Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Dostoevsky was still afraid that Suslova might “come up with some foolishness,” and warned her against doing anything rash. Her reply tells us a good deal about herself, as well as about her future relations with Dostoevsky and the portrait he was to paint of her later in The Gambler. “ ‘I would not like to kill him’ I said, ‘but I would like to torture him for a very long time.’ ” A passage in her diary elaborates on this impulse: “right now I suddenly feel a desire to avenge myself, but how? By what means?” Suslova finally decided to send Salvador a sum of money in payment for the “service” he had rendered her, hoping by this gesture to wound the hidalgo dignity that had previously impressed her in his character.18 The insulting letter was sent, but it elicited no more reply than all the others.

  A few days later, Suslova and Dostoevsky departed on their long-planned trip to Italy. He would have been less than human if he had not hoped that his role of friend and counselor would eventually return again to being that of lover, but Suslova was seething with an unappeased desire for vengeance, and in the absence of Salvador she turned on the hapless Dostoevsky instead. He too, after all, was an ex-lover who had betrayed her expectations, and while grateful for his continued sympathy and solicitude, she also took a sadistic pleasure in treating him as she no doubt imagined herself treating Salvador had he been within her reach.

  In a diary entry for September 5, made on their first stop in Baden-Baden, Suslova confesses, “A thirst for revenge burned in my soul for a long time after, and I decided that, if I do not become distracted in Italy, I will return to Paris and do as I had planned” (presumably kill Salvador).19 Other diary entries reveal her ego in the process of obtaining satisfaction for the painful wounds inflicted by the unhappy past: “While we were enroute there, he [Dostoevsky] told me he had some hope. . . . I did not say anything to this, but I knew it was not going to happen.”20 Suslova’s behavior continued to inflame his passion while frustrating its satisfaction. Certainly she derived some consolation from the ardency of Dostoevsky’s wooing. She describes lying on her bed, summoning Dostoevsky to hold her hand. “I felt good,” she notes. “I took his hand and for a long time held it in mine. . . . I told him that I had been unfair and unkind to him in Paris, that it may have seemed as though I had been thinking only of myself, yet I had been thinking of him, too, but did not want to say it, so as not to hurt him.”21

  No wonder Dostoevsky suddenly leaped to his feet, stumbled, explained that he wished to close the window, but then admitted, “with a strange expression” on his face, that he had just been on the point of bending to kiss her foot. Desiring then to undress and go to bed, Suslova indicated as much indirectly, but Dostoevsky invented excuses for not leaving the room immediately and then came back several times on one pretext or another (the two had adjoining rooms). The next day he apologized for his behavior and “said that I must probably find it unpleasant, the way he was annoying me. I answered that I didn’t mind, and refused to be drawn into a discussion of the subject, so that he could neither cherish hope nor be quite without it.”22 Suslova later excerpted this scene from her notebook and used it, dialogue and all, in a short story.

  Although Suslova’s evasiveness was surely a major factor in the darkening of his disposition, his severe losses at roulette contributed their share as well. At the start, he tells Mikhail, “I came to the table [at Baden] and in a quarter of an hour had won 600 francs. That fired me up. Suddenly, I began to lose, I couldn’t stop, and I lost everything, down to the last kopek.”23 His letters home plead with Mikhail to scrape together whatever he can and send it immediately, and he asks his sister-in-law to retrieve for him one hundred rubles from the amount dispatched earlier for Marya Dimitrievna. The diplomatic maneuvers involved in such a task were extremely intricate, and Dostoevsky takes several pages to explain how the feat might be accomplished without arousing Marya Dimitrievna’s stormy susceptibilities.

  As if all this were not enough, Dostoevsky’s agitated stay in Baden-Baden was complicated by the obligation to call on Turgenev, who had settled there recently in a ménage à trois with Pauline Viardot, her husband, and family. Turgenev would have been offended if he had heard of Dostoevsky’s passage by accident, but Dostoevsky also knew that, if he caught sight of Suslova, tongues would immediately start to wag in Petersburg. “At Baden I saw Turgenev,” Dostoevsky reports to Mikhail. “I visited him twice and he came to see me once in return. He did not see A. P. I did not want him to know. . . . He spoke to me of all his moral torments and his doubts. Philosophic doubts, but which undermine life. A bit fatuous. I did not hide from him that I gambled. He gave me Phantoms to read, but gambling prevented me from reading and I returned it unread. He said that he wrote it for our journal and that if, once in Rome, I asked him for it, he will send it there. But what do I know of the journal?”24

  The sensitive Turgenev was still suffering from the uproar caused by Fathers and Children, especially from the unrelenting hostility of that portion of the radical press (The Contemporary and The Spark) that considered the work a defamation of the younger generation. The failure to read Phantoms, destined for Time or whatever journal replaced it, was of course a terrible faux pas, and Mikhail’s cry of anguish when he read the above passage can be heard in his response: “Do you know what Turgenev means for us now?”25 Nothing could have been a greater affront to Turgenev’s considerable literary vanity, especially at this troubled moment of his career.

  Dostoevsky had asked that the money he so urgently requested be forwarded to Turin, where it would await them once the ill-matched pair, alternating between tenderness and tantrums, had crossed the Alps by way of Switzerland. On arrival, however, they found nothing, and both lived in constant fear of being summoned to pay their hotel bill and dragged to the police. “Here, that’s how things are done,” Dostoevsky informs Mikhail, “no arrangement is possible . . . and I am not alone here. It’s horrible!” But the eagerly awaited funds finally came to the rescue. Meanwhile, Dostoevsky had tried to do some writing—perhaps a travel article, perhaps some notes for The Gambler, but, he tells Mikhail, “I tore up everything I had written in Turin. I have had enough of writing on order.”26

  After a stormy sea voyage from Genoa, with a stopover in Livorno, the two arrived in Rome. “Yesterday morning,” he wrote to Strakhov, “I visited St. Peter’s! The impression is very strong, Nikolay Nikolaevich, and gives one a shiver up the spine.”27 The shiver, one presumes, was not caused by aesthetic appreciation but rather by the mighty power for evil that Dostoevsky always associated with the Roman church. Despite the harassments attendant on his wanderings, and prompted by Strakhov, Dostoevsky had found time to further his education. “Tell Strakhov that I am carefully reading the Slavophils,” he had instructed Mikhail, “and that I have found something new.”28

  What he could not have discovered through Belinsky and Herzen was the systematic theological basis that the Slavophils had provided for their ideas. Slavophil theology was bitterly anti-Catholic and traced all the evils of mankind, past and present, back to the Roman Catholic pope’s assumption of the temporal power once possessed by the Roman emperors.29 St. Peter’s, in Dostoevsky’s eyes, could only have been seen as the living embodiment of such un-Christian claims to worldly grandeur, and his visit to Rome thus coincided with an important phase in the evolution of his ideas. Slavophil thought now gave his personal prejudices a wide-ranging conceptual foundation, and it was only after this second trip to Europe that Dostoevsky begins to express the opposition between Russia and Europe in primarily religious terms. “The Polish War,” he confides to his notebook during the winter of 1863–1864, “is a war of two Christianities—it is the beginning of the future war between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, in other words—of the Slavic genius with European civilization” (20: 170).

  The fluctuations of Dostoevsky’s affair with Suslova seemed to have reached a new phase in Rome, and her diary entries, which reveal the strange duel in which the pair now engaged, already prefig
ure some of the situations of The Gambler. Dostoevsky now openly begins to protest against Suslova’s attitude toward him, and bluntly accuses her of moral sadism. “Yesterday F. M. was importunate again,” she writes during their Roman stay. “ ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that you can’t torture a man this long, for he will eventually quit trying.’ ” A little while later, he dropped the game of jocosity and admitted “I am unhappy”—at which, she writes, “I embraced him with ardor,” and the merry-go-round began once again. That evening, leaving Suslova’s room at one in the morning, with his temptress lying fetchingly undressed in bed, Dostoevsky said “that it was humiliating for him to leave in this fashion. . . . ‘For the Russians never did retreat.’ ”30 The serio-comic flavor of the contest between the two is close to the tonality of The Gambler.

  It was in the midst of such scenes that The Gambler was originally conceived, and its first mention occurs in a letter to Strakhov from Rome. Dostoevsky remained critically short of funds, and tried to raise some by asking his friend to offer magazine editors a new story idea in return for an advance. What Dostoevsky outlines is the first version of The Gambler, which at this stage was more ambitious thematically than the final redaction:

  The subject of this story is the following: a type of Russian man living abroad. . . . It will be the mirror of the national reality, so far as possible. . . . I imagine an impulsive character, but a man very cultivated nonetheless, incomplete in all things, having lost his faith but not daring not to believe, in revolt against the authorities and fearing them. . . . The essential is that all his vital powers of life, his violences, his audacity are devoted to roulette. He is a gambler, but not an ordinary gambler—just as the Covetous Knight of Pushkin is not a simple merchant. . . . He is a poet in his fashion, but he is ashamed of that poetry because he profoundly feels its baseness, although the need of risk ennobles him in his own eyes. The story retraces how, for three years, he drags himself through the gambling houses and plays roulette.31

  The outline contains a motif manifestly pointing toward Notes from Underground that will be appropriated for this earlier work. The conception of a character who has lost his faith but does not dare not to believe recalls the Golyadkin type of The Double, terrified at his own audacity in stepping over the divinely sanctioned boundaries of the Russian caste system. Dostoevsky had continued to make notes for a revised version of this text all through 1860–1864, and a year after his letter to Strakhov about The Gambler he turned this Golyadkin type into the underground man, who also suffers from not daring not to believe in certain ideas that he finds incompatible with his moral sensibility. These ideas are no longer those that prop up the Russian bureaucratic system but rather the essential tenets of the Western European ideologies that have invaded and reshaped the Russian moral-social psyche. What remained then for The Gambler was the national theme, the delights and dangers of the “poetry of risk,” and the emotional difficulties of Dostoevsky’s tortuous involvement with Suslova.

  The peregrinations of the pair next took them to Naples. By this time he was becoming thoroughly sick of the whole escapade, and longed to be back in Russia. Apologizing for not having provided a forwarding address to which Phantoms could be mailed, Dostoevsky explains to Turgenev that “I remained everywhere only for a brief time, and it generally happened that, leaving one city, I scarcely knew in the evening where I would be the following day. Certain circumstances caused all these movements not always to depend on me; it was rather I who depended on circumstances.”32 Dostoevsky probably felt himself to have become a plaything of Suslova’s whims, since the couple’s destination was decided by her changing moods. He thus decided in Rome that Naples was to be the last stop on their swing southward; from there he planned to go north again and return home via Turin and Geneva. While no longer under any illusion as to her character, Dostoevsky’s passion for Suslova had not abated, and it was painful for him to give her up entirely. The two travelers parted on a note of reconciliation, and the alluring image of the tempting Apollinaria, who had never completely excluded the possibility of a resumption of their love affair—who always seemed to remain just ever so slightly, but not entirely, beyond his grasp—haunted Dostoevsky for several more years to come.

  By the time he reached Turin, Dostoevsky’s thoughts were fortunately preoccupied with other concerns, and he sketches for the benefit of Turgenev the discouraging prospect that he foresees awaiting him but that, all the same, he is eager to rejoin: “A difficult task awaits me in Petersburg. Although my health has infinitely improved, in two or three months it will, without doubt, be entirely destroyed. Nothing can be done about it. The journal has to be remade from scratch. It must be more up-to-date, more interesting, and at the same time it must respect literature—incompatible aims according to a number of Petersburg thinkers. But we have the intention of fighting fiercely against this contempt leveled at literature. . . . Support us I beg of you [by sending Phantoms], join us.”33 Phantoms did appear in the first number of Epoch, thus testifying to the good will Turgenev nourished for the defenders of Fathers and Children.

  The same letter also contains an apology for Dostoevsky’s impossible behavior at their last meeting in Baden, which he vaguely attributes to “the tumult of passions” in which he was then caught. “If I had not the hope of doing something more intelligent in the future,” he writes wryly, “really, I would be very ashamed now. But after all! Am I going to ask pardon of myself?”34 Far from doing so, Dostoevsky gambled once more in Hamburg, once more was stranded without a penny, and was forced to appeal to Suslova in Paris for help. A loyal friend, she raised three hundred francs. Dostoevsky limped home in early November to find matters still undecided so far as the journal was concerned, and his personal affairs in more disarray than he had anticipated.

  Passing through Petersburg very rapidly, by November 10 Dostoevsky was in Vladimir with Marya Dimitrievna, whose condition gave him a shock. “The health of Marya Dimitrievna is very bad,” he wrote her sister in Petersburg. “She has been terribly ill for two months now. . . . She has been particularly worn out, for these past two months, by a continual fever.”35 Her situation was so grave that Dostoevsky decided not to return with her to the harsh climate of Petersburg and planned to live in Moscow, renting a small apartment in the northern capital where he could stay when looking after the affairs of the journal. Dostoevsky punctiliously introduced his wife to his Moscow relatives, hoping they would look after her during his absences, and the financial pressures on him eased for the moment because his wealthy Moscow uncle, who had recently died, left him a bequest in his will. But this windfall provided the only bright spot in a situation that rapidly became more and more tormenting.

  1 Pis’ma, 1: 318; June 17, 1863.

  2 Biografiya, 173.

  3 F. M. Dostoevsky, The Gambler, with Polina Suslova’s Diary, trans. Victor Terras, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1972), 365. The Russian source for Suslova’s diary and letters is A. S. Dolinin, Gody blizosti s Dostoevskim (Moscow, 1928).

  4 Ibid., 364.

  5 L. P. Grossman, Put’ Dostoevskogo (Leningrad, 1929), 154.

  6 The Gambler, with Polina Suslova’s Diary, 257.

  7 Pis’ma, 1: 323–326; September 1 (new style), 1863.

  8 Ibid., 330; September 8/20, 1863.

  9 Ibid., 324; September 1 (new style), 1863.

  10 Ibid.

  11 The Gambler, with Polina Suslova’s Diary, 202.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Ibid., 203.

  14 Ibid., 206.

  15 Ibid., 207.

  16 Ibid., 209–210.

  17 Ibid., 211.

  18 Ibid., 211–212.

  19 Ibid., 213.

  20 Ibid., 214.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Ibid., 215.

  23 Pis’ma, 1: 330; September 8/20, 1863.

  24 Ibid., 331.

  25 DMI, 543.

  26 Pis’ma, 1: 329–331; September 8/20, 1863.

  27 Ibid., 335.

 
; 28 Ibid., 331.

  29 In an article that has had a major influence on the history of Russian thought, Ivan Kireevsky declared that “the classical world of ancient paganism, which Russia lacked in her inheritance, represented in its essence a triumph of formal human reason,” which led, among other disasters, to “the pope [becoming] the head of the church instead of Jesus Christ . . . the whole totality of faith was supported by syllogistic scholasticism; the Inquisition, Jesuitry, in one word, all the peculiarities of Catholicism developed through the power of the same formal process of reasoning, so that Protestantism itself, which the Catholics reproach with rationalism, developed directly out of the rationalism of Catholicism. A perspicacious mind could see in advance, in this final triumph of formal reason over faith and tradition, the entire present fate of Europe, as a result of a fallacious principle: Strauss and the new philosophy in all of its aspects; industrialism as the mainspring of social life; philanthropy based on calculated self-interest; the system of education accelerated by the power of aroused jealousy; Goethe, the crown of German poesy, the literary Tallyrand, who changes his beauty as the other changes his governments; Napoleon, the hero of our time, the ideal of soulless calculation; the numerical majority, a fruit of rationalistic politics; and Louis Philippe, the latest result of such hopes and such expensive experiments!” These words illustrate the suggestive sweep of Slavophil thought, which coincides with Dostoevsky’s ideas. See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophils (rpt. Gloucester, MA, 1965), 96.

  30 The Gambler, with Polina Suslova’s Diary, 218–220.

  31 Pis’ma, 1: 333.

  32 Ibid., 337; October 18, 1863.

  33 Ibid., 338.

  34 Ibid.

  35 Ibid., 339; November 10, 1863.