Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Raskolnikov’s dream provides an impressive climax to the main ideological theme of the book and is, in effect, its proper ending. Also effective is the growing need for Sonya that Raskolnikov feels after the desolation of his dream; she offers him not only a means of renewing his life personally but also, perhaps, a way of achieving some sort of assimilation to the people (the peasant convicts refuse to accept him as a genuine Christian). In the final pages, though, just before Raskolnikov flings himself at Sonya’s feet to embrace her and weep, he is sitting on the riverbank, gazing at the steppe, where he sees the tents of nomads in the distance. It seemed as if time had stood still, and he was back in the “age of Abraham and his flocks” (6: 421), the age of untroubled faith. It is only after this comparison occurs to him that he turns to Sonya, but Dostoevsky knew that Raskolnikov could not become another Sonya or return to “the age of Abraham,” and that it would be a daunting task to find an adequate artistic image of a possible new Raskolnikov. This task could hardly be undertaken in his brief concluding pages, and so the epilogue, if not a failure as a whole, invariably leaves readers with a sense of dissatisfaction. It was a sense evidently felt by Dostoevsky, whose narrator speaks of Raskolnikov’s “gradual regeneration” as being “the theme of a new story” (7: 422), and it would be a story that continued to preoccupy Dostoevsky throughout the remainder of his life. For time and again we shall see him returning to the challenge of creating a regenerated Raskolnikov—of creating, that is, a highly educated and spiritually developed member of Russian society who conquers his egoism and undergoes a genuine conversion to a Christian morality of love.

  1 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN, 1984), 258.

  2 Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), 280.

  3 Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works (Cambridge, MA, 1905), 371.

  4 Sonya, who provides the moral standard of the novel, never blames herself for being a prostitute, which is her only way of practicing agape in relation to her family, but she bitterly regrets having failed to give Katerina Ivanovna some cuffs that she had bought to adorn herself. Katerina had asked to be given them, but Sonya refused with the chilling Utilitarian question, “What use are they to you, Katerina Ivanovna?” and had never forgiven herself for this betrayal of agape, this chance to give the dying woman a moment of happiness (6: 245).

  CHAPTER 35

  “A Little Diamond”

  The publication of Crime and Punishment, which created even more of a sensation than had House of the Dead five years earlier, marked a new era in Dostoevsky’s literary career. Once again he was in the forefront of Russian literature, and it was now clear that he, Turgenev, and Tolstoy were in competition for the palm as the greatest Russian novelist. The final chapters of the novel had been completed with the aid of Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, the stenographer who had worked with him on The Gambler, and by this time a major change had also occurred in his personal life. He had proposed marriage to Anna and been accepted.

  The charming story of their meeting and courtship, recounted in the Reminiscences that were edited and published after her death, is one of the most luminous episodes in a life otherwise filled with gloom and misfortune.1 Difficulties and hardships aplenty would continue to plague Dostoevsky and his new bride, particularly in the early years of their marriage when they lived abroad. But thanks to the sterling moral qualities and sturdy good sense of Anna Grigoryevna, the erratic and turbulent Dostoevsky would finally attain that relatively tranquil family existence he so much envied in others.

  The reserved and attractive young lady who turned up at Dostoevsky’s flat at half-past eleven on the morning of October 4, 1866, prepared to take dictation, came from a comfortable family of mixed Ukrainian and Swedish origin. Anna was raised in a strict but, according to her own account, harmonious family atmosphere in which the children (she had an older sister and younger brother) were well treated. “Life in our family was quiet, measured and serene, without quarrels, dramas or catastrophes.”2 Between the ages of nine and twelve she was sent to a school in which, except for the lessons in religion, all instruction was given in German, and her fluency in that language stood the Dostoevskys in good stead when they lived in Germany during the years just after their marriage. Anna was also growing up in the period when higher education began to become available for Russian women. The first secondary school had been opened for them in Petersburg in 1858, and Anna entered in the fall of that year, graduating in 1864 with honors. The first Pedagogical Institute for women opened in 1863, and Anna eagerly entered in the fall of 1864. “At that time,” she writes, “a passionate interest in the natural sciences had arisen in Russian society, and I too succumbed to the trend. . . . I registered in the school’s department of mathematics and physics.”3 But she soon found that the sciences were not her forte. What she enjoyed most were the brilliant lectures on Russian literature by a Professor V. V. Nikolsky, which she attended assiduously.

  21. Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevsky, ca. 1863

  By this time, Anna’s father had fallen ill, and it was clear he would not recover. Dropping out of school to help with his care, she exhibited a sense of duty and capacity for self-subordination that was to mark her conduct as Dostoevsky’s spouse. When she came across the announcement of a course in stenography given in the evening after her father’s usual bedtime, she enrolled with his encouragement, but found the work difficult and continued only because her father insisted. His death was such a wracking event that she interrupted her attendance, but the kindly Professor Olkhin continued to work with her by correspondence. When Olkhin was asked to find a stenographer to aid the noted writer Dostoevsky, he immediately thought of the young and determined Anna.

  Anna was naturally excited at embarking on her first job, which for a woman in those days was an important event. Her first assignment, marking “my transformation from a school-girl into an independent practitioner of my chosen profession,”4 would be to work with a writer whose books she admired and by whom she had been deeply affected. Anna and her sister disputed the issues of Time that were bought every month, and at the age of fifteen she tearfully pored over installments of The Insulted and Injured. The narrator, the tenderhearted but hapless Ivan Petrovich, particularly appealed to her, and she identified his deplorable fate with that of the author. Later she told her husband that she had been in love with him in that guise ever since those early years. More recently, she had been reading Crime and Punishment, and as she entered the apartment house in which Dostoevsky resided, “I was immediately reminded of the house . . . where . . . Raskolnikov had lived.”5

  The flat that Anna entered was modestly furnished, except for two large and beautiful Chinese vases in Dostoevsky’s study (some remains from his Siberian years). The study itself she found “dim and hushed; and you felt a kind of depression in that dimness and silence.” The first person she saw, beside the maidservant, was a half-dressed young man “with hair disheveled and shirt open at the chest,” who emerged from a side room and rapidly vanished when he caught sight of her.6 Anna, much to her sorrow, was to get to know Pavel Isaev all too well when she replaced his mother as Dostoevsky’s spouse. Dostoevsky himself soon appeared, but also quickly quit the room to order tea, leaving Anna to mull over her impressions. He had seemed quite old at first sight, but when he returned and began to speak, he suddenly “grew younger at once.” “His chestnut-colored hair, faintly tinged with red, was heavily pomaded and carefully smoothed. But it was his eyes that really struck me. They weren’t alike—one was dark-brown, while the other had a pupil so dilated that you couldn’t see the iris at all. [Dostoevsky had recently fallen during an epileptic attack and had temporarily injured his right eye—J.F.] This dissimilarity gave his face an enigmatic expression. His face [was] pale and sick-looking. . . . He was dressed in a blue cotton jacket, rather worn, but with snow-white collar and cuffs.”7

  Dostoevsky, who
had agreed to work with a stenographer only as a last resort, was nervous and distraught, obviously at a loss on how to treat this newly intrusive presence. He smoked continuously, stubbing out one cigarette and lighting another even before the first was finished; at one point he offered Anna a cigarette. Ladies, of course, did not smoke in the mid-nineteenth century—at least not in public—but neither did ladies hire themselves out as stenographers and visit the apartments of strangers unattended. By inviting Anna to take a cigarette, Dostoevsky thus indicated that he thought she might be a completely emancipated Nihilist à la Kukshina, a character in Turgenev’s Fathers and Children who was always puffing away at a cigarette. When Anna refused, he inquired whether she was merely doing so out of politeness. “I was quick to assure him,” she writes, “that I not only didn’t smoke, but didn’t even like to see other women smoke.”8 A bit later, he told Anna that “he had been pleasantly surprised by my knowledge of correct behavior. He was used to meeting Nihilist women socially and observing their behavior, which roused him to indignation.”9

  Once this uncomfortable moment had passed, Dostoevsky continued to converse, but in a dispirited fashion. “He looked exhausted and ill” to the observant Anna, and had difficulty in collecting his thoughts; he kept asking her name and then forgetting it a moment later. Such lapses in memory were frequent after his epileptic seizures, and with a frankness that astonished Anna he informed her that he suffered from epilepsy and had undergone an attack just a few days before. At last remembering why she had come, he read her a passage from The Russian Messenger, which she took down and transcribed, and he corrected two minor errors rather sharply. After the first stab at dictation, however, he walked around the room for some time sunk in thought, “as if unaware of [Anna’s] presence,” and then gave up the attempt to concentrate altogether. Telling Anna he was in no condition to work, he asked her to return in the evening at eight o’clock, when he would begin to dictate his novel.10

  On her return that evening, Dostoevsky began by offering her tea and cakes, as he had done before, asked her name again and proffered a cigarette, apparently totally forgetful of what had occurred just a few hours earlier. As often happened when Dostoevsky wished to establish some intimacy with others, he began to reminisce about his past, vividly evoking his arrest and mock execution. While the youthfully impressionable Anna listened with reverential rapture, he described all the details then still wrapped in legend, and he dwelt on some of his emotions at the time. “How precious my life seemed to me, how much that was fine and good I might have accomplished!” It was only later that Anna came to understand the reasons for such disconcerting frankness. “At that time Feodor Mikhailovich was utterly alone and surrounded by persons who were hostile to him. He felt too keenly the need to share his thoughts with those whom he sensed as kind and interested in him.”11

  Dostoevsky finally began to dictate the opening paragraphs of The Gambler but stopped very soon, and Anna left for home to transcribe the text. The next day she arrived a half-hour late to find Dostoevsky in great agitation. He had thought she might not return, and he would have lost not only a stenographer but also the small fragment of manuscript he had managed to compose! Every page was precious to him because, as he explained, he had agreed to provide a novel by the first of November, “and I haven’t even worked out a plan for it.” This was Anna’s first knowledge of Dostoevsky’s perilous dilemma. “Stellovsky’s behavior,” she writes, “made my blood boil,” and she determined to do everything within her power to rescue the intended victim from his clutches. Learning the menacing details of Dostoevsky’s precarious practical situation only reinforced the feeling he had inspired in Anna the night before. “This was the first time I had ever known such a man; wise, good, and yet unhappy; apparently abandoned by everyone. And a feeling of deep pity and commiseration was born in me.”12

  On the second day, Dostoevsky began dictating with more determination, but “it was obviously difficult for him to get into the work. He stopped often, thought things over and asked me to reread what he had already dictated.”13 After an hour he felt tired, decided to rest, and began to chat with Anna again. Once more forgetting her name, and absentmindedly offering her another cigarette, he brightened up considerably when she began to question him about contemporary Russian writers. Nekrasov “he bluntly called a cheat, a terrible gambler, someone who talks about the sufferings of mankind, but who drives around himself in a carriage with trotters.” He mentioned Turgenev “as a firstrate talent, but regretted that as a result of his long residence abroad he had lost some of his understanding of Russia and the Russian people.”14 This opinion would be confirmed for Dostoevsky a year later by the publication of Smoke, the most bitterly condemnatory of all Turgenev’s novels about his native land.

  Encouraged by Anna’s cool determination, Dostoevsky settled down to a regular routine. Anna arrived at his house every day at twelve and stayed until four. “During that time we would have three dictating sessions of a half-hour or more, and between dictations we would drink tea and talk.”15 Dostoevsky, as Anna noticed, now was much calmer when she arrived, and became more and more cheerful as the pages piled up and she estimated that the manuscript would be ready for submission by the appointed date.

  Dostoevsky’s mood also lightened as, in the midst of total isolation, he began to pour out his heart to an avid, attentive, and devotedly sympathetic listener. “Each day, chatting with me like a friend, he would lay bare some unhappy scene from his past. I could not help being deeply touched at his accounts of the difficulties from which he had never extricated himself, and indeed could not.” Each day, as well, his attitude toward Anna, whose name he no longer forgot, became kindlier, warmer, more personal. “He often addressed me as ‘golubchik’ ” (or ‘little dove,’ his favorite affectionate expression), and in response to Anna’s inquiries recounted many of the details of his past life.16 Their conversations thus began to turn more and more to questions concerning his present trying situation and depressed state of mind, saddled as he was with debts and struggling to make ends meet. Anna noted how bad things were when the Chinese vases suddenly vanished and the silver spoons of the dining set were replaced on the table by wooden ones. Dostoevsky explained that both had been pawned to pay some pressing creditors who could no longer be put off.

  Dostoevsky now also began to acquaint Anna with some of the details of his more recent sentimental life—such as his attraction to, and presumed engagement with, Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya. He embellished the story by making their engagement a fact; no doubt he wished to intimate that a highly desirable young woman could agree to link her life with his own. He had, according to this version of events, released the other Anna from her promise only because the sharp divergence of their social-political views excluded the possibility of happiness. Nothing is said in the Reminiscences about Suslova, but the diaries reveal that Dostoevsky showed her portrait to Anna, and when Anna called her a “remarkable beauty,” Dostoevsky disparagingly observed that she had changed a good deal in the past six years.17

  As the talk between the two dwelt more and more on Dostoevsky’s present circumstances, he depicted himself, with all his skill in melodrama, as having reached a crucially decisive moment in his life that would soon decide his future fate for good and all. With more than a touch of Romantic Byronism, he told Anna that “he was standing at a crossroad and three paths lay open before him.” He could go to the East—Constantinople and Jerusalem—and remain there, “perhaps forever”; he could “go abroad to play roulette,” and “immolate himself in the game he found so utterly engrossing”; or he could “marry again and seek joy and happiness in family life.”18 Since Anna had already shown so much friendliness for him, would she give him the benefit of her advice? Which path should he follow?

  Dostoevsky was evidently testing the temperature of the water into which he planned to plunge, and the reply he received from the sturdily commonsensical Anna was the one he had hoped for. Anna assured her
anxious questioner that marriage and family happiness were what he needed. At which Dostoevsky instantly responded with a further question; since Anna had indicated that he might still be able to find a wife, should he seek for an intelligent one or a kind companion? Anna came down on the side of intelligence, but Dostoevsky, knowing himself far better than she did at this point, replied that he would prefer “a kind one, so that she’ll take pity on me and love me.”19 Anna little knew then how much pity and love she would be required to lavish on Dostoevsky in the future!

  “Even then,” Anna confided to her diary, “it seemed to me that he would certainly propose, and I really did not know whether I would accept or not. He pleases me very much, but all the same frightens me because of his irascibility and illness.” She noticed how often he shouted at the maidservant Fedosya, though adding that the rebukes were on the whole well deserved. The daily meetings with Dostoevsky now became the center of Anna’s life, and everything she had previously known seemed to her uninteresting and insipid by comparison. “I rarely saw my friends,” she writes, “and concentrated wholly on work and on those utterly fascinating conversations we used to have while we were relaxing after our dictation sessions. I couldn’t help comparing Dostoevsky with young men I used to meet in my own social circle. How empty and trivial their talk seemed to me in comparison with the ever fresh and original views of my favorite writer. . . . Leaving his house still under the influence of ideas new to me, I would miss him when I was at home and lived only in the expectation of the next day’s meeting with him. I realized with sorrow that the work was nearing its end and that our acquaintance must break off.”20