Nadezhda herself, whom Dostoevsky admired and often visited in Petersburg, had criticized him harshly for his supposed ill treatment of her sister; and he appeals to Nadezhda’s firsthand knowledge of his character to counter the damaging effect of Apollinaria’s complaints. For the past several years, he reminds her, “I have come to seek in your company some peace for my soul during all the times of trial, and recently it was only to you that I came when my heart was too full of grief. You have seen me in my sincerest moments and you can judge: do I feed on the sufferings of others, am I brutal, (inwardly), am I cruel?”1 Apollinaria, he tells her sister, is herself “a great egoist. Her egoism and her vanity are colossal. She demands everything of other people, all the perfections, and does not pardon the slightest imperfection in the light of other qualities that one may possess.” Dostoevsky predicts that she will always be unhappy, because “the person who demands everything of others but recognizes no obligation can never be happy.” What little we know of Apollinaria Suslova’s later life would seem to bear out this prophecy.2
“I still love her,” Dostoevsky confesses, “I love her very much, but already I wish not to love her. She does not deserve such a love.” Dostoevsky insists that what Suslova finds insulting in his letter “is that I have dared to oppose her, dared to tell her I was suffering. . . . She has no humanity at all in her relations with me. She knows that I still love her. Why then does she torture me? Don’t love me, but also don’t torture me.” If Dostoevsky’s behavior patterns exhibit a strong masochistic component, such words illustrate that there was a limit to his presumed enjoyment of suffering; but neither could he forget that Suslova had once loved him, nor relinquish the tantalizing hope that she might surrender herself again. For all his misgivings, he could not let slip what seemed his last chance for personal happiness, and the pursuit of Apollinaria was certainly among the reasons why he determined, at whatever cost, to return to Europe during the summer of 1865.
The major obstacle to such a plan was a lack of funds, and just how hard-pressed Dostoevsky was at this time can be seen from a notice he received from the local police warning him to pay his creditors six hundred rubles. In case of default, he could expect a visit from the police to make an inventory of his personal belongings preparatory to their sale at auction. Dostoevsky turned for help to the Literary Fund, which granted him the loan of six hundred rubles, thus rescuing him from the loss of all his household effects.
Continuously subjected to such harassment, Dostoevsky was all the more eager to leave the country for a time. On June 8 he wrote to Kraevsky, his old editor of the 1840s and still at the head of Notes of the Fatherland, to offer him the plan for a new work and to request an advance of three thousand rubles. “My novel is called The Drunkards,” Dostoevsky explains, “and will deal with the present problem of alcoholism.”3 Dostoevsky promised to have the first chapters ready by October 1865; in case of death, or if he failed to meet the deadline, he offered as guarantee the right in perpetuity to all his previous works. But Kraevsky declined the proposal, even though Dostoevsky specified other conditions protecting the rights of the publisher. In any event, Dostoevsky’s plan for The Drunkards came to little more than the idea he mentioned in his letters. Totally hemmed in by the affairs of Epoch, he would hardly have had time to work out ideas for a new novel. The Drunkards was never written, but it did provide the subplot involving the Marmeladov family in Crime and Punishment.
As a last resort, Dostoevsky turned to a publisher named Stellovsky, ill famed for driving hard bargains. Stellovsky had already approached Dostoevsky with an offer of two thousand rubles in return for the right to publish a single edition of his works with no royalties accruing. Dostoevsky had turned down this miserly proposition, but, driven back to Stellovsky by necessity, he now agreed to accept even more severe conditions. The publisher would advance three thousand rubles in exchange for the right to print an edition of Dostoevsky’s complete works. In addition, Dostoevsky agreed to furnish a new novel of specified format by November 1, 1866, and in case of failure, Stellovsky would have the right to publish all of Dostoevsky’s future works without compensation to the author for a period of nine years. Despite the risks of entering into such a contract, Dostoevsky accepted. After revising his works for Stellovsky’s new edition and obtaining a provisional promise from the journal The Library for Reading to forward him an advance in return for a story or some travel articles, he left for Europe at the end of July.
Each time Dostoevsky had gone abroad in the past, he had hurried to the roulette tables, and the same pattern was repeated now. By the time he arrived in Wiesbaden on the twenty-ninth of July to try his luck, the three thousand rubles obtained from Stellovsky had been distributed among his most pressing creditors and also parceled out to meet the needs of Mikhail’s family and Dostoevsky’s stepson Pasha; only one hundred seventy-five silver rubles had been retained for the voyage. Five days later, however, he lost everything down to his last penny, and was even forced to pawn his watch. For help he turned first to Turgenev in Baden-Baden, whom he had seen just the month previous in Petersburg and with whom he was on the friendliest footing.
Writing from Wiesbaden, Dostoevsky first explained his unfortunate circumstances and then apologetically added that, while feeling “aversion and shame” at disturbing his fellow novelist, he had nowhere else to appeal for help. And “since you are more intelligent than the others, it is morally easier to turn to you. Here is what is involved: I appeal to you as one human being to another, and I ask for one hundred thalers.” Dostoevsky promised to repay within a month out of funds he expected to receive from The Library for Reading and also from “someone who must help me”4 (perhaps Apollinaria Suslova, who shortly afterward arrived in Wiesbaden for a visit).
Turgenev rapidly sent fifty thalers, which was all he could afford at the moment. Dostoevsky gratefully acknowledged the loan: “although [it] has not entirely cleared me, all the same it is of great help. I hope to pay you back very soon.”5 In addition to Turgenev, Dostoevsky also appealed to Herzen in Geneva, with whom his relations in the recent past had been cordial, but he received no immediate reply. Meanwhile, Suslova appeared on the scene to spend a few days with her still amorous ex-lover, whose circumstances were hardly propitious for renewing his efforts to regain her affections. During the intervening two years, Suslova’s desultory and wandering life in France and Switzerland had been unhappy and frustrating. Her first and deepest amorous relation had been with Dostoevsky, and she tended to blame him for her inability to establish more satisfactory ones with other men.
Dostoevsky could hardly have anticipated that his eagerly awaited rendezvous with Suslova would occur under such inglorious circumstances, reduced as he was to utter destitution and living in fear of being expelled from his hotel at any moment and taken to the police. Dostoevsky’s letters to Suslova after her departure are filled with concern over her welfare, and it is likely that, leaving herself with barely enough to continue her journey, she aided Dostoevsky with whatever funds she had available. “Dear Polya,” he writes, “in the first place I do not understand how you managed to arrive [in Paris]. To my disgusting anguish about myself has been added the anguish about you. . . . At Cologne the hotel, the carriages, the voyage—even if you had enough for the train, you were probably hungry. All this hammers in my head and gives me no rest.”6
Dostoevsky had no secrets from Suslova, and it is from his letters to her that we obtain the most graphic image of the debasing conditions under which he was living and which cut his pride to the quick. “Meanwhile,” his letter continues, “my situation has gotten so bad that it is unbelievable. Scarcely had you left when on the next day, early in the morning, the hotel declared to me that they would no longer give me any meals, neither tea nor coffee. I went for an explanation and the stout German owner explained to me that I did not ‘deserve’ the meals and that he would send me tea. So that since yesterday I no longer eat and only drink tea. Yes, and . . . all th
e staff treat me with an inexpressible, totally German contempt. There is no greater crime for a German than to be without any money and not pay on time.”7
Two days later, Dostoevsky adds some new details in another letter sent without postage. “My affairs are terrible nec plus ultra; it is impossible to go any further. Beyond, there must be another zone of misfortunes and filthiness of which I still have no knowledge. . . . I am still living without meals, and this is already the third day that I live on morning and evening tea—and it’s curious: I do not at all really wish to eat. The worst is that they hem me in and sometimes refuse me a candle in the evening [especially] when some bit of the previous one is left over, even the smallest fragment. But I leave the hotel every day at three o’clock and only return at six, so as not to give the impression that I do not dine at all. How much like a Khlestakov [a character in Gogol’s The Inspector-General]!” Dostoevsky concludes with a plea to Suslova to raise some money for him from her friends in Paris if possible, and adds, as a despairing postscript: “now I no longer see at all what will become of me.”8
To the distress induced by his circumstances was added the humiliation of failing to receive any answer from Herzen. “Herzen torments me,” he admits to Suslova. “If he received my letter and does not wish to respond—what a humiliation and what behavior! really, did I deserve this, and for what reason?”9 A postscript to this letter announces with relief that Herzen had finally replied, and though he could not spare the full amount requested, he had offered to send a lesser sum if this would help. Dostoevsky wonders why Herzen has not simply dispatched the smaller sum and decides forgivingly that he was probably short of funds, but now, he tells Suslova, it is impossible to bring himself to answer with another pleading entreaty.
Despite the bleak picture of solitary misery that emerges from Dostoevsky’s letters, he was not as isolated as might be assumed. There were other Russians in Wiesbaden with whom he struck up an acquaintance, and they played a crucial part in helping him escape from the debasement of his penury. Of particular importance was the priest in charge of the Russian Orthodox Church, Father I. L. Yanishev. A man of unusual culture, Father Yanishev became well-known in Orthodox theological circles because of his endeavors to ground moral theology on the psychological analysis of human character, and in one book he paid special attention to a problem of vital concern to Dostoevsky, the freedom of the will. Father George Florovsky, in his great work on the history of Russian theology, writes about him with a shade of disapproval, because his teachings were “above all, a justification of the world. ‘Earthly blessings’ are accepted as the necessary milieu outside of which moral awakening is impossible—‘without which virtue is impossible.’ . . . In the contemplative mysticism of the ascetics, Yanishev found only quietism.”10
Instead of such “quietism,” Yanishev favored a Christianity understood as charitable love for others—a love that he called “the center and crown of the Christian faith.”11 The novelist certainly did not need Yanishev to teach him, the erstwhile Christian Socialist, that Christianity was primarily “charitable love,” but if the two talked of such matters Dostoevsky would certainly have been pleased to find such a conception defended by so eminent a clergyman. And when the young novice Alyosha Karamazov is told by his mentor Father Zosima to quit the monastery and test his Christianity in the hurly-burly of everyday life, he is being instructed to follow one of the chief tenets of Father Yanishev’s teachings. Dostoevsky remained in contact with Father Yanishev even after Wiesbaden, and two years later wrote of him to Apollon Maikov: “He is a rare person, worthy, meek, with a sense of his own dignity, of an angelic purity of soul and a passionate believer.”12 More immediately pressing issues than theological ones were naturally on Dostoevsky’s mind when the two men first met, and Father Yanishev aided the distraught man of letters not only with spiritual counsel but also with a down-to-earth loan.
It was during this period of protracted mortification that Dostoevsky, while strolling one day among the linden trees at Wiesbaden, poured some of his troubles into the sympathetic ears of Princess Shalikova, a distinguished lady who also frequented the company of Father Yanishev and was herself an author under various pseudonyms. At it turned out, she was also a distant relative of Katkov, the powerful anti-radical editor of The Russian Messenger, and she encouraged Dostoevsky to apply to him as a possible publisher. Princess Shalikova may also have conveyed some indication of Katkov’s recent appreciation of Dostoevsky as a writer. Whatever was said, the result is well-known: Dostoevsky wrote to Katkov sometime during the first two weeks in September with the first outline of the conception of what became Crime and Punishment. At this stage, Dostoevsky was thinking not of a novel but of a story or novella, which he had been working on “for two months” and was on the point of completing. He promised Katkov that it would be finished in one or two weeks, at most a month, and then outlined its central theme, which, he assured the editor, “in no way contradicts [the policy] of your journal; rather the contrary”:
It is the psychological report of a crime. . . . A young man, expelled from the university, . . . living in the direst poverty . . . falling under the influence of the strange “unfinished” ideas afloat . . . decides to break out of his disgusting position at one stroke. He has made up his mind to kill an old woman . . . who lends money at interest. The old woman is stupid, stupid and ailing, greedy, takes as high a rate of interest as a Yid, is evil and eats up other lives. . . . ‘She is good for nothing. Why should she live?’ . . . These questions befuddle the young man. He decides to kill her in order to bring happiness to his mother living in the provinces, rescue his sister, . . . finish his studies, go abroad, and then all his life be upright, staunch, unbendable in fulfilling his ‘humane obligation to mankind,’ which would ultimately ‘smooth out’ his crime, if one can really call a crime this action against a deaf, stupid, evil, sickly old woman . . . He spends a month after that until the final catastrophe . . . unsuspected and unexpected feelings torment his heart. Heavenly truth, earthly law, take their toll and he finishes by being forced to denounce himself. Forced because, even though he perishes in katorga, at least he will be reunited with the people; the feeling of isolation and separation from mankind, which he felt right after completing the crime, has tortured him. The law of truth and human nature took its [text illegible]. . . . The criminal himself decides to accept suffering in order to atone for his deed.13
In conclusion, Dostoevsky asked to be paid the modest sum of one hundred twenty-five rubles per folio sheet, although it was well-known that writers like Turgenev and Tolstoy received a good deal more, and he pleadingly requested an immediate advance of three hundred rubles to rescue him from his present difficulties, whose details he left unspecified. No reply arrived immediately, and with the help of Father Yanishev (and Wrangel) Dostoevsky managed to pay his bills and return to Russia. When Katkov finally sent the advance to Wiesbaden, Dostoevsky was already back in his native land. Father Yanishev forwarded the money, and this was the beginning of Dostoevsky’s long relationship with The Russian Messenger, which published all his major novels except A Raw Youth. It was also the beginning of a much more prolonged period of literary labor than Dostoevsky had imagined when he promised to complete his “story” in a few more weeks.
Dostoevsky’s return to Petersburg in mid-October immediately plunged him back into the swarm of menacing creditors from whose persecution he had fled to Europe. To make matters worse, Dostoevsky’s epileptic attacks increased in frequency shortly after his return (as if, he remarked to Wrangel bitterly, to make up for the three months’ respite afforded him in Europe). All this misery was further aggravated by “family disagreements, the countless troubles connected with the affairs of my late brother, of his family, and of our deceased journal.”14 Mikhail’s widow and her children held Dostoevsky responsible for their straitened economic situation, and he was deeply aggrieved at their hostility.
Dostoevsky complains about the difficulti
es of literary composition under such nerve-racking conditions, and it might be thought that he would have avoided complicating them further. Instead, even though most of the story he had proposed to Katkov already existed in a next-to-final draft, he decided to recast his plan. “At the end of November,” he explained to Wrangel two months later, “a good part (of the initial plan) had been written and was ready; but I burned it all; I can confess this to you now. I didn’t like it myself. A new form, a new plan carried me away, and I started afresh.”15 This new plan involved writing a much longer work, a novel in six parts whose title would be Crime and Punishment.
It would be an exaggeration to speak of Dostoevsky as maintaining any normal social life during the second half of 1865, and he remarked himself that “I have not visited anyone all winter.”16 In fact, however, Apollinaria Suslova was now living in Petersburg, and he continued to pursue her, though with results that hardly alleviated his loneliness. On November 2, 1865, Suslova confided to her diary: “Today F M was here and we argued and contradicted each other all the time. For a long time now he has been offering me his hand and his heart, and he only makes me angry doing so. Speaking of my character, he once said: ‘If you were to get married, you’d begin to hate your husband three days later, and leave him.’ ”17 Their relationship ended when his offers of marriage were persistently refused. But Dostoevsky would soon recreate the strained intensity of their love-hate bickering in The Gambler—where, however, he acquires imaginatively what he had failed to achieve in reality. For there the beautiful and contemptuous Polina is in love with the feckless and self-destructive gambler.
The first and second parts of Crime and Punishment were serialized in the January and February issues of The Russian Messenger. Despite predictable reactions from the radicals on The Contemporary (its critic G. Z. Eliseev wrote of “this new ‘fantasy’ of Mr. Dostoevsky, a fantasy according to which the entire student body is accused without exception of attempting murder and robbery”),18 the book’s installments were a sensational success with the reading public. “Only Crime and Punishment was read during 1866,” Strakhov recalled, “only it was spoken about by lovers of literature, who often complained about the stifling power of the novel and the painful impression it left, which caused people with strong nerves almost to become ill and forced those with weak ones to give up reading it altogether.”19 Strakhov also remembered “most striking of all,” the coincidence “with reality.” On January 12, 1866, a student named A. M. Danilov killed a moneylender and his manservant in order to loot their apartment, and the crime instantly recalled Raskolnikov’s deed.
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