Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Once on the spot, Dostoevsky’s suspicions of having been replaced were amply confirmed. “What a noble, what an angelic soul!” he writes to Wrangel. “She cried, she kissed my hands, but she loves another.”42 The other was the young schoolmaster, Nikolay Vergunov, who had befriended the Isaevs on their arrival and whose relations with Marya Dimitrievna had become close. No doubt Marya Dimitrievna had begun to lose patience with the slow improvement of Dostoevsky’s prospects; perhaps she had lost faith in them entirely. A young schoolmaster in hand, even with a pitiable income, was preferable to an even more penurious writer whose glowing anticipations of fame and fortune might never be realized. Dostoevsky himself refuses to utter one word of blame about what he might well have considered a betrayal.

  What occurred between the threesome, during Dostoevsky’s two days in Kuznetsk, rivals the stormiest scenes of a three-decker novel and was transposed by Dostoevsky a few years later in the pages of The Insulted and Injured. He depicts himself (or his fictional hero, a young writer who is the author of Poor Folk) as retreating helplessly before the infatuation of his beloved for another; but in real life Dostoevsky played a different role. He was far from willing to abandon the field without a struggle, and his best weapon turned out to be his imagination as a novelist. For he sketched in, with all the resources of his art, the appalling problems that might arise in the future because of incompatibilities in age and character between Marya Dimitrievna and her young lover, aged twenty-four. Dostoevsky became so agitated, even in recounting these events to Wrangel, that his handwriting is barely legible.

  “And [gap in text] will he not later,” he told Marya Dimitrievna and now repeats for Wrangel, “in several years, when she is still [gap in text], will he not wish for her death? . . . Might he not later reproach her with having calculated on his youth and taken over his life solely to satisfy her voluptuous demands?” Naturally, all these agitated premonitions had not been put so bluntly in face-to-face conversation; Dostoevsky had been more subtle, sketching his menacing visions as conjectures while maintaining that Vergunov could not possibly behave in such a fashion. “I didn’t convince her of anything” he estimates, “but I spread some doubt; she wept and was tormented.”43

  At this point, a peripety occurred that reminds us of those sudden climactic moments in Dostoevsky’s work when mutual hostility turns to love. “I felt pity for her, and then she completely came back to me—she felt pity for me! If you know what an angel she is, my friend! You never knew her; at every instant something original, sensible, clever but also paradoxical, infinitely good, truly noble (a knight in female clothing), she has the heart of a knight; she will be her own ruination. She doesn’t know herself, but I know her!” Dostoevsky also met Vergunov, who broke down and wept in his presence. “I met him; he cried, but only knows how to cry,” he remarks, with a touch of disdain.44 At Marya Dimitrievna’s suggestion, Dostoevsky wrote a letter to Vergunov summing up all the weighty reasons he had advanced against the approaching union of the pair. She kept spinning like a weathervane and told Dostoevsky before his departure, “ ‘Don’t cry, don’t grieve, everything is not decided; you and I and nobody else!’ These are her exact words,” he assures Wrangel. “I don’t know how I spent those two days. It was bliss and unbearable torture! At the end of the second day, I left full of hope.”45

  Meanwhile, Dostoevsky was continuing efforts to obtain admission for Pasha Isaev to the Corps of Cadets in Siberia, and he asks Wrangel to see if General Gasfort cannot be persuaded to use his influence to help the young petitioner find a place. He also pleads with Wrangel for still another favor involving the Isaevs. “For God’s sake, for the sake of heaven’s radiance, don’t refuse. She should not have to suffer. If she marries him, at least let them have some money.” And so Dostoevsky urges Wrangel to speak about Vergunnov to Gasfort “as a worthy young man with first-rate abilities; praise him to the skies, say that you know him; that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to give him a higher post. . . . All this for her, for her alone. Just so she won’t end in misery, that’s all!”46 Dostoevsky, who had such an acute personal and literary sense of the aching miseries of genteel poverty, was genuinely moved by the possible future plight of the woman he loved with passion and toward whom he felt an immense debt of gratitude. “She came at the saddest moment of my life,” he told Wrangel a few months later, “and she resuscitated my soul.”47

  In the early fall of 1856, Dostoevsky’s promotion was at last officially confirmed, and he became a commissioned officer with a respectable social status and a regular income. His first and only thought on receiving the news was that it would enable him to visit Marya Dimitrievna. Dostoevsky makes no attempt to conceal the ravages of what, as he knew, was a pathological fixation. “Don’t shake your head, don’t condemn me,” he begs Wrangel. “I know that in many ways I am behaving irrationally in my relations with her, that there is almost no hope for me—but whether there is or is not hope is all the same. I can’t think of anything else! Only to see her, to hear her! I am a poor madman. A love of this kind is an illness. I feel it.”48 He was hoping against hope that another visit would have the same rekindling effect as his first. Consumed with guilt at squandering the money he had begged for so urgently from his brother, he asks Wrangel not to tell Mikhail about his proposed project for a new trip to win over his reluctant amorata.

  At the same time, Dostoevsky urges Wrangel to inquire whether it would be possible for him, now that he is an officer, to seek retirement from the army for reasons of health. This is the first reference in Dostoevsky’s correspondence to what had become an increasingly worried concern with his physical and mental condition. “If I wish to return to Russia,” he says, “It would be solely to embrace those I love, and to see qualified doctors so as to know what my illness is (epilepsy), what these attacks are which always keep recurring, and which each time weaken my memory and all my faculties and which, I fear, may one day lead me to madness. What kind of an officer am I?”49

  In December 1856, undertaking the long journey to Kuznetsk again, he finally succeeded in obtaining Marya Dimitrievna’s consent. All of Dostoevsky’s energies were now turned to the task of raising the money for the wedding, which involved a staggering sum for someone who, already up to his ears in debt, could count only on his small salary as an officer. Dostoevsky would have to finance not only another trip to Kuznetsk for himself, but also a return with his new wife and stepson in a closed carriage (it was midwinter), the transport of their household goods, and the purchase of whatever was necessary to set up housekeeping. On top of all this were the expenses occasioned by his promotion, which required that he outfit himself from head to foot with equipment literally worth its weight in gold in remote Siberia. Luckily, a friendly captain of engineers attached to one of the mining establishments had offered to advance him six hundred rubles as a long-term loan, and one of his sisters had recently sent him two hundred rubles as a gift. Since he had unpublished manuscripts worth, by his estimate, about a thousand rubles, he was sure that once he received permission to publish, his troubles would be over. “But if they forbid me to publish for still another year—I am lost.” Dostoevsky accordingly renews his plea to Wrangel to communicate to him immediately “the slightest news concerning permission to publish.”50 He was so desperate that he affirmed his willingness to publish, if necessary forever, without a signature or under a pseudonym.

  13. Dostoevsky in uniform, 1858

  Two months elapsed before Dostoevsky could complete preparations for the wedding, during which time he wrote a carefully worded letter to his wealthy uncle in Moscow asking for the amount of his loan as a gift. He then departed for a two-week stay at Kuznetsk, and on February 7, 1857, the ceremony was performed in the presence of various local worthies, including Vergunov, who makes his last appearance as a witness at the wedding of the woman he had once loved and the man who had thwarted his suit. The honeymoon couple then embarked on the exhausting trip back to Semipalatinsk, breaking the
journey at Barnaul to accept the hospitality of Dostoevsky’s old friend Count Peter Semenov. What occurred during this stopover cast a pall on Dostoevsky’s ill-starred marriage from the very beginning. “On the road home,” Dostoevsky writes to Mikhail, “misfortune came my way: totally unexpectedly, I had an attack of epilepsy, which frightened my wife to death, and filled me with sadness and dejection.”51

  Marya Dimitrievna had never before been exposed to the unearthly shriek, the fainting fit, the convulsive movements of the face and limbs, the foaming at the mouth, the involuntary loss of urine that marked Dostoevsky’s acute seizures; and she was terrified at discovering that she had unwittingly linked her fate to a husband ravaged by such an illness. Even worse, Dostoevsky now learned, for the first time, the true nature of his malady. “The doctor . . . told me, contrary to everything said previously by doctors, that I had genuine epilepsy, and that I could expect, in one of these seizures, to suffocate because of throat spasms and would die from this cause. I myself entreated and admonished the doctor, by his reputation as an honest man, to be detailed and frank. In general, he advised me to be careful at the time of a new moon.”52

  If there is reason to suspect that Marya Dimitrievna regretted her recent marriage vows, there is no ambiguity about Dostoevsky’s own sentiments. “In marrying,” he admits to Mikhail, “I completely trusted the doctors who told me they were only nervous seizures, which would pass with a change in the circumstances of my life. If I had known as a fact that I had genuine epilepsy, I would not have married. For my peace of mind and in order to consult with genuine doctors and take measures, it is necessary to obtain my retirement as quickly as possible and return to Russia, but how can this be done?”53 Marya Dimitrievna had arrived back in Semipalatinsk quite ill herself; and Dostoevsky began now to better understand the precariousness of both her physical and emotional equilibrium. “She is a good and tender creature, somewhat quick, excitable, extremely impressionable; her past life has left painful traces in her soul. Her impressions change with incredible rapidity, but she never ceases to be noble and good. I love her very much, she loves me, and for the moment everything is going along in good order.”54

  Once settled in Semipalatinsk, where the newlyweds rented a comfortable four-room apartment, Dostoevsky could at last devote himself, in the time left over from military duties, to his literary career (though uncertainty continued to hang over his right to publish). He manfully acquitted himself of his new responsibilities, placed Pasha in the Siberian Cadet Corps, and wrote dutiful letters to his new father-in-law and his wife’s sisters (whom he had never met). In one such letter to an invisible sister-in-law, almost a year after his marriage, Dostoevsky expresses a weariness stemming from a profound sense of disappointment with his life. “Do you know,” he remarks strangely, “I have a sort of presentiment, I think I shall die quite soon . . . and it is quite calmly that I am certain of an imminent death. It seems to me that I have already lived through all that one is required to live through in this world, and that there is nothing to which I can aspire.”55 Such words unquestionably have something to do with the fears induced by his epilepsy—in mid-January 1858, Dostoevsky applied officially for permission to retire from the army on grounds of disability and in order to consult competent doctors in St. Petersburg—but they also express an inner lassitude whose most probable explanation is a desire to escape from the burdens of life in common with Marya Dimitrievna.

  References to her disappear almost entirely from the correspondence as time goes on, except for brief remarks that allow us to infer a background of bickering and recriminations. The most overt reference may be found in a letter to Wrangel, from whom Dostoevsky had no secrets regarding his wife, and who, as he knew, had always looked on the older man’s infatuation as an unfortunate mishap. Writing two years after his marriage, Dostoevsky says, “If you wish to know what is up with me, what can I tell you? I have burdened myself with the cares of a family and I pull them along. But I believe that my life is not yet finished and do not want to die.”56 As it happened, it was Marya Dimitrievna who, five years later, was to die of tuberculosis, and the growing ravages of her illness only increased the irritability and irascibility of a character that had so seduced Dostoevsky by its capacity for righteous indignation. And, in all fairness, we must recognize that she herself had good reason to harbor emotions of resentment and betrayal against her second husband, whose promised recapture of fame remained maddeningly problematic and whose epilepsy kept recurring with alarming frequency.

  1 Pis’ma, 1: 143; between February 20, 1854, and the end of the month.

  2 Ibid., 138. February 22, 1854.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Ibid., 139.

  5 A. E. Wrangel, Vospominaniya o F. M. Dostoevskom v Siberii (St. Petersburg, 1912), 66.

  6 Pis’ma, 1: 183–184; April 13, 1856.

  7 Wrangel, Vospominaniya, 34.

  8 Ibid., 21.

  9 Carl Gustav Carus, Psyche zur Entwick-Lungsgeschichte der Seele (Pforzheim, 1846), 297–298.

  10 Ibid., 1.

  11 Ibid., 93.

  12 Pis’ma, 1: 137: February 22, 1854.

  13 Wrangel, Vospominaniya, 15.

  14 George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 2 vols. (New York, 1891), 1: 158.

  15 Pis’ma, 2: 560; January 13, 1856.

  16 Wrangel, Vospominaniya, 38.

  17 Pis’ma, 1: 146; July 30, 1854.

  18 Wrangel, Vospominaniya, 39.

  19 Ibid.

  20 Ibid., 8.

  21 Ibid., 17.

  22 Ibid., 18.

  23 Pis’ma, 2: 538; January 13, 1856.

  24 Wrangel, Vospominaniya, 25.

  25 Ibid., 39.

  26 Ibid., 34–35.

  27 Ibid., 43.

  28 Ibid., 50.

  29 Ibid., 51.

  30 Pis’ma, 1: 152–153; June 4, 1855.

  31 Ibid., 153.

  32 Wrangel, Vospominaniya, 64.

  33 Pis’ma, 1: 168–176; March 23, 1856.

  34 Ibid.

  35 Ibid.

  36 Ibid., 178; March 24, 1856.

  37 Ibid., 184–185; April 13, 1856.

  38 Ibid., 183; April 13, 1856.

  39 Ibid., 187; May 23, 1856.

  40 W. E. Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia (New York, 1962), 42.

  41 Pis’ma, 1: 188; May 23, 1856.

  42 Ibid., 189; July 14, 1856.

  43 Ibid., 190.

  44 Ibid., 191.

  45 Ibid., 189.

  46 Ibid., 192.

  47 Ibid., 198; November 9, 1856.

  48 Ibid., 197–198.

  49 Ibid., 198.

  50 Ibid., 1: 205–206; December 21, 1856.

  51 Ibid., 2: 579–580; March 9, 1857.

  52 Ibid., 580.

  53 Ibid.

  54 Ibid.

  55 Ibid., 1: 228; November 30, 1857.

  56 Ibid., 253–255; September 22, 1859.

  CHAPTER 18

  A Russian Heart

  Thanks to the kindness of new friends like Wrangel and Yakushkin, who obligingly conveyed letters between Dostoevsky and his family and old circle of friends in Petersburg and Moscow, the novelist, though far removed from the centers of Russian social and cultural life, could still gain some sense of the ideas and tendencies now stirring the intelligentsia. The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 (news of which had barely managed to seep into the prison camp) had stirred all the latent patriotic ardor of Dostoevsky’s old friend Apollon Maikov, a progressive Westernizer, and his open letter, published in the St. Petersburg Gazette in 1854 as a cultural-political manifesto, records the upsurge of chauvinistic nationalism that swept over much of literate Russian society at the beginning of hostilities. In this open letter the critic urges writers, as Russians, to honor the “sacred feeling of love for the fatherland” and to “illuminate [in their work] that ideal of Russia which is perceptible to everybody.”1

  “I have read your letter,” Dostoevsky responds approv
ingly in January 1856, “and have not understood the essential. I mean about patriotism, the Russian idea, the feeling of duty, national honor . . . my friend! . . . I have always shared exactly these same sentiments and convictions. . . . What is really new in this movement that you have seen come to birth and of which you speak as a new tendency?” “I entirely share your patriotic sentiments about the moral liberation of the Slavs,” he continues, “I agree with you that Europe and her mission will be realized by Russia. This has been clear to me for a long time.”2 Dostoevsky asserts repeatedly that both he and Maikov have remained the same men on the level of “the heart,” whatever alterations may have taken place in the “ideas” they profess; and these assertions serve as a prelude to the important profession of faith that Dostoevsky makes and his disclosure of how he now interprets his past.

  “Perhaps a little while ago,” writes Dostoevsky, “you were still troubled by the influx of French ideas into that class of society which thinks, feels, and studies. . . . But you will agree yourself that all right-thinking people, that is, those who gave the tone to everything, regarded French ideas from a scientific point of view—no more, and remained Russian even while devoting themselves to the exceptional. In what do you see anything new?”3 By “French ideas,” of course, Dostoevsky was referring to the radical and Utopian Socialist currents of the 1840s, which he denies had had the power to change the Russian character. Dostoevsky’s self-interpretation feeds into and anticipates his later creations: time and again he will show in his major characters the persistence of something he considers “Russian,” even in those who are most powerfully and corrosively affected by Western European ideas. For Dostoevsky was passionately persuaded (and he accepted his own experience as irrefutable evidence of its truth) that the instinctive sentiments and loyalties of Russians would always break through in some way, no matter how impenetrable might seem to be the overlay of Western European culture in the makeup of their personalities. Referring to his years in katorga, he adds: “I learned . . . that I had always been a Russian at heart. One may be mistaken in ideas, but it is impossible to be mistaken with one’s heart.”4