“There is reason to lose one’s mind…the situation becomes more intolerable with every day. Many decent people have fallen into despair and watch with dull calm to see when this world will fall apart,” wrote the famous Westernizer Professor Granovsky.
In that deadly silence, in that dense fog, a very dangerous light exploded.
In the later 1840s a certain M. Butashevich-Petrashevsky served as translator in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As Pushkin put it, “He is an original in our country, for he thinks.” And in fact, at a time when all the loyalists had fully comprehended that thinking was out of the question, Petrashevsky not only dared to think, he spoke his thoughts aloud. He was an original in everything. When officials tried to appear unremarkable and dressed in uniforms or similar civil dress, this gentleman wore outrageous clothing—a Spanish cloak and top hat. Long hair was banned by the authorities, but Petrashevsky figured out how to get around it. He shaved his head and wore a long-haired wig. He added a beard, which was also not approved. In those extremely serious times, Petrashevsky mocked the rules.
Soon this original, mocking gentleman decided that thinking alone was not enough. On Fridays he invited other young men to come think at his house. They were minor officials, officers, teachers, writers, painters. Gradually the Fridays at Petrashevsky’s turned into a club. They discussed fashionable European movements—the socialism of Fourier, Proudhon, and others (whose books were naturally banned in Russia)—and spoke of the necessity for freeing the serfs and for open trials. The most radical even thought about setting up an underground printing press.
Benkendorf’s creation worked efficiently. The secret police learned about the thinking young men right away and infiltrated the circle with an agent. The Petrashevsky group was arrested. Among the prisoners was a young but already known writer, Fedor Dostoevsky.
From his youth until his death, terror and revolution, an apocalyptic vision of the future held Dostoevsky in its grip. Blood, suffering, and religion were part of his birthright. He was born in the section for the poor of the Maryinsky Hospital, where his father worked as a doctor. Family legend has it that his father, a temperamental and tormented neurasthenic, was killed by his own serfs. His passionately religious mother took the children annually on a pilgrimage to Russia’s main monastery, Trinity–St. Sergius Monastery. She taught them to read using the book Four Hundred Holy Stories from the Old and New Testaments. “In our family we knew the Bible from our earliest childhood,” wrote Dostoevsky. They read aloud Karamzin’s History of the Russian State and the poetry of the “demigod” Pushkin.
In January 1838, Dostoevsky, seventeen, entered the Main Engineering School, which trained military engineers. The school was located in Mikhailovsky Castle, where Paul I had been murdered, but now the tragic castle had been renamed the Engineering Castle, and the bedroom where the tsar’s blood had been shed was locked forever. (In midcentury, the Chapel of Sts. Peter and Paul would be erected on the spot.)
Painful associations inflamed his morbid imagination. Study there was hard for him. The nervous youth was quick to take injury, conceited, and profoundly resentful of mustering and military discipline. The meaning of his life, his relief, and his island of tormenting solitude was literature.
He started writing, and dreamed of devoting himself to literary work. As soon as he graduated, he retired from engineering. He had no doubts that glory awaited him as a writer.
His dream came true strangely and marvelously. “Unexpectedly, all of a sudden,” Dostoevsky began writing the novel Poor Folk and “gave myself up to it wholeheartedly.” His friend (subsequently a famous writer himself, Dmitri Grigorovich), who shared a flat with him, gave the manuscript to Nikolai Nekrasov, then already a celebrated poet and, more important, a successful publisher. What happened next is a legend in the history of Russian literature. Nekrasov and Grigorovich stayed up reading Poor Folk, unable to put it down. At four in the morning they came to awaken “the great talent and express delight.”
Nekrasov published the novel, which was a triumphant, smashing debut. Vissarion Belinsky, the main literary critic of the period, predicted a great future for Dostoevsky. He was accepted in Belinsky’s circle, composed of Russia’s most famous writers.
Tragedy followed right away. Everyone had expected a new masterpiece from him. Dostoevsky worked feverishly, writing ten novellas before his arrest. He was too hasty. One evening at Belinsky’s, he read “The Double.” His great admirer and all the members of the circle failed to appreciate or understand it. The split personality and the dark subconscious games of the story were alien to their harmonious and simpler worldview. But young Dostoevsky would not forgive their lapse in recognition. A chill developed in the relationship between the writer and the critic and his circle.
Dostoevsky fell into the typical syndrome of a man ahead of his time—a constant shortage of money, literary hackwork to pay the bills, and a falling-out with the literary establishment. It tormented him. He “suffered from an irritation of the entire nervous system” more and more frequently, and the first symptoms appeared of the epilepsy he had for the rest of his life.
It was in that spring of 1847 that Dostoevsky started attending Petrashevsky’s Fridays. It eased his loneliness. He also joined a secret society formed by Nikolai Speshnev, the most radical member of the Petrashevsky circle. Handsome, a wealthy landowner, cold seducer, and ruthless revolutionary, he dreamed of a bloody revolt. Nikolai Speshnev was the first devil in Dostoevsky’s life. This “Mephistopheles” had an enormous influence on the writer, who eventually used him for his character Nikolai Stavrogin in the novel The Possessed (also known as The Devils).
At dawn on April 23, 1849, the writer who had made a triumphant debut was arrested with the other members of the Petrashevsky circle and incarcerated in the harshest part of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Alexeyevsky ravelin, where he spent eight months under investigation and interrogation.
When they were brought to the Third Department, “Some walked trying to keep to the wall, afraid to step on the parquet floor in the center of the room, for they believed in the Sheshkovsky trap. They were afraid that the floor would sink and they would be whipped,” recalled P. A. Kuzmin, one of the members of the circle.
Things turned out much worse than that. As Petrashevsky put it, they were tried and “found guilty for their intentions.” So that no one else would consider being original in the future, that is, to think dangerous thoughts, twenty-one people were condemned to execution.
The inventive tsar came up with a little guignol scenario to play out. The men who had dared to think would be brought to the execution site on Semenovsky Square, and after all the preparations for the execution squad to begin had been made, they would be pardoned. The commander of the guards was to organize the “execution.”
The commander, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, “martinet and wit,” died while Dostoevsky and the others were incarcerated in the fortress. The emperor came to the fortress for the funeral of his favorite brother at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul. It had been a difficult year for the royal family, and especially for Alexander. His daughter, Grand Duchess Alexandra, died that summer at the age of seven. He marked that day in his diary, outlining the page with a black mourning stripe and placing a dried flower between the pages. It must have come from her funeral.
Upon the death of Mikhail, the tsar made Alexander the new commander of the guards and grenadiers. Now he would have to act out the sham execution. On its eve, the minister of war told Alexander, “The implementation of bringing out the squad and the announcement by Adjutant General Sumarokov of the highest confirmation [clemency], already known to Your Imperial Highness, depends on the orders of Your Imperial Highness.”
Alexander got up before dawn on December 22, 1849, to organize the terrible show on Semenovsky Square. Thus it was that Dostoevsky and Alexander virtually met on the scaffold.
Dostoevsky returned to those minutes many times in his work. They
were awakened on the black December morning. The cathedral bells struck 6:30. They were placed in carriages and brought to Semenovsky Square to hear the sentence. Still dressed in the April clothes they wore at the time of their arrest, they were brought out into the freezing cold of the square.
They were led up onto the scaffold, which was covered in black cloth, and there each man was read his death sentence. A priest, carrying a cross, rose to the scaffold to hear their last confessions. “The horrible, immeasurably horrible minutes of awaiting death began,” recalled Dostoevsky. “It was cold, so terribly cold. They removed not only our coats, but our jackets. And it was minus twenty degrees.”
Loose white garments were put on them and the first three condemned men, including Petrashevsky, were brought down from the scaffold to be shot. Stakes had been erected. They were tied to the stakes and hoods were placed over their heads. The execution squad lined up.
“We were taken in threes. I was in the second group. I had no more than a minute left to live,” Dostoevsky wrote. He had spent a horrible quarter hour, convinced that he would be dead in a few minutes.
“Aim!” The soldiers raised their rifles.
And then came the reprieve. The tsar’s pardon was read out loud.
“I received the news of the termination of the execution dully. There was no joy at returning to the living. People around me were shouting and making noise. But I didn’t care, I had already lived through the very worst. Yes, yes, the very worst. Wretched Grigoryev went mad…. How did the others survive? I don’t know. We didn’t even catch cold.”
The inexpressible joy of life came to him later, in the cell, when the predeath shock was over and he fully realized what had happened. “I was at the last moment and now I am alive again!” His wife remembered, “He was so happy that day. He would never recall another such time. He walked up and down in his cell and sang loudly, he kept singing. He was so happy to have the gift of life.”
Instead of execution, the Petrashevsky group was sent to hard labor, with convicts. Petrashevsky did not stop his mocking, even after the execution farce. As they put on their convicts’ uniforms and shackles, he looked around and burst out laughing. “Really, friends, we look so ridiculous in these outfits.”
Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor, “stripped of all rights and with subsequent service as a soldier.”
Having restored order at home, Nicholas went on with restoring order in the world. In 1853, he protected the rights of Orthodox Christians in Palestine with his usual bluntness. He demanded special rights for Orthodox Christians from the Turks—an ultimatum. When the Turks refused, he declared war. His armies quickly occupied the Danube principalities of Moldavia and Walachia. But here, to his surprise, Austria, which he had recently rescued, moved its army to aid Turkey. He gave the order to retreat, but too late. The British and French fleets had arrived in the Black Sea. Turkey’s brave refusal was suddenly explained—European powers supported the Turks. Nicholas was caught in a trap. Instead of his being able to dictate the rules to Europe, those states had united against him and were going to dictate to him.
The coalition against him included the hated France, now ruled by Bonaparte’s nephew, Napoleon III. England was with him. The Austrian emperor, whom Nicholas had helped end the uprising in Hungary, was behaving in a particularly low manner. He was with his enemies.
This was the start of the Crimean War. The army Nicholas considered the most powerful in Europe was destroyed. It turned out that his army was fighting the army of Napoleon III with weapons of the era of Napoleon I. His navy was hopelessly obsolete. The might of his army existed only in parades and the reports of his yes men. The allies landed sixty thousand French and British soldiers in Crimea and surrounded the Russians in Sevastopol. In a very short time, the enemy navy entered “his” Baltic Sea, and he could observe the ships through binoculars from his study in his favorite little villa, Alexandria. His family could see that shame every day.
It was then, for the first time, that Alexander saw that his father did need him. The guards went off to war and he, commander of the guards, began preparing reserves on his father’s orders. The allies might land men onto the shore and try to take St. Petersburg. Alexander and the reserves would have to protect the Baltic coast and the imperial capital.
Losing the war changed Nicholas. The giant grew stoop-shouldered and much gentler. He readily listened to family suggestions. Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna proposed sending female nurses and the famous surgeon Nikolai Pirogov to the Crimea. Nicholas agreed instantly. The Württemberg princess saved numerous lives: Pirogov operated on hundreds of men, and one-hundred and sixty nurses struggled to help the wounded in terrible circumstances.
Nicholas wanted to show ungrateful Europe that he was a knight despite their betrayal. He sent Alexander to besieged Sevastopol, turned to ruins by allied artillery, to verify that prisoners of war were being treated humanely.
Upon his arrival, the heir saw an amusing scene. There had been a storm the night before and the British ship carrying wages for their troops had sunk. In the breaks between attacks, Russian soldiers dived for British coins.
Then he spoke with French and English prisoners. They were satisfied and said that they were treated well. As he was leaving, one French officer asked for permission to speak to him privately. He said, “Your Majesty, we ask only one thing: Please keep us in separate quarters from those Englishmen!” That was how much love the European allies had for each other. It convinced Alexander that the European unions and friendships were always temporary. He also understood something else on that visit—Sevastopol, the most vital Russian port on the Black Sea, was doomed.
He told his father frankly, and his father’s weakness was horrible to behold. His eyes filled with tears. “That giant, so intolerant of men’s tears, now often wept,” wrote the maid of honor Anna Tyutcheva. The tsar, who had once thrown Marquis de Custine’s book on the floor in a rage, now almost repeated the “scoundrel’s” words verbatim in his diary: “Ascending on the throne, I passionately wanted to know the truth, but after listening to lies and flattery every day for thirty years, I have lost the ability to tell truth from lie.”
Now, as he watched the catastrophe unfold, he wanted it.
Events wore him down. When Nicholas caught an ordinary cold, he refused to treat it. He no longer wanted to live, after the defeat of his army. Rumors spread later that when he despaired of dying of influenza, the tsar demanded poison from his physician, Dr. Mandt, who begged him not to do it. But the tsar, as usual, brooked no argument. He had trained everyone well; no one dared to say no. In any case, Dr. Mandt hastily left Russia after Nicholas’s death.
The poison story seems to be just a legend like the one about Alexander I going off to be a hermit in Siberia. Both brothers simply stopped wanting to live. Nicholas, like Alexander before him, gave himself up to death.
On February 14, 1855, Nicholas ordered the court be informed of his illness. The enormous and cold palace vestibule outside his study filled with people—ladies-in-waiting, maids of honor, all ranks of courtiers, ministers, generals. It was as if no one was there, it was so quiet. In the twilight of the poorly lit vestibule, the only sounds were the howling wind and the breathing of the silent crowd. They stood, waiting for the resolution. The ruthless reign was drawing to a close.
In his first-floor study, Nicholas lay on the camp bed, under a military greatcoat. He no longer allowed anyone in besides his wife and children. For the first time, all state papers were brought to the heir. To the court’s amazement, apathetic Sasha was transformed. Now he was full of energy. The liberation from the will of his beloved father had taken place. The coming responsibility, the heavy crown of Monomakh to be worn during the coronation, was making him act.
Alexander went into his father’s study. The dying emperor no longer asked about business. He had just taken Communion. The empress, his children and grandchildren were gathered around the bed.
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nbsp; “Will it be soon?” the dying man impatiently demanded of the doctor. Mandt promised that his lungs would soon be paralyzed.
Nicholas blessed everyone individually. Despite his increasing weakness, he talked with each family member. He blessed Masha, Alexander’s wife, whom he had loved. He took her hand and looked over at his wife, asking her to take care of her. After blessing them all, he said, “Remember what I have so often asked: Remain friends.”
The empress was kind to him to the end. She said, “They wish to say good-bye to you—Yulya Baranova, Ekaterina Tizengausen.” For the sake of propriety, she listed all her maids of honor. But she ended with: “And Varenka Nelidova.”
Nicholas thanked her with his eyes and said, “No, dear, I must not see her anymore, tell her that I beg her forgiveness, that I prayed for her…and ask that she pray for me.”
It was Alexander’s turn. Everyone moved away from the bed. The dying tsar said, “I am passing command to you that is not in desirable order. I am leaving you many disappointments and cares.” He paused. And then in his former strong voice he ended, “But hold everything! Hold it like that!” And making a hard fist with his iron hand, he showed Alexander how Russia should be held.
Then the sanctity of his coming death returned to him and he said, “Now I must be alone, to prepare for the final moment.”
This solemn parting enriched the lives of his family, and it was also one of the reasons Alexander would fear assassination so much. He wanted to leave with prayer, like his father.
Lady-in-waiting Anna Tyutcheva described how the dying tsar’s mistress, not permitted at his bedside, wandered, hair loosened, through the palace filled with silent, waiting courtiers. When she saw Tyutcheva, Varenka Nelidova clutched her hand, feverishly jiggled it, and whispered, “Une belle nuit, une belle nuit!” (A beautiful night, a beautiful night!) She did not know what she was saying, she was so distraught.
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