Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Whether Dostoevsky gave complete credence to Anna’s reassurances may be left undecided, though he was much concerned over the state of her health and spirits. Six weeks later, he informs Maikov, “Anna Grigoryevna is waiting in awe, loves our future guest with all her heart, and bears up bravely and staunchly, although of late her nerves have given way a bit. She is occasionally assailed by somber thoughts, worries that she may die, etc. This makes things rather depressing and wearisome.”3 “I wish you knew, my dear friend,” he continues, “with what joy I read and re-read, again and again, every letter I get from you!” It was only with Maikov that he could exchange literary ideas and impressions, and of course the ardent nationalism of Maikov’s letters provoked a similar statement of Dostoevsky’s own patriotic sentiments. “Here abroad,” Dostoevsky tells Maikov, “I have definitely become an uncompromising monarchist when it comes to Russia.” Dostoevsky had supported tsarism in the past, but largely because, as he writes, “if anyone has accomplished anything in Russia, it has certainly been he [Alexander II] alone.” Now, however, he sees something more deeply rooted at work: “In our country, people have given and continue to give their love to every one of our tsars, and it is only in him that they finally believe. For the people this is a mystery, a sacrament, and anointment. The Westernizers understand nothing of this, and they, who pride themselves on basing their theories on facts, have overlooked the primary, the greatest fact of our history.”4

  Dostoevsky had now reached such a pitch of exasperation with all opponents of the tsarist regime that even a modicum of genuine affability was excluded in chance encounters with old friends. “It makes me sick when I run into our know-it-alls,” he explodes to Maikov. “Oh, the poor wretches, oh, the nonentities, oh, the garbage swollen with vanity, oh, the turds. Disgusting! I met Herzen by chance in the street, and for ten minutes we spoke to each other in politely hostile tones, made a few digs at each other, and parted. No, I can’t take them anymore. . . . The extent to which they understand nothing! And you should see how puffed up they have become, so very puffed up!”5

  By the time this letter was written, in mid-March, Dostoevsky had already sent off the remaining nine chapters of Part I. The second batch of chapters, printed in the February issue of the journal, was accompanied by a note from the editors explaining that no further installment would appear until the April issue. In view of his wife’s impending childbirth, Dostoevsky was granted a temporary respite from the obligation of uninterrupted publication.

  The most important event in the lives of the Dostoevskys during their Geneva sojourn was the birth of their daughter Sofya on March 5, 1868. There are many references to this welcome baby in Anna’s Geneva diary, and the couple often spoke affectionately with each other about little Sonya or Misha who was on the way. Dostoevsky insisted that Anna consult a leading gynecologist, recommended by Ogarev, and the doctor gave them the name of a reliable midwife, to whose care Anna was entrusted. Ever since arriving in Geneva the couple had lived in one room, and they now began to search for a two-room apartment, which was no easy task, given their limited means. Luckily, they found suitable quarters, and though Dostoevsky had engaged a nurse to look after Anna until her complete recovery, he also invited Anna’s mother to join them (she came several months later) to help her daughter in the early period after birth.

  After several false alarms the great event finally arrived, unfortunately on the very night that Dostoevsky suffered a severe epileptic attack and was completely incapacitated. Anna remained silent all through the succeeding hours of labor pain, praying to God for strength and succor and awakening Dostoevsky only at seven in the morning. Refreshed by his sleep, he rushed to summon the midwife, who displayed an indifferent stolidity that both the frantic father and the apprehensive mother found infuriating. Anna’s delivery was extremely prolonged, partly, according to the midwife, because Dostoevsky’s own agitation and transparent fears so much upset his wife. Anna recalls that “at times I saw him sobbing, and I myself began to fear that I might be on the threshold of death.”6 He was finally denied access to her room, and in the midst of her contractions Anna would ask either the nurse or the midwife to peek outside and report on the state of her husband. At last Dostoevsky heard the whimpering cry of a child among Anna’s moans, broke into the room, though the door had been locked against him, and knelt at her bedside to kiss her hands with overflowing joy.

  Dostoevsky announced the birth of Sofya in letters to his family and friends, contenting himself with reassuring and conventional phrases in all except the one to Maikov, from which a more worrisome picture emerges: “On February 22 (our style) my wife (after terrible sufferings that lasted thirty hours) gave birth to a daughter and is still quite ill; you know how nerves become disordered in this situation. . . . Sonya, my daughter, is a healthy, robust, lovable, marvelous child, and I spend practically half the day kissing her and can’t tear myself away.”7 The exuberant parade of adjectives about Sonya confirms Anna’s testimony that Dostoevsky was “the tenderest possible father,” who helped with the baby’s bath and “would sit by her crib for hours on end, now singing songs to her, now talking to her, and was convinced that she recognized him in her third month.”8

  For the moment, though, Dostoevsky was terrified that Anna might suffer a relapse and that he would be unable to pay for a doctor and medicines. Even though the Dostoevskys were not in dire want, thanks to the regular payments received from Katkov, they lived from month to month without a penny to spare and were often forced to pawn belongings to meet an unexpected expense. Dostoevsky was also greatly upset by a report—unfounded, and spread by Anna’s mother—that Pasha Isaev had gone to Moscow to importune Katkov for some of the allowance sent his stepfather. Dostoevsky could not establish whether his information was true or false, but he wrote a humbly apologetic letter to Katkov nonetheless, on the deceptive assurance of his mother-in-law that the incident had occurred. The machinations of Anna’s mother, determined to stop at nothing to end Dostoevsky’s support of his stepson, added to his vexations at this trying juncture. He was feverishly working on plans for the next several sections of The Idiot, and the unremitting strain increased the frequency of his epileptic crises.

  Despite all these tribulations, Dostoevsky’s next letter to Maikov was somewhat less harried (no doubt because the new advance had arrived in the interim). Dostoevsky frequently, and with a touching wonder, mentions as “amusing” and almost “ridiculous” the extent to which Sonya resembles her father. “The child is only a month old, and she already absolutely has my expression, my physiognomy even to the wrinkles on my forehead—when she is lying down—it’s exactly as if she were writing a novel!”9 It was Maikov whom Dostoevsky had asked to look after the distribution of part of his new advance to Emilya Feodorovna and Pasha, and Maikov responded, “you, Feodor Mikhailovich, busy yourself about yours here with unpardonable zeal. So that I dislike going and handing out your money. You, I believe, look through spectacles that are too kindly and make things seem worse.”10 Maikov advised Dostoevsky to make a will so that, in case of his death, there would be no ambiguity about who would inherit the right to the income from his works. Apparently he had heard rumors that Mikhail’s family and Pasha had been pleased that Anna had given birth to a girl; with a son they would have had no legal claim to any of Dostoevsky’s property.

  Dostoevsky followed his advice and in the same month wrote a “declaration” unambiguously assigning the rights of all his works to his wife. So far as his other dependents were concerned, however, he explained to Maikov why his obligations to them during his lifetime would remain sacred. “In Pasha’s case, he was entrusted to my care by poor Marya Dimitrievna on her deathbed. . . . If I leave an impression of goodness and kindness on his heart now, it will stand him in good stead, as he matures.” As for Emilya and her children, “there again, my late brother Misha is involved. Surely I don’t have to tell you what that man was to me from my first moments of consciousness.”11


  The respite of a month accorded Dostoevsky by The Russian Messenger was a godsend, but he still had only twenty days before a continuation had to be dispatched and, he confesses to Maikov, “I still have not written a single line! . . . But what can I do. . . . There were nights on end when I couldn’t get to sleep, not only because of mental strain, but because I actually had no other choice. That is a horrible thing for a man suffering from epilepsy. My nerves are now unstrung in the extreme.”12 Nonetheless, Dostoevsky’s notebooks reveal that, with whatever time he had available during March and April (aside from a brief excursion to gamble), he sketched out various possibilities contained in the action already initiated by his first sixteen chapters. Nothing could be clearer, on the evidence of these notes, than Dostoevsky’s complete uncertainty about the future direction of his story. Edward Wasiolek once again well describes Dostoevsky’s artistic perplexity:

  He is not even sure of how much time elapses between the end of the action of the first part and the beginning of the second part. In the notes, he gives variously three weeks, five weeks, five days, one and one-half months, three months and six months. . . . Dostoevsky is not sure whether Nastasya Filippovna will marry Rogozhin or the Prince; . . . whether Nastasya Filippovna will kill herself, be killed, or die naturally; whether Aglaya will marry Ganya or not; whether Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya will hate each other or be reconciled to each other; whether Rogozhin will be a murderer or whether he will be redeemed by the Prince’s teachings. Dostoevsky’s mind teems with possibilities, but the tyranny of art and the tyranny of publishing require a choice.13

  In my view, one of the most important clarifying notes was made on March 12, when Dostoevsky jots down: “Three kinds of love in the novel: (1) Passionate and spontaneous love—Rogozhin. (2) Love out of vanity—Ganya. (3) Christian love—the Prince” (9: 220). Dostoevsky had defined these various types of love earlier as mutations in a single character, but he now assigns them to different individuals. The love theme is central in the book, especially the tragic antinomy implicit in the Prince’s “Christian love,” but Dostoevsky already had given a hint of it in the confusion of the Swiss children over the exact nature of Myshkin’s “love” for the suffering Marie. Several times in the margin of his notes Dostoevsky puts down the phrase, “Prince Christ” (9: 246); the phrase suggests the tension between the human and the divine that Myshkin will be forced to confront—the tension between living in the world as a prince and wishing to marry Aglaya while being, at the same time, a seraphic visionary inspired by a self-sacrificing Christian love for Nastasya.

  Another important note indicates Dostoevsky’s further reflections on the problem broached two months earlier in his letter to his niece—“How make the hero’s personality sympathetic to the reader? . . . If Don Quixote and Pickwick as philanthropists are sympathetic to the reader, it is because they are comical. The hero of this novel, the Prince, is not comical but does have another sympathetic quality: he is innocent” (9: 239–240). Both Don Quixote and Pickwick are also innocent, but become laughable because of the mocking attitude taken toward them by others. The Prince overcomes the initial suspicions of others by the evident sincerity of his ingenuousness—his total candor, his lack of any normal social vanity, his impassioned sympathy with human suffering (as in his discourses about capital punishment)—and there is as well an implicit recognition that his innocence, which discloses what others strive to keep hidden, possibly embodies a higher wisdom in the manner of the Russian “holy fools” (yurodivy). And so Myshkin’s bizarreries are very early endowed with a suggested religious aura.

  Well into the month of April, Dostoevsky set down one of his major difficulties, which he never did solve satisfactorily: “little by little showing the Prince in a field of action. . . . But for that the plot of the novel is essential.” The “plot” that Dostoevsky envisaged, however, was not one that he was able to incarnate artistically. “He [Myshkin] rehabilitates N. F. and exerts an ascendancy over Rogozhin. He induces humility in Aglaya, he drives the General’s wife to distraction with her . . . adoration of him” (9: 252). Except for this last reference to Mme Epanchina’s affection for the prince, none of these happy results of Myshkin’s influence are found in the text, and the lack of such a plot in the middle sections of the novel constitutes a major structural deficiency. In addition to wrestling with the problems of theme and temporal sequence, Dostoevsky was also concerned with the technique he should use as narrator. Here we can follow the analysis of Robin Feuer Miller, who points to the following passage as a key statement: “N.B. Why not present the character of the Prince enigmatically throughout the entire novel, from time to time defining by means of details (more fantastically and more questioningly, arousing curiosity) and suddenly to elucidate his character at the end. . .” (9: 220).

  On the basis of this passage, Miller characterizes Dostoevsky’s narrative stance in The Idiot as a combination of “enigma with explanation,” and cites other notes in which Dostoevsky indicates his wish to “balance one with the other.”14 There was to be an aura of mystery around the Prince, which the explanations of the garrulous narrator only enhance rather than dispel. “Write more concisely: only the facts,” Dostoevsky admonishes himself, “without reasoning and without a description of feelings.” But then he adds, “Write in the sense of people say . . .” (9: 235). In other words, the narrator would report the facts as he knew them but would not be omniscient, and many “facts” would be simply gossip and rumor—the legend, as it were—that accumulates around the prince’s actions and behavior. As Miller acutely remarks, “this grouping of narrative methods has the effect of placing the facts on the side of rumor and mystery rather than on the side of description and explanation.”15

  A note sketching the final chapters in which the Prince prepares for his wedding with Nastasya reveals more about Dostoevsky’s narrative stance: “(The Prince is insane—according to general rumor that is), and except for a few people they all desert him” (9: 258). This desertion of the Prince in the face of the scandal he has provoked prefigures the attitude of the narrator in these concluding pages, who relays all the various distorted and malicious explanations of the Prince’s decision. Dostoevsky thus deliberately envisages in advance the abandonment of the Prince by the narrator, who continues to remain on the level of “people say,” and for whom the Prince becomes an inexplicable enigma. This limitation of the narrator, however, is part of Dostoevsky’s effort to present Myshkin’s behavior as transcending all the categories of worldly moral-social experience.

  Sometime in the latter part of April, Dostoevsky interrupted his work on the plans for the novel as a whole and managed to write the opening two chapters of Part II, which appeared in the May issue of The Russian Messenger, and he continued to work without interruption on the next three chapters. Meanwhile, his financial situation had worsened because of a few days of gambling at Saxon-les-Bains. Dostoevsky’s luck was even worse than usual on this occasion, and he gambled away all his money in the first half-hour of play. His letters to Anna (two on the same day) are filled with the usual semihysterical apologies, this time with additional self-castigations. Referring to his wife’s “troubles” in caring for Sofya, he adds, “Of whom I am not worthy. What kind of a father am I?”16 He had intended to write Katkov and apologize for the scantiness of the chapters he had barely managed to send after a month’s respite, but for obvious reasons of literary pride had put off this demeaning task. Now, however, he sketches for Anna’s benefit a letter to Katkov in which he asks for a new advance to allow him to work more productively by moving his family to Vevey. “I will remain in complete solitude until I finish the novel. . . . Meanwhile, . . . we can bring up our child without fearing that she will catch cold in being exposed to the sudden local bise (the north wind from the mountains).”17

  Alas for the poor Dostoevskys, the very danger they had wished to guard against was exactly what occurred. Anna’s mother arrived in the early days of May, and Sofy
a was christened on May 4; her godparents were Mme Snitkina and Apollon Maikov. Misfortune struck just at the moment when the worst seemed over. Anna had been advised by the doctor to walk in the park with Sofya so that she could benefit from the fresh air, and when the weather turned mild and radiant in early May his counsel was zealously followed. But the hated bise blew in unexpectedly one day and Sofya caught a chill; it developed into an inflammation of the lungs in the course of a week, and though the worried parents were assured of recovery by the doctor just three hours before the end, she was carried off on May 12. Dostoevsky “sobbed and wept like a woman,” his wife writes, “standing in front of the body of his darling as it grew cold, and covering her tiny white face and hands with burning kisses. I never again saw such paroxysms of grief.”18

  A week later, the depth of Dostoevsky’s grief is revealed in a heartrending letter to Maikov. “Oh, Apollon Nikolaevich, what does it matter that my love for my first child may have been ridiculous, that I expressed myself ridiculously about her in letters to those congratulating me. . . . This tiny, three months old being, so pitiful, so miniscule—for me was already a person, a character. She began to recognize me, to love me, to smile when I approached, when I, with my ridiculous voice, sang to her, she liked to listen. She did not cry or wrinkle her face when I kissed her; she ceased to cry when I approached. And now they tell me, in consolation, that I will have other children. But where is Sofya? Where is that little individual for whom, I dare to say, I would have accepted crucifixion so that she might live?”19