Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Dostoevsky returned to Staraya Russa on August 1 and immediately plunged into work on the scenarios for A Raw Youth. By this time Anna had come to an important decision. Why return to Petersburg for the winter? They would live in the country in the spring because life there was healthier for the children, and they could reduce their living expenses considerably. Nor would her husband be distracted by the obligations of Petersburg’s social life, where “in winter Feodor Mikhailovich hardly belonged to his family” and Anna herself had to play the burdensome role of social hostess.19 As usual in such practical matters, she got her way. The couple immediately rented the top floor of a villa in town, with a study and separate bedroom for Dostoevsky, and it was agreed that he would go to Petersburg two or three times in the course of the winter to keep in touch with the literary scene.

  Writing to Victor Putsykovich, who had taken over the editorship of The Citizen, Dostoevsky asks for “material on the trial of Dolgushin and company from the newspapers.”20 The public trial of this radical group (named after its leader, Alexander Dolgushin) will be partially employed in A Raw Youth for a fleeting portrayal of the fictional Dergachev group. Many of the Dolgushintsy had been in contact with the Nechaevsty and jailed in connection with that affair, though they took no part in any of Nechaev’s activities. Indeed, they had now converted to that reverence for a Socialist Christ and for Christian moral ideals so typical of the Populists. Their propaganda was drawn from the ideas of V. V. Bervi-Flerovsky, an economist whose Position of the Working Class in Russia (1869) was one of the major works, along with those already mentioned by Lavrov and Mikhailovsky, that inspired the Populist movement. “Bervi-Flerovsky,” writes Andrzej Walicki, “painted a vivid picture of the growing destitution of the peasantry following the introduction of capitalist social relations in agriculture; the conclusion he drew was that everything possible should be done to prevent capitalism from making further headway, and to utilize, instead, the possibility of the peasant commune.”21 A discussion of Bervi-Flerovsky’s ideas had appeared in Dawn, which Dostoevsky read assiduously during its brief life span.

  One of the three proclamations among the Dolgushintsy documents was a shortened version of a brochure written for them by Bervi-Flerovsky in a semi-liturgical style, “Of the Martyr Nikolay and How Mankind Should Live by the Laws of Nature and Justice.” Another, furnished with an epigraph from Saint Matthew, was even more stylistically adapted to the sacramental language of church services. All the proclamations of the Dolgushintsy were based on moral appeal. As the commentator in the Academy of Sciences edition of A Raw Youth notes, “The ethical substance of the ‘justice’ that the Dolgushintsy desired coincided objectively . . . with the substance of the Christian teachings, even though the Dolgushintsy were opponents of Christianity. . . . ‘[T]he religion of equality’ as the source and goal of their strivings, runs through all of their proclamations.”22

  Labors on his novel were broken only by letters from his stepson Pavel Isaev, who had married and become a father for the second time. A letter in November from Pavel’s wife to Anna revealed that she had no idea of his whereabouts. Also, she requested Anna’s aid in finding a foundling home where she could place their baby daughter. Locating Pavel at last, Dostoevsky sent twenty-five rubles, “because of your harsh situation,” but urged him “to try and send it all to Nadezhda Nikolayevna [his wife].”23 Anna did not mince words in expressing her disapproval of his behavior in her reply to his wife. Insulted, Pavel sent the twenty-five rubles back to his stepfather and complained that Anna had over-stepped “all the bounds of decency” in dressing him down. Taking this rebuke to Anna badly, Dostoevsky replied, “It’s impossible not to be indignant, if only from the side (and I’m not on the side for you) about how you treat your children. Do you have any notion of what a foundling home is and of the raising of the newborn by a Finnish woman, amid refuse, filth, pinches, and perhaps punches: certain death. . . . After all, I didn’t send you, only a stepson, just anywhere to be taught, brought up, made into a shoemaker.”24

  It was not Dostoevsky who made the first trip to Petersburg from Staraya Russa that winter but Anna, who left in mid-December to supervise the publication of House of the Dead under the Dostoevsky imprint. He was gloomy about the prospects of any further demand for his prison memoirs, but Anna succeeded in selling or placing on commission seven hundred copies, returning home with a small profit. She had left him in charge of the children, aided of course by the servants and the old nanny of whom he was so appreciative, and his letters show him to be a devoted paterfamilias, observing his children with pleasure. “Yesterday,” he writes Anna, “during the cigarettes [Dostoevsky, an inveterate smoker, rolled his own cigarettes], they started dancing, and Fedya invented a new step: Lilya would stand at the mirror, Fedya opposite her, and they both would go toward each other in time (moreover, Lilya was very graceful); after coming together (all the while in time), Fedya would kiss Lilya, and after kissing they would go their separate ways.”25

  Although by this time he had sent off the first chapters of A Raw Youth to Notes of the Fatherland, so far no response to them had been forthcoming. Two days later, from a story in The Citizen, Dostoevsky learned that Katkov had purchased Anna Karenina at five hundred rubles per folio sheet. “They couldn’t immediately resolve to give me 250 rubles,” he remarks ruefully, “but they paid L. Tolstoy 500 with alacrity!”26 Even more than this blow to his literary pride, what bothered him was that “now it’s quite possible that Nekrasov will cut me back if there is anything contrary to their orientation. . . . But even if we have to beg for alms, I won’t compromise my orientation by so much as a line!”27

  A month later he went to Petersburg. Nekrasov had finally written that the next installment was to be put into galleys; but he still had not proferred any opinion about the work, and Dostoevsky had begun to fret that perhaps his depiction of the Dergachev group had met with some hostility. He cheerfully informs Anna, however, that Nekrasov was “terribly happy with the novel, although he hasn’t yet read the second part.” Moreover, the co-editor, Saltykov-Shchedrin, with whom he had slashingly polemicized in the past, “praises [it] very highly.” The opinion of the satirist, if correctly reported, drastically altered with later installments, which he spoke of as being “almost crazy.”28

  Dostoevsky read part of his proofs at Nekrasov’s home and took the remainder back to his hotel, but feeling the need for company he called on the Maikovs and found Strakhov there as well. Maikov “greeted me with apparent heartiness,” he writes Anna, “but . . . not a word about my novel and obviously because of not wanting to pain me. They also talked a little about Tolstoy’s novel [Anna Karenina], and what they said was ridiculous in its enthusiasm. I started to speak and made the point that, if Tolstoy published in Notes of the Fatherland, then why were they criticizing me, but Maikov frowned and broke off the conversation and I didn’t insist. In short, I see that something is going on here, and precisely what you and I talked about, that is, Maikov has spread that idea about me [that he had betrayed his former beliefs and commitments].”29

  Dostoevsky read the first installments of Anna Karenina during this Petersburg visit “under a bell,” that is, his compressed-air treatments for emphysema. Tolstoy’s novel “is rather boring and so-so,” he reports to Anna. “I can’t understand what they’re all so excited about.”30 He was overjoyed when Nekrasov, as he proudly told Anna, dropped in unexpectedly on the fourth day of his stay “to express his delight after reading the end of the first part [of A Raw Youth]. ‘I got so carried away that I stayed up all night reading . . . And what freshness you have, my dear fellow . . . that sort of freshness doesn’t happen at our age and not a single other writer had it. Lev Tolstoy’s latest novel only repeats what I’ve read in him before, only it was better before’ (Nekrasov said this).”31

  Dostoevsky’s perturbation over the accidental competition between his novel and Anna Karenina was considerable. One of the warmest articles greeting the
first chapters of A Raw Youth had appeared in the St. Petersburg Gazette (written under a pseudonym) by Vsevolod Solovyev. When Dostoevsky paid him a visit, Solovyev recalls the novelist was “in a highly irritable state and in the gloomiest frame of mind. ‘Tell me, tell me honestly—do you think I am envious of Lev Tolstoy?’ he blurted out, having greeted me and intently looking me in the eye.” The startled Solovyev, hardly knowing how to respond, adroitly replied that, since the two writers were so different, he could not imagine Dostoevsky being envious of Tolstoy. “They accuse me of envy,” exclaimed Dostoevsky. “And who? Old friends, who have known me for twenty years.” These could only be Maikov and Strakhov. He sank into a chair, but then leaped up and, grasping Solovyev by the hand, broke out into an anguished tirade:

  You know, yes, I am in fact envious, but only not in the way, not at all in the way, that they think. I envy his circumstances, and particularly right now. . . . It’s painful for me to work as I do, painful to hurry. . . . God!, and all my life! . . . Look, I recently read my Idiot; I had forgotten it completely . . . I read it as . . . if for the first time. . . . There are excellent chapters . . . good scenes . . . you remember the meeting between Aglaya and the prince on the bench? . . . But I also saw others, how much was unfinished, hasty. . . . And it’s always so—as now, Notes of the Fatherland presses, it’s necessary to keep up . . . you take advances . . . work them off . . . and again go ahead. . . . And there’s no end! . . . And he is materially secure, never has to worry about the next day, he can polish every one of his works.32

  Even though matters were smoothed over on the surface between Dostoevsky and Strakhov, and to all external appearances they remained friends, the rancor was never dispelled. An entry in Dostoevsky’s notebook for 1876–1877 reveals the depth of his anger, and also a good deal of contempt. He ridicules Strakhov for leading a sycophantic, sybaritic life. He “loves to eat turkey, and not his own, at others’ tables” (Strakhov dined regularly at the Dostoevskys’), while deriving his self-importance from holding “two public posts”—“a purely seminarian trait,” Dostoevsky sneers. Even more, he accuses Strakhov of lacking any sense of “civic feeling or duty,” so that “for some gross, coarsely voluptuous filth he is ready to sell everyone and everything . . . and not because he does not believe in the ideal, but because of the thick layer of fat which prevents him from feeling anything.”33 This extremely insulting characterization was never published, but one assumes that Strakhov must have come across it in preparing Dostoevsky’s biography.34

  27. Tolstoy in 1877, by I. N. Kramskoy

  The estrangement from his oldest friends made him all the more eager to grasp at the chance of reviving his intimacy with Nekrasov, and perhaps establishing a new friendship with the notoriously bearlike Saltykov-Shchedrin. But he had certainly not forgotten their wounding satirical exchanges of the 1860s, which are reflected in his recently reread novel The Idiot. Although there is nothing to indicate that Dostoevsky was subject to any direct editorial pressure, as he had anticipated, an article by Mikhailovsky, published alongside Dostoevsky’s first chapters in the January issue of Notes of the Fatherland, raises questions. The Populist reading public was, apparently, as much taken aback by his presence in the pages of their favorite journal as was his own literary circle, and Mikhailovsky felt called upon to offer some explanation. “First, Dostoevsky is one of our most talented belletrists, and second . . . the scene at Dergachev’s . . . has only an episodic character. If the novel were based on this motif (as had been the case with Demons), Notes of the Fatherland would be forced to renounce the honor of seeing the creation of Dostoevsky in its pages, even if he were a writer of genius.”35 From the amount of space accorded the Dergachev motif in Dostoevsky’s notes, compared with their ancillary role in the novel, it seems likely that he might have wished to avoid any editorial clash over his final text.

  Dostoevsky returned to Staraya Russa after two exhausting weeks. As well as looking after his literary affairs and taking his compressed air treatments, he had dispatched the business of his publishing firm, visited the lawyer handling the litigation over the Kumanina estate as well as the dentist repairing his dentures, and made the rounds of a host of friends and relatives. He hardly had time to sleep and, to make matters worse, he suddenly received a summons from the police informing him, when he showed up, that he lacked an internal passport. On protesting that “there are twenty thousand people without passports in Petersburg, and you’re detaining a person everybody knows,” he was told that, even though he was “a famous person all over Russia,” laws still had to be obeyed.36 However, he was promised a certificate of residency in a few days and told not to worry. In his last letter from Petersburg, he writes: “Today I’m riding around and living as though in hell. . . . Tomorrow there are the devil only knows how many things still to take care of.”37

  Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg in mid-May to read proofs again and obtain another advance for his second trip to Ems, which produced many of the same negative reactions that had marked the first. As before, there are constant laments about the difficulty of working on the third part of A Raw Youth while taking the cure and in the upsetting conditions of Ems. “My darling Anya, I keep being horrified by the obligations that I’ve taken on myself. I see that, try as I might, there’ll be almost no time to write.”38

  Echoes of his preparation for his scenarios can be found in his letters. “I’m reading about Elijah and Enoch (it’s superb) and Bessonov’s Our Age,” he tells Anna. He was probably seeking inspiration for the figure of Makar Dolgoruky, the Russian peasant wanderer (strannik), who makes his appearance in Part III and represents an idealized image of peasant religiosity (Bessonov’s book is a collection of Russian historical folk poetry). He also enthuses over another text of the Old Testament, and his words not only give us a glimpse into childhood memories but also look forward to the creation of The Brothers Karamazov. “I am reading Job and it puts me into a state of painful ecstasy: I leave off reading and I walk about the room almost crying, and if it weren’t for the vile notes of the translator, I would perhaps be happy. That book, dear Anna, it’s strange, it was one of the first to impress me in my life. I was still practically an infant!”39

  He read the Russian press, and he comments on some of the recent issues of The Citizen, for example, “Poretsky has gone completely off his head with Tolstoy.”40 Alexander Poretsky, an old friend, had furiously defended Anna Karenina against a criticism of the radical publicist Peter Tkachev, who had asked whether it was worth spending so much time talking about a book with such a foolish and even corrupting theme. Dostoevsky was then himself being man-handled in some journals, and he felt acutely the lack of any defender against those who were deprecating him. “Absolutely everyone in literature has turned against me. . . . I won’t go chasing after them,” he writes defiantly, referring to criticism in the Journal de Pétersbourg that “il n’y a rien de saillant” (nothing stands out) in the second part of A Raw Youth. But Dostoevsky refuses to be discouraged: “I won’t lose my energy for the future at all—you just be well, my helpmate, and we’ll manage one way or another.”41

  All but one of these letters from Ems are written to his wife. The single exception is addressed to Elena Pavlovna Ivanova, to whom Dostoevsky was distantly related by marriage and with whom he had once been close. During the summer of 1868, he had asked Elena, whose husband was in the last stages of a fatal illness, whether she would consider marrying him on becoming a widow. Now he inquires after the whereabouts of the elusive Pavel and expresses regret at the hostile rumors circulating about himself because of his claim to a share in the Kumanina estate—rumors that had become even more envenomed since the suit he had filed against collateral claimants. His favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova, had ceased to write to him for this reason.42

  Dostoevsky left Ems after a little less than five weeks of treatment, having been told by his doctor “that my chest is in excellent condition, everything has healed. But the wheezing
and difficulty in breathing are left; he said that may go away on its own.”43 On arriving in Petersburg, he was so short of money that he borrowed from friends; and he hastens to explain why to Anna. “On the way I met Pisemsky and Pavel Annenkov; they were traveling to Petersburg from Baden-Baden (where Turgenev and Saltykov are). I couldn’t restrain myself and paid Annenkov (that is, to be passed on to Turgenev) fifty thalers. That’s what did me in. I couldn’t possibly have done anything else; it’s a matter of honor. Both Pisemsky and Annenkov treated me superbly.”44

  1 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 228.

  2 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 319; May 5, 1874.

  3 Ibid., 321; June 6, 1874.

  4 See ibid., 531.

  5 Ibid., 322; June 6, 1874.

  6 Ibid., 323–324.

  7 Ibid., 328.

  8 Ibid., 331; June 16/28, 1874.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid., 346; July 5/17, 1874.

  11 Ibid., 344.

  12 Ibid., 333; June 16/24, 1874.

  13 Ibid., 338; June 23/July 5, 1874.

  14 Ibid., 360.

  15 Ibid., 338.

  16 Ibid., 354; July 14/26, 1874.

  17 Ibid., 352, 353.

  18 Reminiscences, 233–234.

  19 Ibid., 235.

  20 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 361; July 20/August 1, 1874.

  21 Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford, 1979), 224.

  22 PSS, 17: 302.

  23 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 364; November 4, 1874.

  24 Ibid., 366–367; December 11, 1874.