Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Her real name, which Dostoevsky may never have learned, was Elizaveta Andreyevna Chlebnikova, and she was the wayward daughter of a landowning family (her maiden name had been Panina) who had received some education and could write a literary Russian. An adventurous existence had taken her over most of Western Europe in the company of various men—a Hungarian, an Englishman, and a Frenchman, among others. On first setting foot in England, without a penny and ignorant of the language, she had tried to take her life in despair and was saved by the police. For some weeks she lived under the bridges of the Thames among other vagabonds. Thanks to the zeal of various missionaries concerned to save her soul, she acquired English rapidly; and a charitable Methodist pastor, impressed by her knowledge of the Bible and ability to recite the Lord’s Prayer in English, took her to live with his family on the Isle of Guernsey. With the blessing of her patron, she married a sailor named Brown, and she then lived (one assumes as Mrs. Brown) in Weymouth, Brighton, and London. When or why the marriage ended is unknown; equally obscure is what brought Martha Brown back to Russia, where, as she remarks, many people no longer thought she was Russian at all.

  Her first letter to Dostoevsky is a formal reply to an offer of work as a translator; the others are an appeal to Dostoevsky, as someone with position and moral authority, to intervene with Gorsky and attempt to bring him to his senses. By this time she was occupying a bed in the Peter and Paul Hospital, where Gorsky had shown up to exhibit his displeasure and make a drunken scene. Two letters indicate that, although now fully recovered, she preferred to remain in the disease-ridden hospital rather than lapse back into a life of misery and abuse with Gorsky. The last letter, dated sometime in the second half of January 1865, reveals a new state of affairs. Brown, living in the city, is no longer with Gorsky. The letter suggests some previous conversation between the pair about Martha Brown coming to stay with Dostoevsky as his mistress. “In any case,” she goes on, “whether I can succeed or not in satisfying you in a physical sense, and whether there will exist between us that spiritual harmony on which will depend the continuance of our acquaintance, believe me when I say that I shall always remain grateful that you favored me with your friendship. . . . I swear to you that I have never, until now, resolved to be as frank with anyone as I have ventured to be with you.”12

  “Forgive me for this egoistic admission,” she continues, “but so much grief, despair, and hopelessness has accumulated in my soul during these past two years, which I have spent in Russia as in a prison, that, as God is my witness, I am happy, I am fortunate, to have met a man possessing such calmness of soul, such patience, such good sense and righteousness as could be found neither in Flemming [an earlier lover] nor in Gorsky. I am absolutely indifferent at present as to whether our relation will be long or short. But I swear to you that what I value, incomparably more than any material gain, is that you were not squeamish about the fallen side of my personality, that you placed me higher than I stand in my own estimation.”13 Whether this letter led to the love affair she so obviously desired, or whether such an affair had already begun, cannot be determined.

  At the same time as this final letter from Brown, Dostoevsky also received another from a young woman with whom he was soon to fall in love. Her name was Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, and two of her stories had been printed in Epoch during the previous months, but both had appeared under a pseudonym. For Miss Korvin-Krukovskaya, who had sent the stories in secret to the magazine, was the elder daughter of a retired lieutenant-general with strict principles about the behavior of his female folk. A gentleman of the old school, strongly imbued with the sense of his own importance and the dignity of his family, he lived with his much younger wife and two daughters on his estate at Palibino in the depths of the countryside near Vitebsk on the Polish-Russian border. Young Anna, then all of twenty-two, had hidden her literary exploits from her father, if not from her sister Sofya—later to become famous under the name of Kovalevskaya as the first woman to hold a chair of mathematics in Europe—and dispatched them with the conspiratorial aid of the estate steward. Sofya’s memoirs allow us to peer into the recesses of this isolated nest of gentlefolk in the Russian provinces, out of which would emerge two extraordinary women with whom Dostoevsky maintained cordial relations throughout the remainder of his life.

  General Korvin-Krukovsky had little taste for the social frivolities of Petersburg. But, in deference to the desires of his more convivial spouse, and also to introduce his daughters to a wider range of suitors, he allowed them to plunge into the fashionable Petersburg whirl each year for a period of a month. The letter Dostoevsky received from Anna on February 28 signified that one of these annual descents on Petersburg relatives was impending, and informed him that the Korvin-Krukovskys would be glad to receive a visit if notified in advance of his intention to call. Since Dostoevsky was a noted author who had accepted the fledgling literary efforts of their daughter, such an invitation would seem the least that might be expected. In fact, however, permission to extend it had been granted to Anna only after a long struggle against the deeply rooted prejudices of her suspicious and disgruntled father.

  The general had met one Russian literary lady as a young man, the then reigning society belle Countess Rostopchina, and he had chanced on her again years later at the gambling tables of Baden-Baden behaving in a distinctly unladylike manner. Such was the inevitable fate of all Russian authoresses, and when he discovered by accident that his own Anyuta was glorifying in this dubious appellation, he flew into such a rage that his frightened family feared he would be felled by a stroke. To make matters worse, the encouraging letter from Dostoevsky that he read also contained payment for Anna’s contributions to Epoch. “Anything can be expected from young ladies who are capable, unbeknownst to their father and mother, of entering into correspondence with an unknown man and receiving money from him!” he thundered. “Now you are selling your stories, but the time may come, perhaps, when you will sell yourself!”14

  After this first paroxysm of wrath, the general relapsed into sullen silence. Permission was given to Anna to meet Dostoevsky on the next trip to Petersburg only after much maneuvering on the part of the women. But the general, though kindhearted enough under his forbidding exterior, still felt uneasy, and prudently admonished his wife to be on her guard. “Remember, Lisa, that you have a great responsibility,” he told her before departure. “Dostoevsky is not a person of our society. What do we know about him? Only that he is a journalist and former convict. Quite a recommendation! To be sure! We must be very careful with him.”15 Such were the origins of the letter that Dostoevsky received inviting him to call on the family in Petersburg.

  Shortly after their arrival in Petersburg, in the early spring of 1865, the Korvin-Krukovskys received Dostoevsky for the first time; and the long-awaited visit, anticipated by Anna with such eagerness and trepidation, turned out to be a catastrophe. Strictly conforming to her husband’s parting injunctions, Anna’s mother insisted on being present; Sofya too, consumed with curiosity, had received permission to remain in the living room; two elderly Russian-German aunts, finding one pretext or another to enter and catch a glimpse of the famous author, finally installed themselves there for good. Furious at this solemn assemblage, Anna exhibited her displeasure by silence. Dostoevsky too, taken aback at being forced to confront such a forbidding gathering, failed to respond to Mme Korvin-Krukovskaya’s polite conversation. “He seemed old and sickly that day,” Sofya recalled, “as was always the case, incidentally, when he was in low spirits.”16 After half an hour of this slow torture, Dostoevsky seized his hat and hastily departed. Anna ran into her room, uncontrollably burst into tears, and her reproaches soon reduced her mother to the same lachrymose condition.

  Five days later, Dostoevsky called again unexpectedly and found only the two girls at home. He and Anna immediately engaged in eager conversation, as if they had been old friends, and matters could not have gone more swimmingly. He seemed to Sofya to be quite another pers
on, much younger than before and marvelously kind and clever; she could hardly believe that he was all of forty-four years old! When their mother returned home, she was startled and a little frightened to find Dostoevsky ensconced there alone with her daughters, but the two were so radiantly happy that she promptly invited him to stay for dinner. The ice was finally broken, and Dostoevsky now began to call on the Korvin-Krukovskys two or three times a week.

  Dostoevsky, however, was a guest who sometimes shocked the strait-laced household, concerned to guard against any improprieties in the conduct of the unexpected friend of their daughters. According to Sofya, Dostoevsky once told his spellbound female audience about a novel he had intended to write in the days of his youth. He had wished, he said, to depict an educated and cultivated gentleman who, traveling abroad, wakes one morning in his sunny hotel room filled with a sense of physical contentment and self-satisfaction. But he suddenly begins to feel uneasy, and as he concentrates his thoughts, he recalls an incident from the distant past. Once, after a riotous night, and spurred on by drunk companions, he had violated a ten-year-old girl . . . But at this moment Mme Korvin-Krukovskaya broke in with a horrified shriek: “Feodor Mikhailovich! For pity’s sake! There are children present!”17

  To what extent Dostoevsky’s referral of this literary idea to the days of his “youth” should be taken as literally true can only remain a matter for speculation; the juxtaposition of refined aestheticism and lustful depravity emerges in his works sharply only after his return from Siberia in the 1860s. Yet his lifelong preoccupation, and what some have considered his pathological obsession, with this scabrous theme can hardly be doubted. Sometime in the late 1870s Dostoevsky was sitting in another drawing room when the question arose of what should be considered the greatest crime on earth.

  Dostoevsky spoke quickly, agitatedly and stumblingly. . . . The most frightful, the most terrible sin—was to violate a child. To take a life—that is horrible, Dostoevsky said, but to take away faith in the beauty of love—that is the most terrible crime. And Dostoevsky recounted an episode from his childhood. When I lived in Moscow as a child in a hospital for the poor, Dostoevsky said, where my father was a doctor, I played with a little girl (the daughter of a coachman or a cook). She was a delicate, graceful child of nine. . . . And some disgraceful wretch violated the girl when drunk and she died, pouring out blood. I recall, Dostoevsky said, being sent for my father in the other wing of the hospital, but it was too late. All my life this memory has haunted me as the most frightful crime, the most terrible sin, for which there is not, and cannot be, any forgiveness, and I punished Stavrogin in Demons with this very same terrible crime.18

  As can be seen from Sofya’s recollections, Dostoevsky’s verbal comportment may have led Anna’s mother to regret having admitted him into the intimacy of the family circle. Another occasion when she undoubtedly had second thoughts about her tolerance occurred during a farewell party consisting of mostly Russian-Germans, very staid, official, and stuffy—exactly the sort of group in which Dostoevsky felt most uncomfortable. He resented that Anna, as elder daughter, shared the obligations of receiving with her mother and was not allowed to confine her attentions exclusively to himself. Even worse, he conceived a furious jealousy for a handsome young officer present, who was obviously attracted to Anna and to whom, he convinced himself, Anna would be forced to become engaged against her will. He expressed his displeasure and created a scandal by unpleasant remarks uttered in a loud voice (for example, that the Bible had not been written for society women to read) and by a generally boorish behavior. It was after this evening, according to Sofya, that Anna’s previous reverence for Dostoevsky sharply altered. The private conversations between the two changed in tone; now they seemed to be disputing, sometimes acrimoniously, rather than engaging in a friendly exchange of ideas.

  As the moment approached for Anna’s return to Palibino, Dostoevsky became more censorious and despotic, and Anna less docile and more assertive. “The continual and very burning subject of their argument,” writes Sofya, “was Nihilism. The debate over this question continued sometimes long after midnight.” “ ‘All of contemporary youth is stupid and backward!’ Dostoevsky once shouted. ‘Shiny boots are more valuable for them than Pushkin!’ To which Anna retorted coolly that ‘Pushkin has in fact become out of date in our time,’ knowing that nothing could drive Dostoevsky into more of a fury than a lack of respect for Pushkin.”19

  All the same, one evening when Sofya was bravely struggling with Beethoven’s Sonate Pathétique, which she knew to be among Dostoevsky’s favorites, he and Anna treacherously slipped away to another room unobserved. And when the disconsolate pianist went to find her lost audience, she burst in on a proposal of marriage. There is some uncertainty whether Anna accepted, in the emotion of the moment, and then was freed from her pledge by Dostoevsky (that is the story he told his second wife), or whether she ever gave any reply at all. Sofya does not mention an engagement, and one assumes that, if it had existed, Anna’s family would have been informed. Whatever the truth, Anna told Sofya: “I do not love Dostoevsky in such a way as to marry him.” Besides the difference in age and ideas, Anna realized, with salutary insight, that Dostoevsky needed a wife entirely submissive to his will. “Look,” she told her younger sister, “I am sometimes surprised at myself that I cannot love him! He is such a good man! . . . But he does not at all need someone like myself! Besides, he is so nervous, so demanding!”20 Dostoevsky would find exactly the sort of wife he needed a year later, but he always maintained cordial relations with Anna and her sister.

  He saw a good deal of Anna in the mid-1870s, even though, in the interim, she had married a well-known French radical named Charles Victor Jaclard and committed herself wholeheartedly to a life of revolutionary activity. Not only was she the first translator of parts of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital into French, but she also established warm personal relations with Marx and played a leading role among the women (they included a surprising number of Russians) who participated courageously in the defense of the Paris Commune of 1870. It is likely that Dostoevsky drew on his courtship of her for the portrait of Aglaya Epanchina in The Idiot, whose engagement to Prince Myshkin upset her respectable family as much as Anna’s friendship with Dostoevsky had initially done with hers. Once more, however, after his attempt to win Anna’s hand had come to an amicable but irreversible end, Dostoevsky was thrown back on the isolation from which he so achingly longed to escape.

  Meanwhile, whatever Dostoevsky’s gloom over the failure of Epoch, the end of his impossible labors must nonetheless have come as something of a relief. Even when he still believed that Epoch could be a success, he had looked forward to the moment when he could return to his essential creative task as a novelist. Now he was being forced to do so, and for us it is evident that his failure as an editor and journalist was his salvation as an artist. During the next five years, under the pressure of necessity but never at the cost of artistic integrity, he would write three of his greatest novels—Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Demons—and establish his reputation once and for all as belonging to the very front rank of Russian literature. As these works were to prove, it was in the fierce give-and-take of argument and polemic that he had gradually hammered out his own position and found the great theme that was to occupy him throughout the remainder of his life—the moral-psychic dangers involved in the desire of the radical Russian intelligentsia to establish human life on new, “rational” foundations that would replace the God-given order still alive in the Russian moral sensibility.

  1 Pis’ma, 1: 375; first week of July 1864.

  2 Ibid., 4: 272–273; July 29, 1864.

  3 Ibid., 1: 399; April 5, 1865.

  4 Ibid., 400; April 14, 1865.

  5 Ibid., 401.

  6 Ibid., 396; March 31, 1865.

  7 Ibid., 397–398.

  8 Ibid., 398.

  9 Ibid., April 9, 1865.

  10 Ibid., 401; April 14, 1865.

  11 Ib
id., 401–402.

  12 The letters of Martha Panina were published by G. Prokhorov in “Nerazvernuvshiisya roman F. M. Dostoevskogo,” Zvenya 5 (1936), 582–598; the citation is on 600.

  13 Ibid.

  14 S. V. Kovalevskaya, Vospominaniya (Moscow, 1974), 70.

  15 Ibid., 73.

  16 Ibid., 50.

  17 Ibid., 77.

  18 S. V. Belov, “Z. A. Trubetskaya, Dostoevsky i A. P. Filosofova,” Russkaya Literatura 3 (Moscow, 1973), 117.

  19 Kovalevskaya, Vospominaniya, 81.

  20 Ibid., 88.

  PART IV

  The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871

  CHAPTER 32

  Khlestakov in Wiesbaden

  Dostoevsky was again eager to travel abroad because it was there that he could hope to meet his ex-mistress Apollinaria Suslova, the young feminist writer who had never been entirely out of his mind during the past two years and with whom he had carried on a secret correspondence even as his wife was dying. Suslova had remained in Europe when Dostoevsky returned to Russia, and letters between the pair constantly went back and forth. Unfortunately, all of this correspondence has been lost (except for the draft of one letter preserved in Suslova’s diary). That Dostoevsky still dreamed of renewing his relations with Suslova is evident from a letter he sent her younger sister, Nadezhda (who later became a close friend of Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya). Nadezhda Suslova was then pursuing her medical studies in Zurich, and since Apollinaria, living in Montpellier, was to join her there, Dostoevsky wrote letters to both addresses.