Dostoevsky (110 page)

On the second day, Dostoevsky began dictating with more determination, but “it was obviously difficult for him to get into the work. He stopped often, thought things over and asked me to reread what he had already dictated.”
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After an hour he felt tired, decided to rest, and began to chat with Anna again. Once more forgetting her name, and absentmindedly offering her another cigarette, he brightened up considerably when she began to question him about contemporary Russian writers. Nekrasov “he bluntly called a cheat, a terrible gambler, someone who talks about the sufferings of mankind, but who drives around himself in a carriage with trotters.” He mentioned Turgenev “as a firstrate talent, but regretted that as a result of his long residence abroad he had lost some of his understanding of Russia and the Russian people.”
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This opinion
would be confirmed for Dostoevsky a year later by the publication of
Smoke
, the most bitterly condemnatory of all Turgenev’s novels about his native land.

Encouraged by Anna’s cool determination, Dostoevsky settled down to a regular routine. Anna arrived at his house every day at twelve and stayed until four. “During that time we would have three dictating sessions of a half-hour or more, and between dictations we would drink tea and talk.”
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Dostoevsky, as Anna noticed, now was much calmer when she arrived, and became more and more cheerful as the pages piled up and she estimated that the manuscript would be ready for submission by the appointed date.

Dostoevsky’s mood also lightened as, in the midst of total isolation, he began to pour out his heart to an avid, attentive, and devotedly sympathetic listener. “Each day, chatting with me like a friend, he would lay bare some unhappy scene from his past. I could not help being deeply touched at his accounts of the difficulties from which he had never extricated himself, and indeed could not.” Each day, as well, his attitude toward Anna, whose name he no longer forgot, became kindlier, warmer, more personal. “He often addressed me as ‘
golubchik
’ ” (or ‘little dove,’ his favorite affectionate expression), and in response to Anna’s inquiries recounted many of the details of his past life.
¹⁶
Their conversations thus began to turn more and more to questions concerning his present trying situation and depressed state of mind, saddled as he was with debts and struggling to make ends meet. Anna noted how bad things were when the Chinese vases suddenly vanished and the silver spoons of the dining set were replaced on the table by wooden ones. Dostoevsky explained that both had been pawned to pay some pressing creditors who could no longer be put off.

Dostoevsky now also began to acquaint Anna with some of the details of his more recent sentimental life—such as his attraction to, and presumed engagement with, Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya. He embellished the story by making their engagement a fact; no doubt he wished to intimate that a highly desirable young woman
could
agree to link her life with his own. He had, according to this version of events, released the other Anna from her promise only because the sharp divergence of their social-political views excluded the possibility of happiness. Nothing is said in the
Reminiscences
about Suslova, but the diaries reveal that Dostoevsky showed her portrait to Anna, and when Anna called her a “remarkable beauty,” Dostoevsky disparagingly observed that she had changed a good deal in the past six years.
¹⁷

As the talk between the two dwelt more and more on Dostoevsky’s present circumstances, he depicted himself, with all his skill in melodrama, as having reached a crucially decisive moment in his life that would soon decide his future fate for good and all. With more than a touch of Romantic Byronism, he told Anna that “he was standing at a crossroad and three paths lay open before him.” He could go to the East—Constantinople and Jerusalem—and remain there, “perhaps forever”; he could “go abroad to play roulette,” and “immolate himself in the game he found so utterly engrossing”; or he could “marry again and seek joy and happiness in family life.”
¹⁸
Since Anna had already shown so much friendliness for him, would she give him the benefit of her advice? Which path should he follow?

Dostoevsky was evidently testing the temperature of the water into which he planned to plunge, and the reply he received from the sturdily commonsensical Anna was the one he had hoped for. Anna assured her anxious questioner that marriage and family happiness were what he needed. At which Dostoevsky instantly responded with a further question; since Anna had indicated that he might still be able to find a wife, should he seek for an intelligent one or a kind companion? Anna came down on the side of intelligence, but Dostoevsky, knowing himself far better than she did at this point, replied that he would prefer “a kind one, so that she’ll take pity on me and love me.”
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Anna little knew then how much pity and love she would be required to lavish on Dostoevsky in the future!

“Even then,” Anna confided to her diary, “it seemed to me that he would certainly propose, and I really did not know whether I would accept or not. He pleases me very much, but all the same frightens me because of his irascibility and illness.” She noticed how often he shouted at the maidservant Fedosya, though adding that the rebukes were on the whole well deserved. The daily meetings with Dostoevsky now became the center of Anna’s life, and everything she had previously known seemed to her uninteresting and insipid by comparison. “I rarely saw my friends,” she writes, “and concentrated wholly on work and on those utterly fascinating conversations we used to have while we were relaxing after our dictation sessions. I couldn’t help comparing Dostoevsky with young men I used to meet in my own social circle. How empty and trivial their talk seemed to me in comparison with the ever fresh and original views of my favorite writer. . . . Leaving his house still under the influence of ideas new to me, I would miss him when I was at home and lived only in the expectation of the next day’s meeting with him. I realized with sorrow that the work was nearing its end and that our acquaintance must break off.”
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The deadline of November 1 was fast approaching, and since Dostoevsky too was feeling the same sense of impending loss, he put into words what both had been mulling over in their minds. Confessing how much he enjoyed Anna’s companionship and “our lively talks together,” he remarked on what a pity it would be if all this were now to end. Why did not Anna invite him to meet her family? Such a request was certainly a harbinger of serious amatory intentions, and Anna agreed on the spot, but she would set the time for such a visit only after work on the manuscript had been terminated.
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There now remained no doubt that
The Gambler
would be completed by the due date, but Dostoevsky “began to be afraid that Stellovsky . . . would find a pretext for refusing to accept the manuscript.”
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The resourceful Anna consulted a lawyer, who advised registering the manuscript with a notary or with the police officer of the district in which Stellovsky lived. The same advice was given by a lawyer Dostoevsky went to see, perhaps at Anna’s urging, and the instructions stood him in good stead. Meanwhile, elated at having been able to complete the novella at all, Dostoevsky planned a victory dinner for his friends in a restaurant and of course invited Anna, without whom, as he justly said, his triumph would not have been possible. But she refused because she had never been to a restaurant in her life, and she was afraid her shyness and awkwardness would impede the general merriment.

Stellovsky, true to his reputation, attempted by every possible means to prevent Dostoevsky from delivering the manuscript on time. The dictation was finished on October 29, and Anna brought the manuscript to Dostoevsky on the thirtieth, which happened to be his birthday; he was to make the final corrections on the thirty-first and hand in the work on the following day. Arriving on the thirtieth, Anna was confronted with Emilya Feodorovna, the widow of Dostoevsky’s brother Mikhail, come with birthday greetings; and the lady snubbed the employee Anna unmercifully, even though Dostoevsky was warm in his praise of Anna’s indispensable aid. This was only the first of Anna’s many unhappy experiences with this dependent relative, who had also been cordially disliked by Dostoevsky’s first wife, Marya Dimitrievna. Upset by his sister-in-law’s haughty rudeness, Dostoevsky insisted, as he said good-bye to Anna at the door, that she now set the date for his visit to her home. The diary records that he spoke to her in an impassioned manner during this leave-taking and even jestingly suggested that they run away together to Europe; from which Anna concluded that “he loves me very much.”
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Two days later, Dostoevsky tried to deliver the manuscript to Stellovsky’s home but was told that he had left for the provinces, nor would the manager of
his publishing firm accept it, on the pretext that he had not received specific authority to do so. By this time it was too late for a notary, and the police officer of the district would not be returning to his office until ten o’clock in the evening. The frantic Dostoevsky, watching the precious hours slip away, just managed to meet his deadline two hours before its expiration. At last, however, he held the all-important receipt in his hands, and the ordeal was over.

The few days between the end of her employment and Dostoevsky’s promised visit on November 3 were a stretch of dreariness and anxiety for Anna. The tedious days passed, however, and despite her anxieties the visit went well. Dostoevsky gallantly kissed the hand of Mme Snitkina, who surely needed no explanation of his intentions, and immediately plunged into an account of his adventures with Stellovsky. Once that theme had been exhausted, he proposed that Anna continue to work with him on the completion of
Crime and Punishment
. She agreed, if Professor Olkhin, who might wish to recommend another pupil, would give his consent. Dostoevsky took this proviso badly and remarked, “perhaps the truth is you don’t want to work with me any longer?”
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Anna certainly knew that he was talking about more than stenography; and an unannounced visit from Dostoevsky three days later left no doubt on that score. He had not been able to spend more than one or two days without her company; and though he had firmly decided not to give way to his impulse to call, realizing that it might seem “strange” to Anna and her mother, once having “resolved not to come under any circumstances . . . as you see, here I am!”
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Dostoevsky’s inability to resist the promptings of his emotions could hardly have seemed, in this instance, anything other than charming and eminently excusable to Anna, but she would soon encounter other evidence of the same trait of character that drove her to the brink of despair.

The day following this impromptu visit, November 8, had nominally been set as the time when Anna and Dostoevsky would fix a schedule for the completion of
Crime and Punishment
, but Dostoevsky himself had other plans. On her arrival, Anna noticed that the expression on his face was “heightened, fervid, almost ecstatic.” The exuberance of his mood he ascribed to a happy dream. Pointing to a rosewood box given him by a Siberian friend, Dostoevsky explained that he had dreamed he was rearranging his papers there (in other words, attempting to reorder his past), when he came across, buried in the midst of the heap, “a little diamond, a tiny one, but very sparkling and brilliant.” This discovery had cheered him immensely, since he attributed “great meaning” to dreams and
believed firmly that “my dreams are always prophetic.” Whenever he dreamed of his father or his brother Misha, he knew that some catastrophe was impending, but his dream of “the little diamond” seemed to foreshadow some happy change in the present grimness of his circumstances.
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Just what Dostoevsky hoped that his dream foretold (assuming it had not been invented to prepare Anna for what lay ahead) was soon revealed. Dostoevsky had had the idea for a new novel, one in which “the psychology of a young girl” played a crucial part, and he found it difficult to work out the ending; he needed some help, and appealed to Anna. The hero of Dostoevsky’s novel turned out to be “a man grown old before his time, sick with an incurable disease (a paralyzed hand), gloomy, suspicious; possessed of a tender heart, it is true, but a failure who had not once in his life succeeded in embodying his ideas in the forms he dreamed of, and who never ceased to torment himself over this fact.” Just at this critical period of his life, the writer meets a young girl roughly of Anna’s age, named Anya, who was “gentle, wise, kind, bubbling with life and possessed of great tact in personal relationships.” Dostoevsky’s unhappy author naturally fell in love with this irresistible young girl, and began to be tormented by whether she could possibly respond to his own feelings. “What could this elderly, sick, debt-ridden man give a young, alive, exuberant girl?” Would not the very idea of uniting her fate with his be asking her to make a “terrible sacrifice?” Here was the point at which Dostoevsky wanted Anna to give him the benefit of her feminine counsel. Would she consider it psychologically plausible for such a young girl to fall in love with the artist?
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