Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Despite the furor aroused by these early chapters, which, as Dostoevsky later learned from Katkov, had brought The Russian Messenger at least five hundred new subscribers, as the manuscript increased in length there were disturbing indications that the journal editors hoped to lower the price so as to decrease their overall outlay. Dostoevsky believed it would be necessary to travel to Moscow and talk to Katkov personally, but he did not wish to make a move before at least half the work had been published. “With the help of God,” he remarked fervently to Wrangel, “this novel can be the most splendid thing.”20 Dostoevsky thus continued to live on the very edge of poverty, haunted by the fear that his creditors would press him to the wall and ruin everything. In response to some friendly advice from Wrangel counseling him to enter government service, and thus assure himself of a guaranteed income, Dostoevsky sketched for Wrangel’s benefit his hopes for a substantial economic return. “But here’s the trouble,” he added sadly: “If I am locked up in prison for debt, then I will certainly spoil it and maybe not even complete it at all; everything will then go to pieces.”21

  By mid-March, Dostoevsky made the trip to Moscow and was promised a further advance of a thousand rubles. He also visited the family of his second sister, Vera, whose husband, A. P. Ivanov, served as a physician in the Konstantinovsky Land Surveying Institute. The hospitable Ivanovs always had a houseful of guests, and one of them was an attractive twenty-year-old by the name of Marya Sergeevna Ivanchina-Pisareva, a friend of one of the Ivanov daughters. Just a month before, Dostoevsky had written gloomily to Wrangel that “at least you, my good friend, are happy with your family; while fate has so far denied me this great and sole human happiness.”22 Dostoevsky had, all this time, been eagerly seeking some remedy for his emotional solitude, and he was very much taken with Marya Sergeevna. One morning, when the family had gone to Easter matins, he remained at home with her and formally proposed marriage, but in view of the difference in their ages (Dostoevsky was then forty-five), the sprightly young lady turned him off with an unmistakably discouraging quotation from Pushkin’s “Poltava”: “Okameneloe godami / Pylaet serdtse starika” (Petrified by the years / The heart of the old man flames up).23

  It was just a day or two after Dostoevsky’s return from Moscow that the shattering event occurred that left all of Russia aghast. The tsar’s habit, well-known to his adoring subjects, was to walk his dog every day in the Summer Gardens adjacent to the Winter Palace, and a small crowd was watching on April 4, 1866, as he was about to enter his carriage. At that moment a pale and desperately poor ex-student pushed his way through the spectators, took aim with a pistol, and fired. Whether Dimitry Karakozov was a faulty marksman or whether someone—a tradesman named Osip Kommissarov, who became a national hero overnight—had jostled his arm, the shot went wild, and Karakozov was overpowered by the crowd. Saved by the police from a lynching at the hands of the outraged mob, he was dragged to Alexander II, who personally took his pistol from him and asked if he were a Pole. It seemed inconceivable to the tsar that an attempt on his life would be made by anyone but a foreigner, yet Karakozov, who came from a family of small, impoverished landowners and who had been expelled from the university, like Raskolnikov, for failing to pay his fees, replied: “Pure Russian.”

  News of Karakozov’s attempt stunned all of Russia and produced a spontaneous outpouring of devotion to the monarch rivaling the manifestations of patriotism exhibited during major historical catastrophes such as the Napoleonic invasion. Like many others, Dostoevsky was shocked into a state of near hysteria by the unbelievable report, and he rushed to the home of his oldest friend, Apollon Maikov, to share his agitated feelings. Peter Weinberg, who was visiting Maikov, left this image of Dostoevsky:

  Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky ran headlong into the room. He was terribly pale, looked in an awful fright, and he was shaking all over as if in a fever.

  “The tsar has been shot at,” he shrieked, not greeting us, in a voice breaking with emotion.

  “Killed?” Maikov cried out in some sort of strange inhuman voice.

  “No . . . He was saved . . . Fortunately . . . But shot at . . . shot at . . . shot at.”

  We gave him a little something to quiet himself—though Maikov too was close to fainting—and we all three ran into the street.24

  Dostoevsky was horrified at the news itself, but he must also have been filled with foreboding at the severe consequences that he knew would now ensue. Herzen, who strongly repudiated Karakozov’s action, wrote forebodingly in The Bell that “we expect only calamity from it, and are dumbfounded at the thought of the responsibility that this fanatic has taken upon himself.”25 Turgenev hastened to write Annenkov that “one cannot but shudder at the thought of what would have happened in Russia if the dastardly deed had succeeded.”26

  What did happen was bad enough: Count N. M. Muraviev, who had suppressed the Polish rebellion of 1863 with bloody ferocity, was appointed head of a commission to investigate the assassination attempt and given virtually the powers of a dictator. Simultaneously, Katkov launched a ferocious press campaign against all liberal and radical organs of opinion whose nefarious influence had led to the horrendous crime. As Herzen accurately foresaw, the government, aided by the demagogic jeremiads of Katkov, now would “mow down everything right and left, . . . mow down the freedom of speech that has not yet fully emerged, mow down independent thought, . . . mow down ‘the people’ who at present are being so flattered, and all this under the name of saving the Tsar and avenging him.”27 The reigning atmosphere of terror is conveyed in the memoirs of Eliseev, who had criticized the early chapters of Crime and Punishment in the pages of The Contemporary. “Every day,” he recalled, “news arrived that during the night this or that literary man had been taken, and the next morning they took so-and-so and so-and-so. Little by little half of the literary men I knew had been taken. . . . All of these rumors, the constantly growing apprehension and the sleepless nights had so enervated me and brought me so near the point of complete prostration that I considered going and asking them to lock me up in the fortress.”28

  Another editor of The Contemporary, Dostoevsky’s erstwhile friend Nekrasov, behaved under these nerve-shattering circumstances in a manner that has always been considered especially reprehensible. As a man of letters and a poet, Nekrasov had been personally associated with all the eminent representatives of Russian radical opinion beginning with Belinsky, and it was Nekrasov who had entrusted the editorial fate of his journal to Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. His own poems had been filled with “civic themes,” those social-humanitarian motifs expressing the convictions of the radical intelligentsia. Despite all this, in a desperate effort to preserve The Contemporary from extinction, he read a poem in honor of Muraviev at a banquet given for the count at the exclusive English Club. His eulogy concluded with the threatening words, “Spare not the guilty ones!” And to heighten the disgrace, Nekrasov also composed a poem in honor of the pitiable and drink-sodden Kommissarov, who was everywhere being celebrated as “the instrument of God” chosen to avert a great calamity from the Russian people. All these demeaning efforts, which severely tarnished Nekrasov’s reputation and poisoned the remainder of his days, proved to be futile. The implacable Muraviev, after the public obeisance of the poem, is reported to have told Nekrasov with condescending contempt: “I would like to protect you from collective responsibility for the evil we are combating, but that is hardly within my power.”29 And he promptly closed down The Contemporary for good and all.

  Dostoevsky too may well have felt a shudder of fear during these frightening days of grim repression. As an ex-convict, he was still under police surveillance; he was also the ex-editor of a journal that had been banned for political unreliability. Nor did Dostoevsky have any illusions about the authorities’ powers of discernment; he knew they were too obtuse to distinguish between various shades of social-political opinion, and that he would be lumped in the same suspicious category as the radicals he had bee
n polemically combating in Epoch. Nothing untoward occurred to him personally, however, though he blamed his difficulty in obtaining a passport to go abroad “on the present circumstances.”

  This remark is made in an important letter (April 1866) to Katkov, which contains a lengthy appraisal of the situation in the country brought on by the measures taken in the wake of Karakozov’s fateful shot. One should remember that Dostoevsky was writing to the leader of the violent assault against all shades of liberal and radical opinion, and that he was now financially dependent on Katkov for his very sustenance. It is thus all the more praiseworthy that he felt impelled to speak out against the wave of repression sweeping the country. Dostoevsky frankly confides that “I am, and probably always will be, an authentic Slavophil by conviction.”30 The Slavophils had always insisted that the Russian people were God-fearing and obedient subjects of the tsar, and that there was no necessity for the authorities to regard them with suspicion.

  If the Nihilists have been successful in influencing Russian youth, Dostoevsky insists, it is for reasons that can hardly be considered evil. “All those high school pupils, those students, of whom I have seen so many, have become Nihilists so purely, so unselfishly, in the name of honor, truth, and genuine usefulness! You know they are helpless against these stupidities, and take them for perfection.” The captive Karakozov was being interrogated and tried in secret, and little information was available about what those doctrines (“these stupidities”) may have been; but Dostoevsky would have been surprised to discover how accurately he had intuited the consequences of that “unsteadiness” of moral convictions he was then portraying in Raskolnikov. Karakozov was a member of small underground group of radicals headed by Nikolay Ishutin, all students or ex-students and all inspired by the extremism of the revolutionary ideas of the 1860s as Dostoevsky had just described them—including the desire for self-sacrifice. “One member of the group,” writes Franco Venturi, “thought of poisoning [his father] so as to be able to give his legacy to the cause.”31 It was out of such a milieu that Karakozov had emerged.32

  Dostoevsky insists that “the innocents are convinced that Nihilism—gives them the most complete chance to exhibit their civic and social activity and freedom.”33 The only possible answer, implied though not stated, is to provide more freedom for the idealism of youth to express itself in some socially permitted fashion. “Do you know what the people are saying?” he asks. “They say that April 4th has proven mathematically the powerful, extraordinary, sacred union of the tsar with the people. And such union should allow certain governmental personalities to show more faith in the people and in society. Meanwhile, everybody now awaits with fear more constraints on speech and thought. . . . But how can Nihilism be fought without freedom of speech? Even if they, the Nihilists, were given freedom of speech . . . they would make all Russia laugh by the positive explanation of their teachings. While now they are given the appearance of sphinxes, an enigma, wisdom, secrecy, and this fascinates the unexperienced.”34

  This remarkable letter, written at a moment when the clamor for more severity against the radicals was resounding on all sides, throws light on the state of mind in which Dostoevsky was composing his novel. During the next few months, straining himself to the limits of his endurance, Dostoevsky worked without respite, even though harassed by his creditors. To Father Yanishev, whose loan he repaid out of the thousand rubles obtained from Katkov, he wrote at the end of April: “My epilepsy has worsened so much that if I work for a week without interruption I have an attack, and the next week cannot work because the result of two or three attacks will be—apoplexy. And yet I must finish. That’s my situation.”35

  In a letter to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya—who had, with the approval of her father, invited him to vacation in Palibino—Dostoevsky explained that his novel would probably keep him pinned to Petersburg throughout the summer. “In truth,” he added a bit later, “the melancholy, sleazy and foul-smelling Petersburg of summer time fits with my mood and may even provide me with some pseudo-inspiration for my novel; but it’s too oppressive.”36 As the spring wore on, Dostoevsky finally decided to give Moscow a try, but then, finding the heat and the loneliness unbearable after a few days, he moved to the nearby village of Lublino, a summer resort about three miles from Moscow, where the Ivanovs had rented a dacha. The Ivanovs’ ten children had all brought along friends, and there were other young people whom the benevolent Dr. Ivanov had taken under his wing. Since Dostoevsky needed peace and quiet in order to work, a spacious room was found nearby to which he could retire in tranquility. He and Pasha installed themselves in Lublino at the beginning of July.

  Two memoirs have been left of this relatively blithe summer of 1866: one by Dostoevsky’s niece Marya Alexandrovna Ivanova, then eighteen years old and already displaying outstanding musical talent (she later became a brilliant pianist), the other by the then fifteen-year-old N. Von-Voght (or Fon-Fokht, to use the Russian spelling), a student at the Konstantinovsky Institute whom the Ivanovs had befriended. Both depict the lighthearted, untroubled atmosphere of those carefree days, when much time was spent in long walks to neighboring villages during the soft, moonlit evenings, on word games and amateur theatricals to while away the hours after dinner, and on the inevitable good-humored chaffing and jesting of high-spirited youth. The usually gloomy and care-worn Dostoevsky evidently blossomed in this rejuvenating atmosphere, and, despite his age and forbidding reputation (everyone there had some knowledge of his early works and knew of his legendary aura as a Siberian survivor), he is depicted as playing the part of master of the revels with great relish.

  “Although he was forty-five years old,” writes his niece, “he behaved with surprising unaffectedness toward the young company, and was the initial organizer of all the distractions and pranks. . . . Always elegantly dressed, with starched collars, gray trousers and a dark-blue, loose-fitting jacket, Dostoevsky carefully looked after his appearance and was very unhappy, for instance, that his small beard was so scanty.”37 Much diversion was afforded by Dostoevsky’s ability to turn out reams of mocking light verse, most of it directed against a young nephew of the Ivanovs, Dr. Alexander Karepin, who was also the butt of impromptu skits equally flowing from Dostoevsky’s pen. Still unmarried, Dr. Karepin was an opponent of the new ideas about women’s emancipation advocated by Chernyshevsky in What Is To Be Done?, and Dostoevsky once worked him into a fury by asserting that the government had set up an organization to encourage women to desert their husbands and come to Petersburg to learn how to operate sewing machines (an allusion to the dressmaking establishment organized by the heroine of the novel). Dr. Karepin took all this with solemn literalness and flew into a rage against such interference with family stability until reassured that it was only a joke.

  Despite all the amusements, Dostoevsky could hardly forget about his novel or about the new work that he had promised Stellovsky by the beginning of the year. His plan, as he confided to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, had been “to do an unheard of and eccentric thing: write 30 signatures [sixteen pages] in 4 months of two different novels, one in the morning and the other in the evening, and to finish on schedule.”38 His morning labors were presumably spent in sketching ideas for The Gambler, which he completed only several months later. According to one anecdote, the late evening hours were indisputably reserved for pressing ahead with Crime and Punishment. A lackey of the Ivanovs, assigned to sleep in Dostoevsky’s dacha so as to aid him in case of an epileptic attack, announced after a few days that he refused to reside with the author any longer. Dostoevsky, he explained, was planning to kill somebody—“all through the night he paced up and down in his room and spoke about this aloud.”39

  Dostoevsky made weekly visits to Moscow for consultation with the editors of The Russian Messenger, and “always returned dissatisfied and upset. He explained this as the result of being forced to correct his text, or even to throw out parts because of censorship pressure.”40 Dostoevsky mentions in a mid-July letter to
Milyukov that the worst “censorship pressure” came not only from the legal authorities but also from Katkov and his assistant editor Lyubimov, who were insisting that he rewrite the chapter containing the scene in which Sonya reads to Raskolnikov the passage from the Gospels concerning the raising of Lazarus. “I wrote,” Dostoevsky confides, “with genuine inspiration, but perhaps it’s no good; but for them the question is not its literary worth, they are worried about its morality. Here I was in the right—nothing was against morality, and even quite the contrary, but they saw otherwise and, what’s more, saw traces of Nihilism. . . . I took it back, and this revision of a large chapter cost me at least three new chapters of work, judging by the effort and the weariness; but I corrected it and gave it back.”41

  This time-consuming task was one reason why Dostoevsky’s hope of writing his novel for Stellovsky during the summer, while forging ahead with Crime and Punishment, proved to be overly optimistic. Dostoevsky admitted to Milyukov that “I have not yet tackled the novel for Stellovsky, but I will. I have worked out a plan—a quite satisfactory little novel.” “Stellovsky,” he adds, “upsets me to the point of torture, and I even see him in my dreams.”42 However, Dostoevsky made no further progress that would enable him to fulfill the terms of the threatening contract.