Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  But if Russians have not yet worked out their own code of manners, and if the dangers of such a lack have become obvious, they can only demean themselves by attempting to imitate any of the European models. For all his weaknesses, Aleksey arouses sympathy both because of his honesty about himself (except in the case of his night with Polina, which she has presumably forgiven) and because of his unerring eye and refreshing disrespect for the hypocrisies, pretensions, and falsities by which the Europeans cover up their shortcomings. There is an engaging brashness and sincerity about him that wins the friendship of all the “positive” characters (Polina, Auntie, Mr. Astley), and Dostoevsky certainly hoped the reader would share some of their sentiment. Nor was Aleksey meant to be perceived as entirely a lost man, if we judge by his reaction upon learning that Mr. Astley had been sent by Polina: “ ‘Really, Really!,’ I exclaimed, as tears came gushing from my eyes. I just could not hold them back . . .” (5: 317). Such tears may presage something for the future, and they surely indicate an access of undistorted feeling of which the earlier Aleksey had been incapable.

  While The Gambler should not be read in simple biographical terms, it nonetheless allows us to catch a glimpse of how Dostoevsky may have rationalized his gambling addiction to himself. From this angle, the work may be considered both a self-condemnation and an apologia. No doubt it must have been some consolation to believe, as Dostoevsky probably did, that his own losses, which almost always resulted from a failure to stop playing when he was ahead, were the consequence of a positive national Russian trait carried to excess, and not merely a personal defect of character. He was, after all, a “poet” in both the literal and symbolic senses of that word; and his “poetry” was proof that he found it impossible to subordinate his personality to the flesh-god of money, before whom, as he had written in Winter Notes, all of Western civilization was now prostrate. He lost materially, but in some sense he gained a certain reaffirmation of national identity from his very losses. One should also keep in mind that, at the time Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler, his yielding to this weakness had so far injured no one but himself, and could still be referred to with a certain bravado. It was only after his second marriage that the addiction began to elicit feelings of acute guilt and remorse.

  The Gambler, in any case, is a sparkling little work, whose style and technique are in the vein of satirical social comedy familiar from Dostoevsky’s Siberian novellas. The relation of Aleksey and Polina, and the portrayal of the treacherous allurements of gambling, strike a deeper note than these earlier productions; but while Aleksey’s gambling may be a “challenge to fate,” this challenge is not developed into the moral-religious questionings of the major novels. Not the least interesting aspect of The Gambler, finally, is that it points both backward and forward in Dostoevsky’s artistic development. Aleksey’s obsession with winning somewhat resembles Raskolnikov’s fascination with his theory of crime, and neither character can maintain the total, rational self-control of the emotions that is the prerequisite of success. Pointing to the future is the figure of Polina, the pure-souled woman degraded and almost driven mad by the violation of her deepest feelings when she finds herself in the position of being bought and sold. The outlines of the queenly Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot, consumed with pathological hatred of herself and others for the same reasons, are already visible here; so, more faintly, is Aglaya Epanchina in Aleksey’s remarks about “young Russian ladies” and their sentimental illusions about Europeans. In the tenaciously long-lived Auntie, the warm and lovable matriarchal tyrant, we can see a first sketch for the similarly sympathetic and choleric Mme Epanchina. Dostoevsky was thus already feeling his way toward some of the characters of his next great novel, but when he wrote The Gambler, he had not yet the faintest idea of what this new major undertaking would turn out to be.

  1 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 50–51.

  CHAPTER 37

  Escape and Exile

  The days immediately following the wedding were filled with postnuptial celebrations, and Anna remarks that “I drank more goblets of champagne during those ten days than I did all the rest of my life.” So too did her husband, and those celebratory libations brought on Anna’s first encounter with the frightening physical manifestations of Dostoevsky’s dread disease. It overtook him at the home of her sister, just as Dostoevsky, “extremely animated,” was telling some story. Suddenly, “there was a horrible, inhuman scream, or more precisely a howl—and he began to topple forward.”1 Although her sister became hysterical and fled from the room with a “piercing scream,” Anna seized Dostoevsky firmly by the shoulders, tried to place him on the couch, and, when this failed, pushed aside the obstructing furniture and slid his body to the floor. There she sat holding his head in her lap until his convulsions ceased and he began to regain consciousness. The attack was so severe that he could hardly speak, and the words he succeeded in uttering were gibberish. An hour later he suffered another onslaught, “this time with such intensity that for two hours after regaining consciousness he screamed in pain at the top of his voice. It was horrible.”2 Such repeated attacks were mercifully infrequent, and Anna attributes the one she describes to the nervous strain, as well as the obligatory overindulgence in drink, of the postnuptial visits.

  Anna proved capable of coping with such severe tests of her equilibrium and did not allow them to dampen her joy at being Dostoevsky’s bride. But she found herself initially helpless before a more insidious and covert threat—one that arose partly from the circumstances of Dostoevsky’s life, partly from her bruising contacts with other members of Dostoevsky’s family, most notably his stepson, Pasha. Dostoevsky’s routine made it almost impossible for her to spend any time with him alone. He wrote or read at night, slept through most of the morning, and rose in the early afternoon. An early riser, Anna busied herself with household matters while he slept, but found that it was usual for his young nieces and nephews to drop in during the late morning and stay for lunch. In the afternoon, other friends and relatives arrived, and often remained for dinner. Anna, with no experience in managing a household, found this unceasing round of hospitality wearisome. The only people she found interesting and enjoyed entertaining were Dostoevsky’s literary friends, but Anna, closer in age to the young, was asked to take them to another room and look after their amusement.

  The irksomeness of Dostoevsky’s sister-in-law, who spared no occasion to comment on Anna’s shortcomings as a housekeeper—of course only to help her to improve!—was nothing compared to the machinations of Pasha, who carried on a veritable campaign designed to undermine the marriage and protect his hitherto unchallenged power over the Dostoevsky household management. Anna quickly came to feel that the daily aggravations were part of a larger purpose of “embroiling my husband and myself in quarrels and forcing us to separate.”3 Worst of all, while Dostoevsky was present, Pasha concealed his hostility under a surface of amiability; but he did not restrain himself from coarsely expressing his resentment to Anna’s face once they were alone. Dostoevsky, who was infinitely patient with his stepson’s shortcomings, was completely hoodwinked, and even commented happily on the improvement of his manners as a result of Anna’s influence.

  All these tensions led Anna to question the viability of her marriage. There was also anger that “he, ‘the great master of the heart,’ failed so see how difficult my life was and kept pressing his boring relatives on me and defending Paul, who was so hostile to me.”4 The very nature of their relationship made her sense of estrangement important. On her part, as Anna explains, this was more “cerebral” than physical; her passion for Dostoevsky was “not a passion which might have existed between persons of equal age.” It was, rather, “an idea existing in my head . . . it was more like adoration and reverence for a man of such talent and such noble qualities of spirit,” and “a searing pity for a man who had suffered so much without ever knowing joy and happiness, and who was so neglected by all his near ones.”5 The very basis of Anna’s love for Dostoevsky was thre
atened by the conditions of their life together.

  Matters came to a head about a month after the wedding, when Anna felt too tired and upset to accompany Dostoevsky to an evening party at the Maikovs. The moment his stepfather had left, Pasha assailed her with more than his usual vehemence, accusing her of spending too much of “the funds intended for all of us.”6 The beleaguered Anna broke down completely, retreated to her room in tears, and was still sobbing inconsolably in the darkened chamber when Dostoevsky returned. In reply to his anxious inquiry, Anna finally poured out all her griefs, to which he listened in astonishment. When Anna expressed fears that he had ceased to love her, he was quick with reassurances and proposed a trip to Moscow to allow them to escape from the pressures of their Petersburg routine.

  Dostoevsky had been thinking of just such a trip to see Katkov and obtain an advance that would allow them to travel abroad in the summer. The reunited pair left the very next day, and on their arrival Anna was introduced to the Ivanovs, who were pleasantly surprised that he had married a respectable young woman and not “a Nihilist, with bobbed hair and spectacles” (the information that Anna was a stenographer had led to such suspicions).7 One incident during their visit taught Anna a lesson she was never to forget. Taking part in a card game one evening, she was seated next to a lively young man to whom she responded with animation. Dostoevsky, playing in a different room, looked in frequently to see how Anna was faring; and his mood as the evening wore on became gloomier and gloomier. On returning to their hotel, in response to Anna’s attempts to cheer him up, he turned on her furiously with the accusation of being a “heartless coquette” who had flirted with a younger man all evening solely to torment her husband.8 This little scene ended with Dostoevsky comforting Anna and begging forgiveness for his accusations; but it revealed the bottomless depths of his anxieties, and she resolved to be more careful in the future.

  Katkov readily accorded Dostoevsky another advance of a thousand rubles. It seemed that the hope of going abroad would finally be realized, and Anna returned to Petersburg glowing with a secret sense of satisfaction and triumph. Nothing was said as yet about their plan, but matters came to a head quickly when Emilya Feodorovna suggested renting a large house for the summer in Pavlovsk. To this proposal, Dostoevsky replied that he and Anna would be abroad at that time. Conversation stopped instantly, Emilya Feodorovna went to speak with Dostoevsky privately in his study, and a furious Pasha flatly told Anna that he would not tolerate such a trip. His remonstrances with Dostoevsky proved unavailing, however, and the family finally fell back on demanding that advance sums for their expenses be left before the couple’s departure.

  By the time these sums were totaled up, the amount far exceeded the thousand rubles that Katkov had promised. Matters were made worse when one of Dostoevsky’s creditors insisted on at least partial payment of a debt under the threat of seizing and selling Dostoevsky’s belongings. The financial obstacles to a trip seemed insuperable, and Dostoevsky was willing to abandon it and accept Pavlovsk. Anna, however, was convinced that “if we were to save our love, we needed to be alone together if only for two or three months . . . then the two of us would come together for the rest of our lives, and no one could separate us again.” With the determination that always marked her actions, she decided to raise the travel money herself by pawning her dowry. “Possessions—furniture, fancy clothes—have great importance when one is young,” remembers the elderly Anna looking back on that time. “I was extremely fond of my piano, my charming little tables and whatnots, all my lovely things so newly acquired.”9 But she was convinced that the future happiness of her marriage was at stake, and this belief crowded out every other sentiment in guiding her course of action.

  Anna immediately went to consult her mother, who agreed that such a radical step was necessary to ensure the future of the union. “She was a Swede,” Anna comments, “and she feared that the good habits inculcated by my upbringing would vanish thanks to our Russian style of living, with its disorderly hospitality.”10 Dostoevsky had always refused to take a penny of Anna’s belongings and was harder to persuade; it was only after she broke down and began to sob in the street, imploring him to “save our love, our happiness,” that he hastily agreed.11 Acquainted with the waverings of his will, Anna insisted that they go straightaway to apply for a foreign passport. Luckily, the clerk was an admirer of Dostoevsky and promised that the document would be ready in a few days. Anna’s mother gathered up the jewelry, silver, and other valuables the very same evening, and an appraiser came a day later for the furniture.

  Dostoevsky then announced that he and Anna were going abroad after all—and no later than two days hence! Pasha’s objections were cut short, and Dostoevsky told his dependents that they would receive the sums asked for but not a kopek more; the extra money was Anna’s. The pair packed quickly, entrusting all future financial arrangements to Anna’s mother, and took along only a necessary minimum, since they expected to be gone for no longer than three months. In fact, they were not to return for four years. Although Anna was later able to write that “I shall be eternally grateful to God for giving me strength in my decision to go abroad,” this gratitude was often tempered by bitter afterthoughts in the years closer to the event.12 Anna’s devotion and moral stamina were tested to the uttermost, and it was her ability to measure up to the challenge that, in the long run, forged an unshakable foundation for her marriage.

  The Dostoevskys left for their European “vacation” on April 12/26, 1867, taking the train from Petersburg to Berlin, and then moved on to Dresden, where they rented three rooms in a private home and apparently intended to settle. Dostoevsky, heavily in debt to Katkov, planned to work there on his next novel, and to write an article on Belinsky for which he had received an advance from another editor. But the distractions entailed by their first weeks of living abroad, and particularly by a disastrous ten-day expedition to the roulette tables at Hombourg just a month after arriving, prevented him from progressing at all on the novel.

  Anna had promised her mother to keep an account of the trip, and this shorthand diary, which she kept until the birth of her first child a little over a year later, provides an account of day-to-day events in Dostoevsky’s life. Unfortunately, if we are to judge from her pages, Dostoevsky hardly spoke to her at all about his work; even when she had some knowledge of it—he dictated his lost article on Belinsky to her, for example—she simply records the fact and says not a word about its content. What preoccupied her—and not without good reason—was the straitened circumstances in which they lived, the problem of adjusting to Dostoevsky’s continually changing moods, and the difficulties of living in a foreign environment where they did not know a soul and were constantly thrown back on themselves for companionship.

  Dostoevsky was not an easy person to get along with even under the best conditions, and his continually recurring epilepsy invariably made him irritable, intolerant, and quarrelsome. Nor was his temper improved by his rabid xenophobia, which manifested itself in an intense dislike of the Germans among whom he lived and whose language he spoke brokenly. Anna was much more peaceable and less bigoted, but she joined Dostoevsky in denouncing the congenital “stupidity” of Germans or fretting bitterly about the petty cheating from which they suffered at the hands of waiters, landlords, and tradespeople. What Anna called Dostoevsky’s “irritable, volcanic nature” also led to continual disagreements between the two. Dostoevsky was vexed at having his utterances challenged, and often upbraided Anna harshly when she differed with him. On one such occasion, when he was railing against the Germans, “I only contradicted for the sake of something to say . . . but Feodor . . . told me if I was as stupid as that I had better hold my tongue.” Another time, they quarreled about a “sunset”! One dispute often led to another, and Anna jotted down, dispiritedly, “What does it all mean, this perpetual quarreling between us?”13

  Anna nonetheless was infinitely tolerant of her husband’s bad-tempered reactions and never fo
rgot—how could she, being a pityingly pained witness to his frequent epileptic convulsions—that much of his irascibility was caused by the deranged state of his nerves. She never really took such abuse seriously, and writes, “I simply can’t be cross with him; sometimes I show a severe face, but I’ve only to look at him for all my wrath to melt away.” Dostoevsky’s rages, as she depicts them, were all on the surface. It was Dostoevsky’s habit to wake her and say good-night before going to bed (she retired earlier), and then “we talk together for ages, and he says pretty things to me and we joke and laugh, and that is the time we seem to come nearest together and is most precious to me of all the hours of the day.”14 All of their disputations, so far as can be judged from Anna’s diary, ended with such renewed pledges of affection.

  Anna was doggedly determined to make her marriage a success. What she feared most, rather than the hardships arising from their poverty or Dostoevsky’s mercurial personality, was that she might lose him to his earlier passion for Suslova. Anna kept a watchful eye on her husband and knew that he was corresponding with his ex-mistress. Just before leaving for Dresden, Dostoevsky had received a letter from Suslova, to which he replied shortly after arriving there. Suslova had been living abroad for a year, and he brings her up to date. Of Anna, he writes that she has “a remarkably good and open character. . . . The difference in age is terrible (20 and 44), but I am more and more convinced that she will be happy. She has a heart and knows how to love.” Dostoevsky responded to Suslova’s complaints about her own sadness with an implicit reproach: “you consider people to be either infinitely radiant, or the next moment scoundrels and vulgarians.”15 Dostoevsky knew that Anna would not evaluate him in such exacting terms, and that inexhaustible tolerance was what he required most of all.