Dostoevsky
Page 35
Dostoevsky and Wrangel became fast friends. “He is,” Dostoevsky explains to Mikhail, “very gentle, although with a strongly developed point d’honneur, incredibly kind . . . what irritates and enrages others distresses him—the sign of an excellent heart. Très comme il faut.”23 The two began to spend so much time together that tongues started to wag among what Wrangel calls “the bribetaking bureaucrats,”24 and he noticed that his mail began to arrive four days later than its distribution to others. The military governor, considering Wrangel’s tender years, felt called upon to warn him about falling under the influence of such a notorious revolutionary. Taking matters into his own hands, Wrangel asked the official to invite Dostoevsky to his home and judge for himself. As it turned out, the visit was a great success; the invitation was repeated; and from this moment Dostoevsky was received, through Wrangel’s good offices, in whatever good society could be found in Semipalatinsk.
Three months after Wrangel set foot in Semipalatinsk, an event occurred that opened up a more promising perspective on Dostoevsky’s future. Nicholas I died suddenly, on February 18, 1855, struck down while the Russian Army in the Caucasus was still engaged in battle against Turkey, and almost a month later the news finally arrived in the distant Siberian outpost. The thoughts of the many political exiles at once turned to the prospects of amnesty, which traditionally accompanied the installation of a new regime. Moreover, “rumors of the gentleness of character, humaneness, and kindliness of the new tsar had long since penetrated to Siberia.”25 Dostoevsky shared such general expectations; and now, with the influential Wrangel at his side, whose family had connections with the highest court circles, he had every reason to believe they would be fulfilled.
Less than a month later, Wrangel wrote a letter to his father in which he spoke of Dostoevsky for the first time. “Fate has brought me together with a rare person as regards both qualities of heart and mind,” he says; “he is our young and unfortunate writer Dostoevsky. I am much obliged to him, and his words, advice, and ideas will strengthen me for my entire life.” And then he arrived at the real issue: “Do you know, dear father, whether there will be an amnesty? So many unfortunates are waiting and hoping, as a drowning person clutches at a straw.” Two weeks later he sent a letter to his sister, urging her to question their father on the prospects of an amnesty for political prisoners and suggesting that a word might be uttered on Dostoevsky’s behalf to General Dubelt or to Prince Orlov. “Can it be that this remarkable man will perish here as a soldier? . . . I am sad and sick about him—I love him like a brother, and honor him like a father.”26
By the time these letters were written, Dostoevsky and Wrangel had taken up residence together in a dacha, affectionately called “Cossack Garden,” on the outskirts of town. The climate of Semipalatinsk during the summer months was unbearably hot, and Wrangel decided to escape at the beginning of spring the moment the steppe began to blossom and turn green. He found an empty house on a bank of the river in the midst of luxuriant vegetation, and, since the summer encampment of Dostoevsky’s regiment was close by, it was easily arranged for the latter to share his quarters. The picture Wrangel gives of their life together has an idyllic quality that Dostoevsky was not to know again for many years. Wrangel, an enthusiastic and versatile gardener, had determined to show the natives that all sorts of flowers and fruits unknown to the region could be cultivated there, and the work connected with this project “very much pleased and occupied Dostoevsky, [who] more than once recalled his childhood and the farmhouse of his family.”27
By this time, Dostoevsky’s illicit romance with Marya Dimitrievna had become more and more absorbing, and the need to possess her completely soon drove all other thoughts out of his mind. Much to everyone’s astonishment, Alexander Isaev succeeded in finding another post—in the small town of Kuznetsk, a miserable backwater lost in the depths of the Siberian wilderness. The news struck Dostoevsky like a blow, and suddenly shattered the fragile world of relative contentment he had so laboriously managed to construct. “And look, she agrees,” he tells Wrangel bitterly, “she doesn’t object, that’s what’s so shocking.”28
Since the Isaevs were destitute, the impoverished Dostoevsky, borrowing money from the obliging Wrangel, helped them scrape together what they needed for the journey. The departure took place on a soft May night, bathed in moonlight, and Wrangel and Dostoevsky, according to the Russian custom, accompanied the party on the first leg of the journey after they had paused for a final visit at Cossack Garden. Wrangel plied Isaev with champagne until he lapsed into a drunken stupor, then deposited him in a separate carriage so as to give the two lovers a period of privacy at parting. When the time came to say farewell, Dostoevsky and Marya Dimitrievna embraced, wiped away their tears, and the befuddled paterfamilias was placed back in the open tarantas in which the Isaevs were forced to make the journey. “The horses started up,” recalls Wrangel, “puffs of dust rose from the road, already the cart and its passengers could scarcely be seen, the post bell grew fainter and fainter . . . and Dostoevsky still stood as if rooted to the spot, silent, his head lowered, tears coursing down his cheeks. I went up to him, took his hand—he seemed to wake up after a long sleep, and, not saying a word, got into the carriage. We returned home at daybreak.”29
Letters immediately began to fly between Semipalatinsk and Kuznetsk at a weekly rhythm, and thanks to one that survived we can obtain some firsthand impression of Dostoevsky’s feelings for his first great love. “I have never considered our meeting as an ordinary one,” he writes, “and now, deprived of you, I have understood many things. I lived for five years deprived of human beings, alone, having nobody, in the full sense of the word, to whom I could pour out my heart. . . . The simple fact that a woman held out her hand to me has constituted a new epoch in my life. In certain moments, even the best of men, if I may say so, is nothing more or less than a blockhead. The heart of a woman, her compassion, her interest, the infinite goodness of which we do not have an idea, and which often, through stupidity, we do not even notice, is irreplaceable. I found all that in you.”30
12. Marya Dimitrievna Isaeva
Their relationship had already seen some stormy moments, and its tempestuous past hardly augured well for the future. But Dostoevsky took most of the blame himself (“in the first place I was an ungrateful swine”), and attributed Marya Dimitrievna’s outbursts to a noble nature “offended by the fact that a filthy society did not value or understand you, and for a person with your force of character it is impossible not to rebel against injustice; that is an honest and noble trait. It is the foundation of your character. Life and trouble have of course exaggerated and irritated much in you; but, good God! all this is redeemed with interest, a hundred times over.”31 Dostoevsky would always see Marya Dimitrievna in a flattering light, as a person whose violent indignation and explosions of temper expressed a noble rage against the injustices of life. One day he would immortalize this aspect of her personality in the tragically wrathful Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova of Crime and Punishment.
Dostoevsky’s separation from Marya Dimitrievna marked the beginning of an agitated and torturing relationship. The arrival of each weekly letter, filled with accounts of the illness of his beloved, the tedium and loneliness of her existence, the burdens of caring for her alcoholic husband (whose health was now failing badly) and of trying to bring up Pasha decently—all this drove Dostoevsky into a frenzy of despair. Nor was his anxiety lessened by the increasingly frequent references to a sympathetic young schoolteacher who had begun to play the role in her life formerly assumed by Dostoevsky. “With each letter,” writes Wrangel, “the utterances about him became more and more enthusiastic, praising his kindness, devotion, and nobility of soul. Dostoevsky was torn apart by jealousy; it was pitiful to observe his gloomy state of mind, which affected his health.”32 His mood became so downcast that the alarmed Wrangel arranged a meeting between the erstwhile lovers at a town midway between the two localities. But when the friends
arrived after some very hard riding, they found, instead of Marya Dimitrievna, a letter explaining that she could not keep the rendezvous because her husband’s condition had worsened.
In August 1855, Isaev drew his last breath, leaving Marya Dimitrievna alone, ailing and penniless, to struggle along in the quagmire of Kuznetsk. Frantic on receiving the news, Dostoevsky wrote to Wrangel, then traveling on business, to send the destitute woman some money, and to do so with particular tact and care; the obligation of gratitude would only make her more sensitive to any undue negligence of tone. No one understood better than the creator of Devushkin in Poor Folk the agonies of a cultivated sensibility humiliated by poverty and an inferior social position.
The demise of Isaev made it possible for Dostoevsky to dream at last of possessing, legally and publicly, the lady of his heart; but it was unthinkable to ask for her hand while remaining in his lowly status as a soldier. All this time, to be sure, he had been pulling whatever strings he could to obtain promotion. Upon joining the Siberian Army Corps he had asked Mikhail to approach the authorities in St. Petersburg and persuade them to transfer him to a corps on active service in the Caucasus. Dostoevsky believed that his chances of obtaining a full pardon in the future might be enhanced if he were to exhibit his loyalty by serving in a combat zone. In addition, Wrangel now asked Governor-General Gasfort to send Dostoevsky’s poem “On the First of July, 1855” to the recently widowed empress. In this work, Dostoevsky urges her to take comfort in the great deeds of her vanished spouse at the same time that he asks pardon for himself:
Forgive, forgive me, forgive my wish;
Forgive that I dare to speak with you.
Forgive that I dare nourish the senseless dream
Of consoling your sadness, lightening your suffering.
Forgive that I, a mournful outcast, dare
Raise his voice at this hallowed grave. (2: 407)
The poem did finally reach the empress. Dostoevsky was promoted to the rank of unter-ofitser (a noncommissioned grade) in November 1855, and could hope for more important signs of favor in the future. Wrangel left Semipalatinsk a month later for St. Petersburg, and while in the capital he intended to devote himself to advancing Dostoevsky’s cause. A long delay thus occurred between the date Wrangel set foot in the capital and the first letter in which he could give some hope to Dostoevsky, waiting on tenterhooks in his dreary exile for the news that would decide his future. Meanwhile, rumors reached him that Marya Dimitrievna had accepted another suitor. The distraught Dostoevsky sat down to pour out his anguish in a letter but was interrupted by the arrival of one from her, which lacked, as he tells Wrangel, even “a trace of our future hopes, as if that thought had been completely put aside.” And then, finally, came the question he had long feared: what should she do if she received an offer of marriage from a man “of a certain age with good qualities, in the service, and with an assured future?”33
Dostoevsky’s reaction to this missive, with its request for brotherly advice, reveals the melodramatic intensity that will so often mark the love entanglements of his fictional characters. “I was as if struck by lightning, I staggered, fainted, and wept all night. . . . In all my life I have never suffered so much. . . . My heart is consumed by deathly despair, at night there are dreams, shrieks, spasms in my throat choke me, tears sometimes stubbornly refuse to flow, sometimes come in torrents.” One can understand why Dostoevsky should exclaim, “Oh! Let God preserve everyone from this terrible, dreadful emotion! Great is the joy of love, but the sufferings are so frightful that it would be better never to be in love.”34
Worst of all, though, was the moral conflict in which he was plunged. Did he have the right to stand in the way of her making a reasonable marriage when his own prospects were so uncertain? But when he imagined Marya Dimitrievna, “ill, nervous, so refined in heart, cultivated, intelligent,” burying herself in Kuznetsk forever, and with a husband who perhaps “for his part might consider blows as being perfectly legal in marriage”—this simply drove him out of his mind! He had the eerie sense of living through the pathetic finale of his own first novel, with Marya Dimitrievna cast “in the situation of my heroine of Poor Folk, who marries [the brutal] Bykov (how prophetic I was!).” And he was certain that she did love him and was thinking of another only out of the direst necessity. “Mais elle m’aime, elle m’aime, I know that, I see it—by her sadness, her anguish, her melancholy, by the continual outbursts in her letters, and by much else that I will not write about.”35
Dostoevsky appealed to Wrangel, with an urgency verging on hysteria, to redouble his efforts in Petersburg so as to obtain for him a transfer to the Civil Service or a promotion to commissioned rank. Most important, he needed permission to publish (Dostoevsky claimed he would have a “novel” and an article completed in September). He also sent Wrangel, in violation of army regulations, a personal letter addressed to General E. I. Totleben, an old acquaintance from his days in the Academy of Military Engineers and now a national hero because of the brilliant fortifications he had devised for the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Wrangel had already paid him a visit on Dostoevsky’s behalf, but it was Dostoevsky’s idea, as a last resort, to appeal directly to the man of the hour and enlist his enormous prestige to accelerate a favorable decision.
“I was guilty,” he admits to Totleben after briefly outlining the facts of his arrest, trial, and conviction. “I was condemned legally and justly; a long tribulation, torturing and cruel, sobered me up and changed my ideas in many ways. But then—then I was blind, believed in theories and utopias.” And here, for the first time, Dostoevsky attributes his earlier belief in “theories and utopias” to the nervous illness from which he had suffered beginning in the spring of 1846 up to his arrest two years later. “I had been ill for two years running, with a strange, moral sickness. I was a hypochondriac. There were even times when I lost my reason. I was excessively irritable, impressionable to the point of sickness, and with the ability to deform the most ordinary facts and give them another aspect and dimension. But I felt that, even though this sickness exercised a strong and evil influence on my fate, it would have been a very pitiful and even humiliating justification.”36 Mental illness now becomes associated for Dostoevsky—both as a cause and as symptom—with ideological delusions that exercise “a strong and evil influence” on the destiny of those susceptible to their pernicious appeal.
As Dostoevsky’s dossier tortuously wound its way through the Byzantine labyrinth of the Russian bureaucracy, matters went from bad to worse for the two separated lovers. To Mikhail, Dostoevsky tries to justify his decision to marry—a decision that, as he is well aware, seemed madness in the eyes of his family, given the precariousness of his situation—and solicits his aid in reassuring Marya Dimitrievna that, if she were to become his wife, the family would give her a warm welcome. With Wrangel, Dostoevsky is more frank about the difficulties of his sentimental imbroglio. The specter of “a man of a certain age” had vanished because this worthy gentleman had been invented only to test Dostoevsky’s affections. “If I had answered with indifference,” explains Dostoevsky, “she would have had proof that I had really forgotten her. When I received that letter I wrote a desperate one, terrible, which tore her apart, and then another. She had been ill these last days; my letter really finished her off. But it seems that my despair was sweet to her, although she suffered for me.” “I understand her: her heart is noble and proud,” he assures Wrangel.37
Wrangel’s visit to the magnanimous General Totleben, and Dostoevsky’s skillful letter to his erstwhile fellow cadet, at last succeeded in overcoming the first obstacle to his union. The powerful and influential hero agreed to intervene on Dostoevsky’s behalf and to ask the Ministry of War either to promote him to ensign or to release him to the Civil Service at the lowest rank. In either case, Dostoevsky would also be accorded the right to publish his literary work under the normal conditions of the law. It was this information that evoked Dostoevsky’s ec
static reply of May 23, 1856, to the first affirmative word he had so far obtained from Petersburg, and the belief that “The affair, if I understand correctly, is on the right path.”38
Notable too is Dostoevsky’s enthusiastic response to what he hears from Wrangel about the new monarch. “God grant happiness to the magnanimous sovereign! And so, it’s all true, what everyone has said about the ardent love that all feel for him! How happy this makes me! More faith, more unity, and if there is love as well—then everything can be done!”39 This last sentence can almost be taken as a statement of the political ideal to which Dostoevsky was to dedicate his life—the ideal of rallying Russia to faith, unity, and love in support of the rule of Alexander II. For in March 1856, speaking before the gentry of Moscow, Alexander II had made his famous declaration: “It is better to begin the abolition of serfdom from above, than wait until it begins to abolish itself from below.”40 Dostoevsky had become a revolutionary only to abolish serfdom and only after the seeming dissolution of all hope that it would be ended, to quote Pushkin, “by the hand of the Tsar.” But now the glorious day had dawned of which Pushkin could only dream, and the tsar whom Dostoevsky was to support so fervently for the rest of his life was the Tsar-Liberator who had finally decided to eradicate this intolerable moral blight from the Russian consciousness.
Despite the good news that Dostoevsky had received, his state of mind soon returned to its unalterable gloom. The plan had been for Marya Dimitrievna to move to Barnaul, the center of the mining district of the Altai region, where Dostoevsky hoped to be employed, but she now refused to go. Even worse, her letters also suggested, as he tells Wrangel, “that she could not make me happy, that we are both too unhappy, and that it would be better for us . . .” (at this point, two pages have been ripped from the manuscript of the letter by the vengeful hand of Dostoevsky’s second wife). When the letter resumes, we learn that Dostoevsky had decided to go to Kuznetsk and investigate matters for himself. “I am ready to go to jail if only I can see her. My situation is critical. We must talk it over and decide everything at one stroke!”41