Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Katkov once again came to their aid with sufficient funds to cover the cost of travel, and the suffocating Dostoevskys left Florence at the end of July, departing not for Dresden but for Prague. The abrupt change of itinerary was the result of Anna’s desire to remedy Dostoevsky’s dispiriting isolation from any literary or intellectual milieu, and there, too, they would be immersed in a Slavic world once again. Proceeding by way of Bologna, where a stopover was made to view Raphael’s St. Cecilia, they stayed for several days in Venice, hardly leaving the Piazza San Marco and the cathedral, but also visiting the nearby Palazzo Ducale and the Palace of the Doges. To his niece he described how “Anna could only utter exclamations and cries of admiration in looking at the palaces and the piazza. In San Marco Cathedral (astonishing, incomparable!) she lost her sculptured Swiss fan that she adored (she had so little jewelry!). My God, how she cried!”8 On departing from Venice, the Dostoevskys took a boat to Trieste, running into a rough sea that caused Dostoevsky a good deal of anxiety over the pregnant Anna, and then, changing to a train on shore, arrived in Prague at the beginning of August. Their plan to settle in Prague for the winter, however, was thwarted by a lack of available accommodations. Dostoevsky’s hopes of living in a congenial circle outside Russia thus came to naught, and he and Anna fell back on their original Dresden goal.

  The Dostoevskys arrived in Dresden in mid-August and quickly found quarters. Ten days after getting settled, Dostoevsky wrote to Maikov. “I have terrible fears about [Anna’s] health. . . . She is constantly unwell, and besides this, worried, nervous, impressionable, and in the bargain seriously fears that she will die in childbirth (remembering the suffering of the first birth).”9 In the midst of these gloomy forebodings, Dostoevsky complains that “I must begin to write, first for Dawn, and then begin the major work for The Russian Messenger. I have not written anything for eight months. . . . things have turned out for me that it would be more useful to sit in debtor’s prison than remain abroad. If I remain here another year, I do not know whether I will be in a condition to write, not even well but at all, so much have I become cut off from Russia.” Besides, Anna also missed Russia dearly, and both believed that Sonya had died “solely because we could not adapt ourselves to the foreign manner of nurturing and rearing a child.”10 Europe was thus to blame for this lacerating blow to their happiness, and if they were to lose the second child, both he and Anna would give way to total despair.

  Happily, their second daughter, Lyubov, was born on September 26 without untoward incident, but Dostoevsky was so concerned about Anna’s state of mind that he hid from her the volume of War and Peace depicting the death of Prince Andrey’s wife in childbirth. The presence of Anna’s mother was also a source of reassurance because she could look after the child in the Russian fashion considered so important. Lyubov’s birth, however, brought a flood of new expenses that far surpassed the family’s limited means; three days after the birth, Dostoevsky wrote Maikov that he would now be forced to sell (or pawn) his linen, his topcoat, and perhaps even his jacket, unless he received the advance he had requested from Dawn.

  By the end of September, Dostoevsky had completed half of the still-untitled work, and in view of its increased length, had asked for a further advance of two hundred rubles. He asked Maikov to visit the editor Kashpirev and reinforce his plea that he receive an immediate reply. Dostoevsky had told Kashpirev that “the time and the rapidity of the aid is almost more important than the money itself,” and that if a delay occurred, “I would be forced on the spot to sell my remaining and most necessary things, and for things worth one hundred thalers would receive twenty . . . in order to save the lives of three beings.”11 Dostoevsky added, for Maikov’s eyes alone, that he was here telling an untruth; everything worth a hundred thalers had long since been pawned.

  Kashpirev replied favorably within a week and dispatched a letter of credit from a Petersburg bank to one in Dresden, but Dostoevsky’s financial relations with Dawn were dogged by misfortune. The letter of credit, by mistake, had been written in such a way as to require another document in order to be cashed, and Dostoevsky waited in vain for this paper to arrive, going to the bank every day and being told, after a while, that such letters of credit were sometimes issued as a joke. Desperate with fear for the well-being of Anna and the new-born Lyubov, and literally reduced to his last penny, Dostoevsky wrote a week later to Kashpirev asking him to rectify the error and send seventy-five rubles immediately. It took twelve days for him to receive a reply, even though letters from Petersburg usually arrived in three days, and no seventy-five rubles were forthcoming. Noting that Kashpirev’s letter, dated October 3, was postmarked as having been sent on the sixth, he dashed off a furious and frantic letter to Maikov asking him to intercede.

  Dostoevsky’s missive to Maikov is one of the most angry that he ever wrote—a letter in which he releases all his pent-up resentment at the constant humiliations arising from his impecunious and precarious literary situation. Dostoevsky had written to Kashpirev deferentially, almost pleadingly; and the apparent negligence with which he was being treated, when he had confessed that both he and his family were being forced to pawn and sell their belongings, filled him with fury: “Doesn’t he understand how much this is insulting for me? After all, I wrote him about the needs of my wife and child—and after that such carelessness! Is this not insulting!” Dostoevsky felt that Kashpirev was behaving toward him “as only a barin behaves with his lackey,” and he returns to this comparison again and again as the tempestuous sentences pour forth in a wave of bitterness and wounded pride. “I walk up and down and tear my hair, and at night I can’t sleep! I think all the time and become furious.” After enlarging on the enormity of the insult dealt both him and Anna, he exclaims defiantly: “And after that they demand artistry from me, pure poetry without strain, without tension, and refer to Turgenev, Goncharov! Just let them look under what conditions I work!”12

  Coming to the rescue, Maikov sent one hundred rubles and another letter of credit, along with the apologies of Kashpirev and the editor’s offer to reimburse Dostoevsky for all his extra expenses. Gratified by such contrition, Dostoevsky insists that he is content simply by the offer being made, and that “I don’t want any compensation, I’m not a usurer!”13 Despite his agitations, he had continued working on the novella, whose title he thought would be The Eternal Husband (Vechny muzh) and it would be even lengthier than previously reported. Dostoevsky was also worried because Kashpirev intended to advertise the work in advance. He had promised The Russian Messenger the first chapters of a new novel by January 1870, a promise he knew he could not keep, and Katkov would become aware that he had been writing for Dawn instead.

  Dostoevsky worked uninterruptedly at his novella from September through December, finishing The Eternal Husband in the first week of December. He was once again so badly short of funds that he could not even afford the postage required for such a bulky manuscript, and he asked Maikov to urge Kashpirev to send fifty rubles immediately. By this time he was so convinced of Dawn’s business incompetence that he preferred to approach the editors with his friend acting as intermediary. He also remarked that he had so far received no further advance from The Russian Messenger and that Dawn could print his manuscript whenever it pleased.14

  Two weeks later, having sent off his text, Dostoevsky once more pleaded with Maikov to put pressure on Kashpirev for advance payment on everything he earned. Or if not, “since it is impossible for me to remain absolutely without any money during the Christmas season,” then at least to forward one hundred rubles immediately. It was necessary to buy woolens for both Lyubov and Anna, and also to christen the baby—which had not been done for lack of funds. “In three days,” Dostoevsky also informs him, “I will go to work on my novel for The Russian Messenger. Don’t think that I just write anything [the literal Russian is: that I bake blinis]: no matter how terrible and awful what I write may be, the idea of a novel and work on it—is yet to me, poor author, more im
portant than anything in the world! This is not nothing [blinis], but the dearest and most longstanding of my ideas.”15 Dostoevsky can only be referring here to his Atheism plan, which by this time had metamorphosed into The Life of a Great Sinner. It was this novel, or one of its parts, that he was now setting out to compose.

  A month later, Strakhov was able to tell Dostoevsky that the notices for The Eternal Husband were uniformly favorable. Dostoevsky’s artistic reputation had been badly tarnished by The Idiot, but this new work succeeded in restoring some of its gloss. Despite this reassuring reception, so flattering for Dostoevsky’s literary self-esteem, he wrote his niece after sending off the manuscript that “I have hated this story from the very start.”16 Not even the recognition that he had turned out a small masterpiece could decrease his resentment at having been deflected from a major novel that, he was convinced, would once and for all establish his claim to a place in the pantheon of major Russian writers.

  Despite Dostoevsky’s frustration at being distracted from the great work he was planning, this seemingly uncomplicated novella may be seen as his first artistic answer to Tolstoy’s increasing fame. The most important subtext for The Eternal Husband is provided by Apollon Grigoryev’s theory of Russian culture. Both of the main characters—Velchaninov and Trusotsky—speak of “peaceable” (smirny) and “predatory” (khischny) types of personalities. These terms were used by Grigoryev to characterize Russian literature and culture, which he viewed as a struggle between such types; and the same terms had just been revived and employed by Strakhov in his essay on Tolstoy. Types of this kind were understood not only as moral-psychological categories but, in addition, possessed a strong social-cultural significance. The “predatory” figures—masterful, heroic, brilliant, often glamorously Byronic—were identified with Western European culture, the “simple” or “peaceable” ones with Russia and the Russian national character. War and Peace, according to Strakhov, had borne out Grigoryev’s views to perfection, and offered the greatest depiction so far achieved of this memorable internecine warfare taking place within the Russian national psyche.17

  Dostoevsky, a great admirer of Grigoryev, had been deeply influenced by his typology of Russian culture, but he had never accepted all of its details. Indeed, as Grigoryev revealed in a series of articles titled “The Paradoxes of Organic Criticism”—subtitled “Letters to F. M. Dostoevsky”—the novelist had once taxed him personally with being too “theoretical.” Just what Dostoevsky meant by his remark to Grigoryev may perhaps be inferred from The Eternal Husband, in which both the lordly Velchaninov and the docile cuckold Trusotsky momentarily exchange personalities and exhibit characteristics of each other under the stress of events. The novella may thus be taken not only as a comment on Grigoryev but also as a reply to what Dostoevsky considered Strakhov’s excessive praise of Tolstoy, against whose pure personality types he was presenting his own more tangled view of the mutabilities and indeterminacies of human character.18 Both characters turn out to contain possibilities of either type, the predatory and the peaceable, when a crisis occurs in their lives—a crisis that can be surmounted only by the self-transcendence of the ego. The Eternal Husband thus may be seen as Dostoevsky’s first artistic answer to Tolstoy’s increasing fame; the second would have been the great work he was planning, on as vast a scale as War and Peace, under the title of The Life of a Great Sinner.

  In mid-December 1869 Dostoevsky speaks of his obligation to The Russian Messenger with anxiety and indicates how he will proceed. He is engaged on a vast novel, he tells his niece, “only the first part of which will be published in The Russian Messenger. It will not be finished sooner than in five years, and will be divided into three separate novellas. This novel is the whole hope and whole dream of my life—not only as regards money.”19 Dostoevsky, not surprisingly, voices all his qualms about taking such a decision. “In order to write this novel—I would need to be in Russia,” he insists. “For instance, the second half of my first novel takes place in a monastery. I need not just see it (I have seen a lot) but to live in a monastery for a while too.”20

  The bulk of Dostoevsky’s notes deal with the childhood and boyhood of the “great sinner,” who is a member of an “accidental family”—as Dostoevsky liked to call households with no settled traditions of order or decorum. The central figure here is an illegitimate child, sent to live with an elderly couple in the countryside and raised in isolation from his father (a situation that will later be used for A Raw Youth). Dostoevsky’s rivalry with Tolstoy is apparent in the definition he sets down of what he wishes his character to represent. “A type entirely contrary to the scion of that noble family of counts, degenerate to the point of swinishness, which Tolstoy had depicted in Childhood and Boyhood. This [Dostoevsky’s new type] is simply a primitive type, subconsciously agitated by a primitive strength, a strength which is completely spontaneous” (9: 128).

  The great sinner was to possess such an elemental force, symbolic of that contained in the Russian people, “an extraordinary inner power hard to bear for those who possess it, a power which demands peace out of the storms of life to the point of suffering, yet cannot help stirring up storms before it finds peace. He finally comes to rest in Christ, but his whole life is storm and disorder.” Such a type “joyfully throws itself—in its period of searches and wanderings—into monstrous deviations and experiments until it comes to rest on an idea powerful enough to be fully proportionate to its own immediate primitive strength—an idea so powerful that it can at last organize this strength and calm it down to a tranquilizing stillness” (9: 128).

  The great sinner is sent off to a monastery as a means of disciplining his rebellious behavior, portrayed through incidents such as the desecration of an icon. There he encounters a saintly monk named Tikhon. The character of Tikhon would be based on the figure of Saint Tikhon-Zadonsky, a Russian clergyman of the mid-eighteenth century who was elevated to sainthood in 1860 and left an abundant literary legacy (fifteen volumes). In the spring of 1870 Dostoevsky had told Maikov that “I took [him] into my heart with rapture a long time ago,”21 perhaps when an edition of Tikhon’s works was published at the time of his canonization. Father George Florovsky, the greatest modern historian of Russian theology, speaks of Saint Tikhon as undergoing what Saint John of the Cross called la noche oscura, the “dark night of the soul,”22 and Dostoevsky would have been deeply moved by Saint Tikhon’s open expression of moods of depression, despair, and susceptibility to temptation. Dostoevsky also found in his writings many of the moral-religious precepts that formed the basis of his own conception of Russian Orthodoxy.

  Evil, according to Saint Tikhon, was necessary to the world to bring about the birth of the good, and the chief Christian task of mankind was to conquer its own evil proclivities, to conquer “pride by humility, anger by gentleness and patience, hatred by love.”23 It is only through the experience of wrestling with the evil in itself that humankind discovers the value and meaning of human existence. Surely such ideas are the source of the famous notebook entry in which Dostoevsky defined what was for him “the Orthodox point of view” dominant in his work: “man is not born for happiness . . . because the knowledge of life and consciousness . . . is acquired by experience pro and contra, which one must take upon oneself. (By suffering, such is the law of our planet)” (7: 155).

  For Tikhon, indeed, even crime was a way of clearing the path to such a discovery of Christian truth; in principle, the possibility of enlightenment and purification was never closed, no matter how burdensome the crime weighing down a human consciousness. “There is no kind of sin,” he declared, “and there cannot be any such on earth, that God would not pardon to someone who sincerely repents.” There are many references in Tikhon’s works to “a great sinner,” and he insists that, whatever the multitude and magnitude of sins, God would always pardon a remorseful heart. One of the best-known incidents of Saint Tikhon’s life involved a quarrel with a landowner reputed to be a “Voltarian.” Disputin
g about questions of faith with Tikhon, the irascible landowner flared up and struck the clergyman in the face. Although known for his fiery temper, Tikhon immediately kneeled and begged forgiveness for having provoked the blow. Such an incident would certainly have been taken by Dostoevsky as an early symbolic instance of that clash between the disintegrating effects of Western reason and the kenotic Russian faith that had now become the great theme of his life.

  During his stay in the monastery, and under the tutelage of Tikhon, the egoism of the great sinner turns inward on itself. He is still obsessed by a need for power and domination; but he begins to believe that this need can be satisfied only by first conquering himself. Under the notebook entry titled “The Principal Idea” we read: “After the monastery and Tikhon the great sinner again goes into the world to be the greatest of men . . . he is the proudest of the proud and treats people with the greatest arrogance. . . . But (and this is the essential) thanks to Tikhon he had been seized by the idea (conviction): that to conquer the entire world it suffices to conquer oneself” (9: 138–139).