Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  It was in the spring of 1871, just before embarking on the return trip to Russia, that Dostoevsky took his final stab at gambling. This was the last time he ever approached a roulette table. He was laboring industriously at the first chapters of Demons, but in a mood of depression and anxiety. Anna had become pregnant with another child, and the expectation of an addition to the family only increased Dostoevsky’s torments about their lack of means. They both desired desperately to return to Russia before the new child was born, which meant a departure by the beginning of July. It so happened that Anna had accumulated a small surplus of three hundred thalers and was willing to sacrifice one hundred of them to provide some distraction for her husband. Some subterfuge was necessary because of the presence of Dostoevsky’s mother-in-law, who disapproved of gambling, and the couple concocted a little code that Dostoevsky could use in telegraphing for money from Wiesbaden. Anna writes with hindsight that she was convinced her husband would lose as usual, but perhaps even she harbored a shred of hope that he might, as had occasionally happened, bring home some winnings.

  But Dostoevsky lost all his money almost immediately, and, to make matters worse, also gambled away the thirty thalers sent him for the return home. Once more he writes the familiar pitifully pleading, imploring, self-castigating letters, not even asking for pardon but rather the opposite: “if you feel sorry for me at this moment, do not do so, I am not worth it.” He is frantic about how the news will affect Anna, now in her final months of pregnancy, and also feels guilty when he thinks of his little daughter: “And Lyuba, Lyuba, how vile I have been!” In asking Anna to dispatch thirty more thalers, which he swears not to use for gambling, he envisions the terrible prospect of what might happen if he betrays her trust yet again. “But, my angel, try to understand, after all, I know that you will die if I were to lose again! I am not at all a madman! After all, I know that then I am done for. . . . Believe me for the last time, and you will not regret it.”31

  This last phrase refers to Dostoevsky’s promise, a few sentences later, that he would never gamble again—a promise he had made often enough in the past and often enough broke. But with the benefit of hindsight, one may perhaps detect a new note of resoluteness in his vehement declarations, a desire at last to come to terms with himself once and for all. “Anya, my guardian angel! A great thing has been accomplished within me, a vile fantasy that has tormented me almost ten years has vanished. For ten years (or, rather since my brother’s death, when I was suddenly crushed by debt) I kept dreaming of winning. I dreamed seriously, passionately. Now all that is finished. This was ABSOLUTELY the last time! Will you believe, Anya, that my hands are untied now; I had been bound by gambling.” As usual, too, the letter is filled with affirmations of a desire to return to work, and he proclaims that “I will think about serious things now, and will not dream whole nights on end about gambling, as I used to. And therefore the serious business will move better and more quickly, and God bless it.”32 Anna, who had heard all this before, was understandably skeptical; but time would show that something decisive had occurred.

  The specter of Anna dying from the grief brought on by his follies should be taken as more than a rhetorical flourish. Indeed, this fear had already manifested itself to him palpably in two terrifying dream images. “I dreamed of my father last night,” Dostoevsky tells her, “but in such a horrible way as he has appeared to me only twice in my life, foretelling a terrible disaster, and twice the dream came true. (And now when I also recall my dream three days ago, that you had turned gray, my heart stops! Lord, what will happen to you when you get this letter!)”33

  Dostoevsky not only took dream images seriously, but he also believed in signs and premonitions; in general he was superstitious and susceptible to being influenced by any intimations of the dictates of a higher will. In Wiesbaden, after playing until 9:30 p.m. and losing everything, he ran off to seek the Russian priest. “I thought on the way,” Dostoevsky explains to Anna, “running to see him, in the dark, down unfamiliar streets, that after all he is the Lord’s shepherd, that I would talk to him not as with a private person, but as at a confession.” Lost in the obscurity, he saw looming before him a building whose vaguely Oriental outlines seemed to mark out his destination. “When I reached the church that I had taken for a Russian one, I was told at a shop that it was . . . a Jewish one. It was as though I had had cold water poured over me. I came running home; it is now midnight, I am sitting and writing to you.”34

  Clearly, he intended to convey that he had received a shock to his entire nervous system, and this sensation he may perhaps have interpreted as an ominous sign. It could be that Dostoevsky took this error to indicate, by a signal from on high, that his gambling mania was bringing him into a degrading proximity with those people traditionally linked with the amassing of filthy lucre. Perhaps, whenever he was tempted to gamble in the future, this (for him) demeaning and chilling recollection continued to recur and acted as a barrier. A postscript to the letter confirms that he felt a decisive turning point in his life had been reached: “I will not go to see a priest, not for anything, not in any case. He is one of the witnesses of the old, the past, the former, the vanished! It will be painful even for me to meet him!”35 Never again did he gamble during his several trips to Europe in the following years.

  Dostoevsky came back from Wiesbaden determined, despite the loss of one hundred and eighty thalers, to return to Russia in July. He had calculated that he needed three or four thousand rubles to arrive in safety, but he now resolved to make the journey even though only a thousand might be available. “Staying in Dresden for another year,” he wrote Maikov, “is the most impossible thing of all. That would mean killing Anna Grigoryevna with despair that she is unable to control. . . . It is also impossible for me not to move for a year.”36 Katkov had promised him the thousand by the end of June; but Dostoevsky wrote immediately, as he had done so often after a gambling disaster, to retail his woes and ask that the money be sent as soon as possible. Although the trip would be difficult—the Dostoevskys would be traveling without help and with Lyubov on their hands—there was no time to lose: Anna was expected to give birth at the beginning of August.

  The ever-compliant Katkov agreed to send the money, and the Dostoevsky family departed on July 5. At last back in their homeland, the Dostoevskys still had a twenty-four-hour train trip ahead, but they felt as if they were living through the wondrous realization of a long-cherished dream. “Our consciousness of the fact that we were riding on Russian soil,” Anna recalls, “that all around us were our own people, Russian people, was so comforting that it made us forget all about the troubles of our journey.”37

  1 See the commentary to The Devils in PSS, 12: 198. I am greatly indebted in general to the material contained in pages 192–218.

  2 Ibid., 199.

  3 See Philip Pomper, Sergei Nechaev (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979), 112.

  4 In 1840 Bakunin spread the word that Katkov was carrying on an affair with Ogarev’s first wife (the Russian intelligentsia constituted a very small world). After a furious quarrel in Belinsky’s quarters, during which Katkov called Bakunin “a eunuch” (the revolutionary firebrand appears to have been in truth sexually impotent), Bakunin challenged him to a duel. But no date was set, and Bakunin soon left for Europe in June 1840. See Aileen Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin (New Haven, CT, 1947), 64–65.

  5 PSS, 12: 200.

  6 PSSiP, 14: 103, 100–102.

  7 N. N. Strakhov, Kriticheskiye stati, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1902–1908), 1: 82.

  8 Zarya 7 (1869), 159; cited in PSS, 12: 170–171.

  9 PSS, 12: 172.

  10 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 111; February 26/March 10, 1870.

  11 Ibid., 116; March 25/April 6, 1870.

  12 Ibid., 151; December 2/14, 1870.

  13 On January 7/19, 1870, Dostoevsky records: “NB in general, the results of an attack, that is, nervousness, weakening of the memory, a state of cloudiness, and some sort of pensiveness—now lasts longer than in previo
us years. Earlier, this passed in three days, now not before six. In the evening especially, by candlelight, a sick sadness without cause and as if a red coloration, bloody (not a tint) on everything. Almost impossible to work these days.” E. M. Konshina, Zapisnie tetradi F. M. Dostoevskogo (Moscow–Leningrad, 1935), 83–84.

  14 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 139–140; September 19/October 1, 1870.

  15 Ibid., 141–142; October 8/20, 1870.

  16 Ibid., 145; October 9/21, 1870.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Ibid., 163–164; January 6/18, 1871.

  19 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 164.

  20 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 138n.14.

  21 Ibid., 214; May 18/30, 1871.

  22 Ibid., 215.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Ibid., 115; March 25/April 6, 1870.

  25 Ibid., 125; May 28/June 9, 1870.

  26 Ibid., 113n.28.

  27 Ibid., 127–129; June 11/23, 1870.

  28 Ibid., 216n.21; December 2/14, 1870.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Ibid., 172; January 18/30, 1871.

  31 Ibid., 196–199; April 16/28, 1871.

  32 Ibid., 199.

  33 Ibid., 187.

  34 Ibid., 198.

  35 Ibid.

  36 Ibid., 205; April 21/May 3, 1871.

  37 Reminiscences, 168.

  CHAPTER 43

  Exile’s Return

  On July 8, 1871, Dostoevsky and his family returned to Russia after four years of living abroad, making as unobtrusive a reentry as possible into the St. Petersburg he had quit presumably only for a summer vacation. Already published were all of Part I and two chapters of Part II of Demons, whose plot made spine-chilling use of the most spectacular event of the moment. Indeed, the public trial of the Nechaevtsy was taking place during Dostoevsky’s arrival in the capital, and some of the essential documents, including the coldbloodedly Machiavellian Catechism of a Revolutionary (written by either Bakunin or Nechaev, and perhaps both), were placed in evidence and made publicly available on the very day he stepped off the train.

  The Dostoevskys rented two furnished rooms near Yusupov Park, where they were soon assailed by daily visits from relatives and friends. As Dostoevsky complains in a letter to his favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova, “there was hardly any time to sleep.”1 In the midst of this overwhelming conviviality, Anna suddenly felt labor pains at dinner and gave birth to a son, Feodor, on July 16, happily without suffering the severe contractions of her earlier pregnancies. Dostoevsky was overjoyed and hastened to convey the good news to Anna’s mother (then abroad) and to his family in Moscow.

  A week later, at the end of July, Dostoevsky himself was in Moscow to straighten out his accounts with Katkov, receiving payment for the chapters he had supplied in recent months. The new acquisition of funds enabled the Dostoevskys to envisage moving from their furnished flat, which “was very expensive, full of comings and goings, and owned by nasty Yids.”2 The practical Anna, who had made a quick recovery after the birth of Feodor, soon turned up a suitable four-room dwelling and rented it in her own name, sparing Dostoevsky the legal formalities. Although forced to buy furniture, Anna believed she could retrieve the dinnerware and kitchen utensils, as well as the winter clothing, left in the care of relatives and friends four years earlier. But all had been lost—through careless reshufflings, or in the failure to pay insurance premiums sent from abroad. Worst of all was the loss of Dostoevsky’s library, which had been left in the care of Pasha on condition that he preserve it intact, but it had been sold piecemeal and irretrievably scattered. Anna mentions as of particular value the books inscribed by other writers, “serious works on history and on the sect of Old Believers [raskolniki], in which [my husband] took an immense interest.”3

  At the end of September, news of Dostoevsky’s return was published, and the expected did not fail to occur: creditors immediately began to hammer at his door. One of the most importunate was the widow of a certain G. Hinterlach, who refused Dostoevsky’s request, made in a personal visit, for an extension of a few months, by which time he expected to receive additional payment from Katkov. He returned home in despair, fearing that Frau Hinterlach would attach his personal property and, if this proved insufficient, send him to languish in prison.

  Anna decided to take matters into her own hands and, without informing her husband, paid a visit to the implacable lady. Instead of pleading, she advised her that the household furnishings and the Dostoevsky apartment were both in her name, which meant that neither could be assigned for a debt owed by her husband. Moreover, if Dostoevsky were put in debtor’s prison, Anna would insist that he remain there until the entire debt was canceled. Besides not obtaining a cent, Frau Hinterlach would also have to foot the cost of the prisoner’s upkeep (as the law required of creditors using such a recourse). Anna also threatened to air the whole matter in an article for a journal: “Let everybody see what the honest Germans are capable of!”4 Realizing that Anna was made of sterner stuff than the nervous and distraught Dostoevsky, the creditor hastened to accept the installment arrangement. After this, Anna decided to take over all the debt negotiations, and, meeting the threats with the same arguments, she succeeded in stalling demands for payment on the spot.

  Busily at work on Demons all this while, Dostoevsky was also eager to renew relations with old friends and to make up for the cultural isolation from which he had suffered during his European sojourn. The poet Apollon Maikov, his staunchest friend and most faithful correspondent during his years abroad, introduced Dostoevsky to a literary-political circle that had gathered around Prince V. P. Meshchersky, the founder of a new publication, The Citizen (Grazhdanin), to counter the influence of the liberal and progressive press (though Meshchersky’s opinion of what was “liberal” and “progressive” included journals that the radical intelligentsia regarded as pillars of reaction). Prince Meshchersky was the close friend of the heir to the Russian throne, Tsarevich Alexander, whom he had known since boyhood, and he moved freely in the very highest court circles. He gathered around him a small literary group that included Maikov, the great poet Tyutchev, Strakhov, Dostoevsky himself, and the tutor of the tsarevich, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Pobedonostsev later acquired a sinister reputation when his former pupil succeeded to the throne as Alexander III, and the ex-tutor became known as the malevolent éminence grise of his oppressive regime. But in 1871 he was regarded primarily as a legal scholar and highly placed government official with a liberal past (in the Russian sense), who had supported the cause of judicial reform and the abolition of serfdom. He was also cultivated, had read widely in English, French, and German literature, and had published a translation of Thomas à Kempis in 1869. This was the literary-political environment in which Dostoevsky was to be immersed during the next three years.

  Dostoevsky took great pleasure as well in reestablishing connections within his own family circle. The husband of his niece, Professor M. S. Vladislavlev, who had once been a contributor to Dostoevsky’s journals, now taught philosophy at the University of St. Petersburg, and he frequently invited his eminent uncle-in-law to meet some of the luminaries of the learned world. Dostoevsky also began to entertain, and for a party on February 17, his name day, he sent invitations to close friends. Learning that N. G. Danilevsky, the author of Russia and Europe, was then passing through Petersburg, he asked Strakhov to bring Danilevsky along. They had known each other in the faraway days of the Petrashevsky Circle during the 1840s, when Danilevsky had earned the reputation of being the most thorough connoisseur of the Utopian Socialist doctrines of Fourier. Since then he had become a naturalist as well as a speculative historian of culture and had developed a theory of world civilization with a strong Slavophil tendency. Dostoevsky greatly admired his efforts to prove that Russian culture would soon create a new, independent phase of world history, and he employed some of these ideas for the impassionedly nationalistic speeches of Shatov in Demons.

  In early February Dostoevsky wrote h
appily to his niece that, “thanks to a certain occurrence, my affairs have improved . . . I have gotten some money and satisfied the most impatient creditors.”5 His discretion can be explained by a letter addressed to A. A. Romanov, the tsarevich, which expresses Dostoevsky’s embarrassment “at the boldness I exhibited.” One can only assume that (probably with the help of Meshchersky and Pobedonostsev) he had been urged to explain his circumstances to the heir to the throne, who had come to his aid with a grant of money. Dostoevsky thanked the tsarevich above all “for the priceless attention . . . paid to my request. It is dearer to me than anything else, dearer than the very help that You gave me and which saved me from a great calamity.”6

  The first reactions to Parts I and II of Demons were beginning to appear, and Dostoevsky, who had anticipated hostility from the radical critics, was not disappointed. Enough aspects of the anti-Nihilist pamphlet remained to make the book anathema to those who sympathized even remotely with Nechaev’s revolutionary aims. In one of the most quoted passages of the novel, already cited earlier, a radical theoretician named Shigalev explains that, while he had begun his reflections with the idea of total freedom, he had regrettably discovered that he ended with that of total despotism. And he insists that the only logical answer to the social problem is to reduce all but one-tenth of humanity to the level of a “physiological” equality like a herd of cattle. A typical early review compares such notions to the madness of Poprishchin in Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman.” The novel, in the critic’s view, evokes “a hospital” filled with mental patients “supposedly making up . . . a gathering of contemporary people.”7 One of the commonest charges leveled against Dostoevsky was that his characters were too mentally pathological to be taken as serious social commentary. An implicit subtext of such criticism was that the author himself, known to be epileptic, suffered from the same abnormality that filled his pages.