Dostoevsky (100 page)

This remarkable letter, written at a moment when the clamor for more severity against the radicals was resounding on all sides, throws light on the state of mind in which Dostoevsky was composing his novel. During the next few months, straining himself to the limits of his endurance, Dostoevsky worked without respite, even though harassed by his creditors. To Father Yanishev, whose loan he repaid out of the thousand rubles obtained from Katkov, he wrote at the end of April: “My epilepsy has worsened so much that if I work for
a week without interruption I have an attack, and the next week cannot work because the result of two or three attacks will be—apoplexy. And yet I must finish. That’s my situation.”
³⁵

In a letter to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya—who had, with the approval of her father, invited him to vacation in Palibino—Dostoevsky explained that his novel would probably keep him pinned to Petersburg throughout the summer. “In truth,” he added a bit later, “the melancholy, sleazy and foul-smelling Petersburg of summer time fits with my mood and may even provide me with some pseudo-inspiration for my novel; but it’s too oppressive.”
³⁶
As the spring wore on, Dostoevsky finally decided to give Moscow a try, but then, finding the heat and the loneliness unbearable after a few days, he moved to the nearby village of Lublino, a summer resort about three miles from Moscow, where the Ivanovs had rented a dacha. The Ivanovs’ ten children had all brought along friends, and there were other young people whom the benevolent Dr. Ivanov had taken under his wing. Since Dostoevsky needed peace and quiet in order to work, a spacious room was found nearby to which he could retire in tranquility. He and Pasha installed themselves in Lublino at the beginning of July.

Two memoirs have been left of this relatively blithe summer of 1866: one by Dostoevsky’s niece Marya Alexandrovna Ivanova, then eighteen years old and already displaying outstanding musical talent (she later became a brilliant pianist), the other by the then fifteen-year-old N. Von-Voght (or Fon-Fokht, to use the Russian spelling), a student at the Konstantinovsky Institute whom the Ivanovs had befriended. Both depict the lighthearted, untroubled atmosphere of those carefree days, when much time was spent in long walks to neighboring villages during the soft, moonlit evenings, on word games and amateur theatricals to while away the hours after dinner, and on the inevitable good-humored chaffing and jesting of high-spirited youth. The usually gloomy and care-worn Dostoevsky evidently blossomed in this rejuvenating atmosphere, and, despite his age and forbidding reputation (everyone there had some knowledge of his early works and knew of his legendary aura as a Siberian survivor), he is depicted as playing the part of master of the revels with great relish.

“Although he was forty-five years old,” writes his niece, “he behaved with surprising unaffectedness toward the young company, and was the initial organizer of all the distractions and pranks. . . . Always elegantly dressed, with starched collars, gray trousers and a dark-blue, loose-fitting jacket, Dostoevsky carefully looked after his appearance and was very unhappy, for instance, that
his small beard was so scanty.”
³⁷
Much diversion was afforded by Dostoevsky’s ability to turn out reams of mocking light verse, most of it directed against a young nephew of the Ivanovs, Dr. Alexander Karepin, who was also the butt of impromptu skits equally flowing from Dostoevsky’s pen. Still unmarried, Dr. Karepin was an opponent of the new ideas about women’s emancipation advocated by Chernyshevsky in
What Is To Be Done?
, and Dostoevsky once worked him into a fury by asserting that the government had set up an organization to encourage women to desert their husbands and come to Petersburg to learn how to operate sewing machines (an allusion to the dressmaking establishment organized by the heroine of the novel). Dr. Karepin took all this with solemn literalness and flew into a rage against such interference with family stability until reassured that it was only a joke.

Despite all the amusements, Dostoevsky could hardly forget about his novel or about the new work that he had promised Stellovsky by the beginning of the year. His plan, as he confided to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, had been “to do an unheard of and eccentric thing: write 30 signatures [sixteen pages] in 4 months of two different novels, one in the morning and the other in the evening, and to finish on schedule.”
³⁸
His morning labors were presumably spent in sketching ideas for
The Gambler
, which he completed only several months later. According to one anecdote, the late evening hours were indisputably reserved for pressing ahead with
Crime and Punishment
. A lackey of the Ivanovs, assigned to sleep in Dostoevsky’s dacha so as to aid him in case of an epileptic attack, announced after a few days that he refused to reside with the author any longer. Dostoevsky, he explained, was planning to kill somebody—“all through the night he paced up and down in his room and spoke about this aloud.”
³⁹

Dostoevsky made weekly visits to Moscow for consultation with the editors of
The Russian Messenger
, and “always returned dissatisfied and upset. He explained this as the result of being forced to correct his text, or even to throw out parts because of censorship pressure.”
⁴⁰
Dostoevsky mentions in a mid-July letter to Milyukov that the worst “censorship pressure” came not only from the legal authorities but also from Katkov and his assistant editor Lyubimov, who were insisting that he rewrite the chapter containing the scene in which Sonya reads to Raskolnikov the passage from the Gospels concerning the raising of Lazarus. “I wrote,” Dostoevsky confides, “with genuine inspiration, but perhaps it’s no good; but for them the question is not its literary worth, they are worried about its morality. Here I was in the right—nothing was against morality, and
even quite the contrary
, but they saw otherwise and, what’s more, saw traces of
Nihilism
. . . . I took it back, and this revision of a large chapter cost me at least three new chapters of work, judging by the effort and the weariness; but I corrected it and gave it back.”
⁴¹

This time-consuming task was one reason why Dostoevsky’s hope of writing his novel for Stellovsky during the summer, while forging ahead with
Crime and Punishment
, proved to be overly optimistic. Dostoevsky admitted to Milyukov that “I have not yet tackled the novel for Stellovsky, but I will. I have worked out a plan—a quite satisfactory little novel.” “Stellovsky,” he adds, “upsets me to the point of torture, and I even see him in my dreams.”
⁴²
However, Dostoevsky made no further progress that would enable him to fulfill the terms of the threatening contract.

Since the original manuscript of
Crime and Punishment
has been lost, it is difficult to determine just what the editors had objected to in the text. The only other information available is a remark made in 1889 by the editors of
The Russian Messenger
, who, in publishing Dostoevsky’s letter, commented that “it was not easy for him to give up his intentionally exaggerated idealization of Sonya as a woman who carried self-sacrifice to the point of sacrificing her body. Feodor Mikhailovich substantially shortened the conversation during the reading of the Gospel, which in the original version was much longer than what remains in the printed text.”
⁴³
It seems clear, then, that Dostoevsky had initially given Sonya a more affirmative role in this scene, and this led to what Katkov considered her unacceptably “exaggerated idealization.”

What Katkov found inadmissible may perhaps be clarified by a passage in Dostoevsky’s notebooks, where Sonya
is
presented occasionally as the spokeswoman for the morality that Dostoevsky wished to advocate. In one scene, she explains to Raskolnikov that “in comfort, in wealth, you would perhaps have seen nothing of human happiness. The person God loves, the person on whom He really counts, is the one to whom He sends much suffering, so that he sees better and recognizes through himself why in unhappiness the suffering of people is more visible than in happiness.” Immediately following this speech, Raskolnikov retorts bitterly: “And perhaps God does not exist” (7: 150). This reply is included in the Gospel-reading chapter, and we may assume that Sonya’s words were meant for the same context. It is possible that similar speeches in the notes were also included in the rejected version.

If so, it is not difficult to understand why the worthy editors of
The Russian Messenger
might have been upset. For Dostoevsky is depicting a fallen woman as the inspired interpreter of the Gospels, the expositor of the inscrutable purposes of divine will. Moreover, if the logic of Sonya’s words is taken literally, it would
mean that God had ultimately brought about, for his own ends, her degradation and Raskolnikov’s crime. Such a bold reversal of the ordinary tenets of social morality could well have been seen by the editors as being tainted with “Nihilism,” since it could provide an opening for an implicit accusation against God himself. Exactly such an accusation will soon be made by the death-stricken Ippolit Terentyev in
The Idiot
and later by Ivan Karamazov.

If these speculations have any validity, they may help to clarify why Dostoevsky was accused by the editors of blurring the boundaries between good and evil. “
Evil
and
good
are sharply separated,” he assures Lyubimov, “and it will be impossible to confuse or misinterpret them. . . . Everything you spoke about has been done, everything is separated, demarcated and clear.
The reading of the Gospel
is given a different coloring.”
⁴⁴
Katkov probably improved Dostoevsky’s text by insisting that he shorten Sonya’s preachings, and the novelist may well in the end have recognized this himself. As he returned the proofs in mid-July, he remarked: “For 20 years I have painfully felt, and seen more clearly than anyone, that my literary vice is:
prolixity
, but I can’t seem to shake it off.”
⁴⁵
There is, however, nothing prolix about
Crime and Punishment
, whose every word, as we shall soon see, stems from acute artistic self-awareness.

On October 1, shortly after Dostoevsky’s return to Petersburg, Milyukov called and found his friend walking up and down his study in terrible agitation. It was then that Dostoevsky revealed to him the terms of the Stellovsky agreement and confessed that he was hopelessly entrapped. Just a month was left to satisfy his part of the bargain and nothing had yet been written. Even if he managed to write a first draft, it would be almost physically impossible to transcribe and correct it in time to meet the deadline. Milyukov, horrified at what might occur, advised him to find a stenographer and dictate the novel (
The Gambler
). Luckily, Milyukov had contact with a professor of stenography who had recently established the first such course for women in Russia. A day or two later, one of his star pupils, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, turned up in Dostoevsky’s flat with newly sharpened pencils and a portfolio especially purchased for this epochal occasion, ready to assume her duties. This businesslike visit of the outwardly cool young lady proved to have a decisive effect on Dostoevsky’s entire life.

¹
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 121–122; April 19, 1865.

²
What information there is of Suslova (1839–1918) comes from her husband, V. V. Rozanov, a morally dubious figure who sometimes advocated a vicious anti-Semitism and wrote simultaneously for both progressive and reactionary newspapers under different pseudonyms. Rozanov and Suslova were married when he was twenty and she forty. After six years, she ran away with a Jewish lover of good family and education working in the book trade. Rozanov refused to give her a legal separation in the hope that she would return; she then refused to grant him a divorce even when he later fathered several children by a woman he wished to marry. When Rozanov appealed to her father, with whom she was then living, the old man replied that “the enemy of the human race has moved in with me now, and it [has become] impossible for me to live here.” One of Rozanov’s friends, who went to plead with Suslova when she was past sixty, mentioned the fierce implacability of her hatred.

In a letter written in 1902, Rozanov describes their first meeting when he was seventeen and she thirty-seven. She was, he writes, “sublime . . . I have never yet seen such a Russian woman, and if Russian, then . . . a Mother of God of the flagellants.” (A Mother of God of the flagellant sect exercised absolute autocratic power over those belonging to her group.) See Leonid Grossman,
Put’ Dostoevskogo
(Moscow, 1928), 134–137, and Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu,
L’Empire des tsars et les Russes
(Paris, 1990), 1197.

³
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 127; June 8, 1865.

⁴
Ibid., 128; August 3/15, 1865.

⁵
Ibid., 129; August 20 1865.