literary notoriety, began to be known among the more literate members of the Russian community in Semipalatinsk. Educated men were at a premium in that part of the world, and exiles of all kinds (mostly Poles) were employed as tutors to supplement or even replace the scanty public education available to Russian children. Dostoevsky was soon approached to tutor the offspring of various families, and in this fashion he began to strike up closer relations with various households. He became acquainted with the commander of his battalion, the good-natured and knockabout Lieutenant-Colonel Belikhov, who had worked his way up from the ranks. This worthy officer found reading a chore, so he invited Dostoevsky to come and read to him from newspapers and magazines. It was at the home of Belikhov one evening that Dostoevsky first met Alexander Ivanovich Isaev and his wife, Marya Dimitrievna.

  Isaev was another of those incorrigible and appealing Russian drunkards whom Dostoevsky had already portrayed and whom he was to immortalize in the elder Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment. Isaev had come to Semipalatinsk as a customs official, but for some reason—perhaps the exacerbated pride of a drunkard—he had resigned his post. The Isaev family, which included a seven-year-old son, Pasha, was thus living in hand-to-mouth fashion while the breadwinner nominally sought other employment. Meanwhile, what little money he and his wife could scrape together was squandered by Isaev in drinking bouts with his cronies among the riffraff of the town. Dostoevsky, Wrangel tells us, was infinitely charitable with regard to human foibles and fallibilities. Writing to Mikhail, Dostoevsky remarks that Isaev “was, despite all the dirt, exceptionally noble.”15 It was not, however, the husband who soon drew Dostoevsky to spend all his time at the Isaevs but the wife, destined to become the first great love of his life.

  Marya Dimitrievna’s father was at that time head of the quarantine for travelers arriving in Astrakhan, a port city on the Caspian Sea. All of his daughters had been educated in a private pension, and Mme Isaeva’s intellectual and spiritual capacities were unmistakably a cut above those of the average Semipalatinsk army or bureaucratic spouse. “Marya Dimitrievna was about thirty years old,” writes Wrangel, “a quite pretty blonde of medium height, very slim, with a passionate nature given to exalted feeling. Even then an ill-omened flush played on her pale face, and several years later tuberculosis took her to the grave. She was well-read, quite cultivated, eager for knowledge, kind, and unusually vivacious and impressionable. She took a great interest in Dostoevsky and treated him kindly, not, I think, because she valued him deeply, but rather because she felt sorry for an unhappy human being beaten down by fate. It is possible that she was even attached to him, but there was no question of being in love.”16

  Certainly, like everyone else in town, she was aware that he had an “illness,” but he himself was as yet uncertain about its diagnosis. “I have already spoken to you of my illness,” he writes Mikhail. “Bizarre attacks, resembling epilepsy and yet not being epilepsy.”17 She saw him as being “direly in need of resources, and . . . said he was a man ‘without a future,’ ” writes Wrangel. “Feodor Mikhailovich took the feeling of pity and sympathy as mutual love, and fell head over heels in love with all the fire of youth.”18 He became a close “friend of the family,” assumed the function of tutor to their son, and, as Wrangel puts it, “spent entire days at the Isaevs.”19 This was the situation when Wrangel appeared on the scene in November 1854 to provide Dostoevsky with closer friendship, and more powerful patronage, than any he had been able to acquire so far.

  During the agonizing minutes that Dostoevsky stood on the scaffolding in Semenovsky Square, his eyes may well have turned to the massed crowds surrounding the spectacle. If Dostoevsky had been able to distinguish one person from another, he would surely have been struck by one young man—just barely seventeen years of age, and wearing the three-cornered hat and uniform overcoat of the elite Alexander Lyceum located at Tsarskoe Selo—who was watching the proceedings with a sorrowful air of concern. The name of this young man was Baron Alexander Yegorovich Wrangel, and he belonged to one of those Russian-German aristocratic families of Baltic origin that, under Nicholas I, staffed the higher echelons of the bureaucracy and the army.

  The young Wrangel had heard conversations about the case at home—and he pricked up his ears, because he had just read Poor Folk and was reading Netotchka Nezvanova with great admiration. Any information concerning the fate of the gifted and unfortunate Dostoevsky aroused his curiosity, although he took care not to reveal in public a literary taste that would have been considered politically suspect in his milieu. On the day of the mock execution, despite reprimands from a relative to leave the square, Wrangel stayed to the very end of the macabre comedy and only l
eft when the crowd dissolved, “crossing themselves and blessing the mercifulness of the Tsar.”20

  After graduating from the lyceum and dying of boredom in the Ministry of Justice, Wrangel decided to join a number of his classmates in applying for a post in Siberia. Just twenty-one years old, he was appointed public prosecutor of the region that included Semipalatinsk. He had met Mikhail Dostoevsky on some occasion in Petersburg and was happy to call on him before beginning his journey and to receive from him letters for Dostoevsky, some clothes, books, and fifty rubles. Arriving in Semipalatinsk on November 20, 1854, he immediately sent a message inviting Private Dostoevsky to take tea with him the very next day. “Dostoevsky did not know who had summoned him and why,” Wrangel recalls, “and when he came in, was extremely reserved. He was in his gray soldier’s overcoat, with a stiff red collar and red epaulettes, morose, his face pale and sickly. . . . Intently looking at me with his sharp, gray-blue eyes, it seemed that he was trying to peer into my very soul—now what sort of a man is he?”21

  Dostoevsky buried himself in the letters that Wrangel had brought, beginning to sob quietly while reading those written by his brother and sister. Wrangel too had a packet of correspondence awaiting him, and he too began to sob uncontrollably as memories of his family and friends rose before his eyes. “We both stood there face to face, forgotten by fate, solitary. . . . I felt so distressed that, despite my exalted rank . . . as it were involuntarily, without thinking, I threw myself on the neck of Feodor Mikhailovich, who stood opposite looking at me with a sad and pensive expression.”22 The older man comforted the younger, and the two promised to see each other frequently.