Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Once in Geneva, Dostoevsky wasted no time in writing a letter to his staunchest friend, Apollon Maikov, asking for a loan. He had already received three advances from Katkov, whose generosity he found astonishing (“What a heart the man has!”),2 and he now owed the editor four thousand rubles. This debt he planned to repay with his novel; meanwhile, it was necessary to survive before he could begin to supply Katkov with copy in January. Disclosing Anna’s pregnancy, which he asks Maikov to keep secret for the time from Dostoevsky’s relatives, he asks for one hundred and fifty rubles for two months, which would be repaid directly by The Russian Messenger. Fully aware that Maikov’s means were limited, Dostoevsky writes piteously: “But really, I’m drowning, have utterly drowned. In two or three weeks I’ll be absolutely without a kopek, and a drowning man extends a hand without consulting reason . . . except for you—I don’t have anyone, and if you don’t help me I’ll perish, utterly perish.”3 Describing his passion for gambling as a moral-psychological flaw of character, he remarks: “And worst of all is that my nature is vile and very passionate; everywhere and in everything I go to the last limit; I’ve been going over the line my whole life.”4

  23. Apollon Maikov, ca. 1861

  Not having been in touch with Maikov for a protracted period of time, Dostoevsky urges him to write regularly; such letters “will take the place of Russia for me and will give me strength.” Dostoevsky’s intense nostalgia for his homeland and his despair over the impossibility of returning reflect now a gnawing fear that a prolonged residence in Europe would cripple his creative capacities: “And I need Russia, need it for my writing . . . and how badly I need it! It’s just like a fish being out of water; you lose your strength and means. . . . I had wanted to set immediately to work and sensed that I absolutely couldn’t work, that the impression was absolutely the wrong one. . . . The Germans upset my nerves, and the life of our Russian upper stratum and its faith in Europe and civilization did too!”5

  Never had Dostoevsky’s love for his native land reached such a pitch of fanaticism as during these years of involuntary expatriation. And never, as a result, did Russia appear to him, with the beguiling eyes of distance, more radiant and more full of hope for the future. “Honest to God,” he writes to Maikov, “the present time, with its changes and reforms, is almost more important than that of Peter the Great’s. . . . [T]here will be true justice everywhere, and then what a great renewal!”6 In the same letter Dostoevsky excoriates Turgenev and the Russian “atheists,” whose ideal of man, presumably modeled on themselves, cannot stand comparison with the “lofty notion of man” given by Christ. Here we can observe how Dostoevsky’s belief in the impending moral-social regeneration of the Russian people—a belief greatly nourished by his exile—blends with his religious convictions and his abhorrence of those who worship before the alien god of Western civilization. Just a few months later, such feelings will contribute to his creation of a specifically Russian image of the highest type of moral beauty possible to humankind.

  At the time he wrote to Maikov, Dostoevsky was working on the essay on Belinsky. Anna remarks that dictation of the piece resumed at the beginning of September, and it was soon dispatched to Maikov with the request to transmit it to the editor of the almanac. But although Maikov followed Dostoevsky’s instructions, the almanac never appeared and Dostoevsky’s pages were lost. Just what the essay contained can only be inferred, but Dostoevsky surely would have tried to include some of the reminiscences later incorporated in his Diary of a Writer (1873). There he evokes the image of Belinsky when the critic had just been converted to Left Hegelian atheism. Responding to the question of whether Christ still had any role to play in the modern world, Belinsky retreats from his initial position that Christ would “simply vanish in the face of contemporary science,” and hastens to agree with an opinion expressed by someone else that “He would, as you say, join the Socialists and follow them” (21: 11).

  Such memories would have flooded back to Dostoevsky as he was writing his article, and if so, then the image of a returning Christ, that is, a Christ reentering the modern world and required to adjust himself to its new moral-social challenges, would have been insistently hovering before him in the period immediately before he began work on his new novel. It is not implausible to imagine that Prince Myshkin’s attempt to live by the highest Christian values in the modern world, and to cope with young Nihilists who considered him as ludicrously outmoded as Belinsky had considered Christ himself, is linked in some subconscious fashion with Dostoevsky’s struggles to tell the truth about “My Acquaintance with Belinsky.”

  Dostoevsky’s epileptic attacks became more frequent in Geneva, and he thought of moving elsewhere, but with barely enough resources to cover their room and meals (they were constantly in arrears and forced to pawn belongings in order to get through a bad stretch), they could not think of leaving. Moreover, Anna would be giving birth in a few months, and Dostoevsky wanted to stay in a large, French-speaking city where medical care would be easily available and he could count on his command of the language.

  Geneva was filled with a large number of Russians living abroad as political exiles, and they frequented the same cafés where Dostoevsky would have gone to read the Russian newspapers, but the only fellow exile with whom Dostoevsky struck up any sustained relation was Nikolay P. Ogarev, a distant cousin and boon companion of Herzen, who was himself prominent in radical circles. Just a few years earlier, in a famous chapter of My Past and Thoughts, Herzen had portrayed the two young men, still in their teens, climbing to the heights of the Sparrow Hills outside Moscow and “suddenly embracing . . . vow[ing] in the sight of all Moscow to sacrifice our lives to the struggle we had chosen.”7 This struggle involved a declaration of war against tyranny and despotism, and Herzen and Ogarev had remained faithful to their youthful oath by becoming leaders of the Russian revolutionary movement.

  The son of a wealthy landowning family, Ogarev was a gentle, softhearted soul whose life had been passed in the shadow of Herzen’s more vital and vigorous personality. A good part of his considerable fortune had been dissipated by his pleasure-loving first wife, whose infidelities, however, had never caused him to renounce her completely. His second wife, when the pair moved to London, became the mistress of his best friend, the recently widowed Herzen, to whom she bore three children. But this matrimonial reshuffling did not disturb the intimacy and close collaboration between the two men—which tells us a good deal about the gentleness of Ogarev’s character. When his father died and he became master of the considerable estate, what part of his fortune had not been squandered by his first wife was further diminished because he freed his serfs on terms so advantageous to them and so economically disastrous for himself. By the time he met Dostoevsky in Geneva, Ogarev was almost as poor as the indigent novelist and lived with his devoted companion (an English ex-prostitute) and her son on a small stipend provided by the affluent Herzen, whose money had always received the most careful supervision.

  Ogarev worked zealously for the cause he had pledged to advance on the Sparrow Hills. He had become co-editor with Herzen of The Bell, and he also edited a special journal, The Common Assembly (Obschee Veche), whose purpose was to stir up discontent among the Old Believers, the lower orders of the clergy, and peasants and soldiers unlikely to pay attention to propaganda cast in a more modern linguistic and ideological idiom. Ogarev was thus publicly linked with the revolutionary agitation of the intelligentsia that Dostoevsky had come to abhor, but he was a highly cultivated, Romantic Idealist man of letters of the 1840s, with a refinement of taste and sensibility that Dostoevsky could respect independently of the partisan enmities of politics. Politically, Ogarev advocated the convening of a zemsky sobor (an assembly of representatives of all the people, including the peasantry) to cope with the problems created by the liberation of the serfs. The call for such an assembly would later become a mainstay of Dostoevsky’s own political articles in his Diary of a Writer.

  The two men
had probably met during Dostoevsky’s visit to London in 1863, when he called on Herzen several times and was introduced to his entourage; and the amiable Ogarev now visited the Dostoevskys at home. “I have just been at the house of the dead,” he informs Herzen on September 3.8 It was because of Ogarev that the Dostoevskys attended one session of the Congress that took place in Geneva a week later under the auspices of a group of progressives and radicals calling themselves the League of Peace and Freedom, who had appointed Bakunin, Ogarev, and another more obscure Russian émigré to represent their native land.

  Bakunin was scheduled to speak at the second session of the Congress, and it was long thought that the Dostoevskys had been present when the celebrated revolutionary warrior—whose leonine personality made him an electrifying platform presence, further heightened by his exotic garb of a Cossack freebooter—made a stirring impromptu speech in French calling for the breakup of the Russian Empire and expressing the hope that its armies would be defeated in the future. He also called for the destruction of all “centralized states” to make way for the formation of a United States of Europe organized freely on the basis of new groupings once the old state frameworks had been demolished.

  In her Reminiscences, Anna mistakenly writes that she and Dostoevsky attended the second session of the Congress. In fact, as her diary proves, the Dostoevskys attended the third session, and so could not have heard Bakunin’s impassioned denunciation of everything Dostoevsky held dear. However, the sessions were covered thoroughly in the local and international press, which Dostoevsky read with great diligence, and he was thus well informed about what Bakunin had so thunderously advocated at the second meeting. Not all of the delegates had been in agreement, as Dostoevsky knew, with Bakunin’s vision of total destruction as a necessary prelude to the advent of a new anarchist Utopia; but it was this vision that dominated the impression left by the Congress on his imagination. Several of his letters at this time contain references to the Congress, and they all ridicule its confusion and absurdity, as well as the self-contradiction of its presumably Bakunian goals.9 In a letter to his favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova, he sets down the most detailed evocation:

  They began with the fact that in order to achieve peace on earth the Christian faith has to be exterminated; large states destroyed and turned into small ones; all capital be done away with, so that everything be in common, by order, and so on. All this without the slightest proof, all of this was memorized twenty years ago and that’s just how it has remained. And most importantly, fire and sword—and after everything has been annihilated, then, in their opinion, there will in fact be peace.10

  Three years later, such reactions will be poured into Demons, where Dostoevsky also stresses the self-contradictions in which the radicals became involved as they try to think through the consequences of their cherished ideas. The theoretician of the revolutionary group in that novel will be reduced to despair because his “conclusion is in direct contradiction to the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrived at unlimited despotism” (10: 311).

  Once having sent off his ill-fated Belinsky article, Dostoevsky settled into his larger task, and in mid-September Anna jotted down, “today Fedya began to sketch the program of the new novel.”11 Dostoevsky’s most immediate problem was, as usual, the financial one, and he wrote to everyone who might be willing to lend a helping hand. Maikov sent one hundred twenty-five rubles, and Dostoevsky also appealed to his old friend Dr. Yanovsky, requesting a loan of seventyfive rubles. The reply, happily containing one hundred rubles, arrived on a day when Anna was particularly gloomy because the pair had no money left at all. “I would certainly have to go to that dressmaker and pawn my lace mantilla. God! How much I wish I didn’t have to go,” she writes, adding that she would rather remain hungry for three more days than bow humbly before the condescending dressmaker.12

  Matters were not always arranged so conveniently, and more than once both Anna and Dostoevsky were forced to pawn their clothing like paupers under the gaze of the impassive Swiss. Letters from both Pasha and Emilya Feodorovna complained that they were short of funds, thus driving Anna into her usual rage at their exigencies. They had just returned to Petersburg from the summer dacha at Lublino and had moved into Dostoevsky’s old apartment, for whose rent he made himself responsible. Anna was incensed at finding listed among her sister-in-law’s grievances a lack of money to redeem her pawned best overcoat. “That is really killing, my overcoat has also been pawned, for more than six months, and before hers mine must be redeemed.”13 Katkov again exhibited his usual generosity, and the Dostoevskys finally had a regular but pitifully small income to tide them over until the novel could be gotten under way. Dostoevsky estimated, with his usual overoptimism, that once writing began he would complete it in five months.

  Despite the pressure of his impending deadline, Dostoevsky nonetheless found time to make two short trips to Saxon-les-Bains for another fling at roulette. The lure of winning a large amount revived once more, and Anna could only mark its appearance with incredulity and stoic resignation. On September 17, she noted, “what a strange man. It would seem that fate has punished him so strongly, and showed him so many times that he cannot get rich by roulette. . . . [H]e still is convinced all the same . . . that he will certainly become rich, will certainly win, and then will be able to help his wretches.”14 The usual results occurred, and after the second catastrophe, in a letter filled with the familiar frantic apologies and self-flagellations, he sketched a plan to ask Ogarev for a loan of three hundred francs (unaware of the veteran radical’s own circumstances). “After all, he’s a poet, a writer, he has a heart, and in addition he himself comes to me and seeks me, which means he respects me.”15 When Dostoevsky put the question to Ogarev, the mention of such a large sum “almost frightened him,”16 according to Anna, but he thought he might scrape together sixty francs. Two days later, the unfailingly generous Ogarev visited the Dostoevskys and brought the smaller amount, which they promised to return in two weeks (whether they kept their word remains unknown).

  Dostoevsky’s entire future, of course, depended on the success of his next novel, which only increased the tension under which he was working. The notebooks for The Idiot illustrate how persistently Dostoevsky struggled to find his artistic path through the maze of incidents that he piles up in such profusion. What he counted on, as he wrote to Maikov, was the sudden flash of inspiration that would enable him to discover, among the swarming multiplicity of his scenarios, the one that he could most profitably develop. All through the fall and winter months Dostoevsky sought this moment and tried to provoke its appearance—with so little success, however, that he feared his capacities might be fading because of the frequency of his epileptic attacks. Writing to Dr. Yanovsky in a moment of depression, he complains that “this epilepsy will end up by carrying me off. My star is fading—I realize that. My memory has grown completely dim (completely!). I don’t recognize people anymore. I forget what I read the day before. I’m afraid of going mad or falling into idiocy.”17

  Nonetheless, work stubbornly went on, though without the necessary spark of insight flashing forth from his notebook pages he became more and more discouraged. At the end of October, Anna awoke one night to find him lying on the floor in prayer, and while there were many blessings for which he might have been imploring God, inspiration for his next novel may well have been one of them. Above all, though, he had determined that he would not compromise his artistic integrity, whatever the cost. Explaining to Maikov why he had abandoned a considerable first draft, he declares, “I said to hell with it all. I assure you that the novel could have been satisfactory, but I got incredibly fed up with it precisely because of the fact that it was satisfactory and not absolutely good.”18 Rather than produce a satisfactory mediocrity, Dostoevsky instead chose to launch himself, almost unprepared, into the writing of one of the most extraordinary and thematically unprecedented novels in the history of the genre.

&n
bsp; Dostoevsky read the newspapers every day, particularly the Russian ones, and perhaps even more attentively now than in the past. “Read them, please,” he admonishes his niece Sofya Ivanova, “because the visible connection among all matters, general and private, is becoming stronger and . . . more obvious.”19 It is not surprising then, to find that for The Idiot, at least in its initial stages, Dostoevsky drew extensively on material from the newspapers. His early notes were affected by what he read of a court case involving the Umetsky family, whose fourteen-year-old daughter Olga had tried to burn down the family house four times and was then brought to trial. Investigation uncovered an unspeakable picture of family tyranny, cruelty, and revolting neglect on the part of the parents. Their inhumanity had led the poor child to attempt to take her own life several times before turning to arson as a last resort. “I’m just dying to get back to Russia,” he tells Maikov in mid-October. “I wouldn’t let the Umetsky case go by without having my word; I’d publish it.”20 Eventually, Olga Umetskaya would inspire the creation of Nastasya Filippovna, the most genuinely tragic and enchanting of all Dostoevsky’s heroines.

  The harrowing fate of Olga Umetskaya was not the only case that left its traces on The Idiot. It is likely that the character of Rogozhin, not mentioned in the early notes, is linked to the trial of a Moscow merchant named V. E. Mazurin, who murdered a jeweler. The corpse, concealed in the house, was covered with an American oilskin; it was also surrounded, exactly as would be the corpse of Nastasya Filippovna, by two containers of something called Zhdanov fluid, used in Russia as a disinfectant and deodorant. Two other crimes culled from the newspapers are also referred to frequently in The Idiot. One is the murder of six people by an eighteen-year-old student named Gorsky, who came from a noble family. Hired as a tutor by the Zhemarin family, he carefully prepared for his crime before carrying it out, killing a doorman and a cook as well as four family members, including his pupil. In The Idiot, Lebedyev speaks of his young Nihilist nephew as being capable of committing a similar deed, and Dostoevsky thus brings this mass murder into the orbit of his conviction that Nihilist ideas were weakening the power and moral conscience in the younger generation.