Dostoevsky (148 page)

Dostoevsky and the Populists would continue to diverge on this fateful question of religious faith, although enough points of contact remained for him to acquire a unique status as someone who, despite his loyalty to the tsar, managed to transcend a narrow factionalism. And he tried to use this eminence, as the 1870s wore on, to ward off the catastrophe that loomed closer and closer for his country as the once peaceful, apolitical Populists turned to terror out of despair.

¹
Cited in B. S. Itenberg,
Dvizhenie revolyutsionnogo narodnichestvo
(Moscow, 1965), 136.

²
Ibid., 136–137.

³
Peter Kropotkin,
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
(Garden City, NY, 1962), 201.

⁴
P. L. Lavrov, “The Cost of Progress,” in
Russian Philosophy
, ed. J. M. Edie, J. P. Scanlan, and M. B. Zeldin, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1964), 2: 141.

⁵
Cited in Itenberg,
Dvizhenie revolyutsionnogo narodnichestvo
, 83.

⁶
Cited in V. V. Zenkovsky,
A History of Russian Philosophy
, trans. G. L. Kline, 2 vols. (London, 1953), 1: 354.

⁷
Ibid., 369.

⁸
N. K. Mikhailovsky,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
, 10 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1909), 4: 38–39.

⁹
Quoted in James H. Billington,
Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism
(Oxford, 1958), 131–132.

¹⁰
D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, “Istoria Russkoi intelligentsii,” in
Sobranie sochinenii
, 10 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1910–1911), vol. 8, part 2, 197.

¹¹
Quoted in Billington,
Mikhailovsky
, 132.

¹²
Ibid., 67–68.

¹³
Ibid., 67.

¹⁴
Ibid., 66.

¹⁵
Kropotkin,
Memoirs
, 199.

¹⁶
Quoted in V. Bogucharsky,
Aktivnoe narodnichestvo semidesyatikh godov
(Moscow, 1912), 179.

¹⁷
Sochineniya N. K. Mikhailovskogo
, 7 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1888), 2: 272–273.

¹⁸
Ibid., 304.

¹⁹
Ibid., 306–307.

²⁰
Ibid.

²¹
Quoted in Itenberg,
Dvizhenie revolyutsionnogo narodnichestvo
, 346.

²²
See
LN
83 (Moscow, 1971), 290.

Dostoevsky resigned from
The Citizen
in April 1874, and it was shortly afterward that an unexpected event occurred: Nekrasov called on his former friend. Anna was aware of their recent estrangement, and when her husband invited his visitor into his study she could not resist eavesdropping on their conversation. What she heard was an offer from Nekrasov for Dostoevsky to contribute a new novel to
Notes of the Fatherland
during the next year, at “a payment of two hundred and fifty rubles per folio sheet, while until this time Dostoevsky had gotten only a hundred and fifty.”
¹
When he went to consult Anna, she impetuously told him to accept even before he could pose the question. Dostoevsky, however, went to Moscow to first determine whether Katkov, who had supported him so loyally for so long, wished to acquire his new novel for the
Russian Messenger
. Katkov consented to the higher rate per folio sheet but demurred at a large advance, and Dostoevsky was thus released from any obligation.

Around this time, a Russian specialist, Professor Koshlakov, had advised Dostoevsky that his emphysema could be alleviated by a six-week stay at the spa of Bad Ems, whose mineral waters were famous for their curative powers. At the beginning of June he thus left Staraya Russa for Petersburg and spent a few days looking after urgent matters before undertaking his journey abroad. One such case involved the estate of his late aunt, the wealthy A. F. Kumanina, who had given Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail ten thousand rubles each in 1864 and then excluded them from her will. Both Dostoevsky and Mikhail’s widow were contesting the exclusion. In a letter a month earlier to his younger brother Nikolay, an engineer given to drink and often aided by his older brother, Dostoevsky put pressure on him to sign a statement, as one of the heirs, renouncing any claim to the money given to the brothers. “Otherwise,” he writes, “don’t bother to have any dealings with me at all,”
²
and Nikolay promptly complied.

Even though he was disappointed to find that only two copies of
The Idiot
had been sold at the offices of
The Citizen
, which served as a depot for the Dostoevsky publishing firm, he was heartened when he ran into a publisher named
M. P. Nadein. “Nadein,” he writes Anna, “proposed to me definitely to publish a complete edition of my works . . . and all just for 5 percent, and as soon as he collects it, the whole edition will belong to me.” In Dostoevsky’s view, his literary stock had just risen because “the booksellers have gotten somewhat excited by Orest Miller’s . . . articles about me in
Nedelya
[
The Week
], in the end very laudatory.”
³
These articles form a part of the volume
Russian Literature since Gogol
, and
The Week
was a journal with both marked Populist and Slavophil sympathies. Nadein was known as a personal friend of some of the leading Populist radicals, and his offer indicates how old ideological lines were now being redrawn. As A. S. Dolinin has remarked, Miller’s articles helped to remove some of the onus that had marred Dostoevsky’s reputation because of his editorship of
The Citizen
.
⁴

If Dostoevsky unperturbedly went his own way and allowed his readership to interpret the idiosyncrasies of his social-political position in any manner they pleased, his old comrades-in-arms were not so serenely untroubled. He tells Anna that “Maikov was a little cold somehow” when he met his old friend at the home of Strakhov, and the latter, an inveterate gossip, also conveyed the unwelcome news that “Turgenev was to stay in Russia the whole year, write a novel, and bragged that he would describe ‘all the reactionaries’ (that is, including me).”
⁵
Turgenev, as it turned out, remained in Russia for only two months, and his next novel,
Virgin Soil
, contained no such caricature. This letter also allows us to catch a glimpse of some of the intimacies of Dostoevsky’s home life. It continues with lines that Anna later attempted to obliterate. “Anya, dear,” her husband enjoins her, “please be attentive to them [the children]. I know that you love them. Just don’t yell at them and keep them clean.” There is an intimation as well that Anna ruled the servants with more of an iron hand than suited Dostoevsky’s own inclinations. “And be nice to Nanny,” he advised her.
⁶

The overnight trip to Berlin was a grueling one, both because of the cold and because rail travel by ordinary coach meant sitting upright without sleep. From Berlin to Bad Ems was another raking ordeal (“We sat like herrings in a barrel”). Dostoevsky had arrived at the height of the tourist season, and “the prices [were] horrible”; all the careful calculations he and Anna had made bore no relation to reality. Scouring the town, he succeeded in renting two rooms, and he arranged to take his meals there as well. He hastened to see a doctor and, after being examined, was assured that there was no sign of consumption. He suffered from “a temporary catarrh” that interfered with his breathing, and he was ordered to drink water from a spring.
⁷

Ordinarily, Dostoevsky wrote in the stillness of the late night hours, but in Ems, forced to adapt to the routine of his cure, such a schedule was impossible. “All of Ems,” he explains, “wakes up at 6:00 in the morning (me too), and at 6:30 a couple of thousand patients are already crowding around two springs. It starts usually with a very boring Lutheran hymn to God: I don’t know anything more sickly and artificial.” His prescription was to drink one glass of curative water at 7:00, walk for an hour, drink a second glass, and then return home for coffee. He tried to work after his morning coffee, but “until now I’ve just been reading Pushkin and getting intoxicated with delight. Each day I find something new. But on the other hand I haven’t been able to put something together for a novel.”
⁸

Ems was overflowing with people, among whom he often heard his native Russian, but he found the vast majority of his compatriots as intolerable as the lady—a directress of an institute in Novocherkask—that he mentions to Anna: “A fool such as the world has never produced. A cosmopolitan and an atheist, who adores the tsar but despises her native land. I came right out and told her that she was unbearable and that she didn’t understand anything, laughing, of course, and in a society manner, but very seriously.”
⁹
As his first enraptured response to the beauties of Ems wore off, his letters become one protracted litany of complaints. The unpredictable climate was trying and the epileptic attacks that he mentions in his letters also contributed to the jangled state of his nerves. “I have come to hate every building here, every bush. . . . I have become so irritable that (especially early in the morning) I view as a personal enemy every person in the slovenly crowd that throngs at the Kranchen [spring] and would perhaps be glad to be on bad terms with them.”
¹⁰

The only relief for his aching misery was the news from Anna, and he awaited her letters with eager impatience as a balm to his gnawing loneliness. She wrote faithfully, but her letters never arrived on time—not, as Dostoevsky bemoaned, because of the inefficiency of the Russian post but because, as Anna learned a year later, they were being read by the secret police. He delighted in news of the children, about whom he worried incessantly. “News about the children is essential to me,” he tells Anna. “I can’t look at children even here calmly, and if I hear a child crying, I give way to misery and evil premonitions.”
¹¹
The letters also reveal that the marriage, despite the twenty years’ difference in age between the partners, had now become solidly rooted (for Dostoevsky at any rate) in a passionate sexual attachment. “I have seductive dreams of you,” he confides to Anna. “Do you dream of me? . . . You said that I’d probably start chasing after
other women here abroad. My friend, I have come to know by experience that I can’t even imagine one other than you. . . . And besides, there’s nothing better
in this regard
than my Anechka. . . . I hope you won’t show this letter to anyone.”
¹²
From a reference in this letter, one surmises that Anna too had confessed to having “indecent dreams,” and he replies affectionately with a famous quote from Gogol: “Never mind, never mind—silence!”
¹³

Dostoevsky gave Anna a running account of his progress on his next novel, which was coming along, if at all, only at a snail’s pace. “I’ve prepared two plans for novels here and don’t know on which one to venture . . . at the end of August I’ll get down to the writing, and do you know what I’m worried about: whether I’ll have the energy and health for such hard work. . . . I’ve finished novels, but nonetheless,
on the whole
, have ruined my health.”
¹⁴
He was upset for practical, as well as artistic, reasons. “I’m terribly troubled by the daily thought of how we will arrange things for ourselves in the fall and on what funds. (I
cannot
ask Nekrasov again [for another advance], and besides, he probably
wouldn’t give
me anything.) He isn’t Katkov; he’s a person from Yaroslavl.”
¹⁵
Moreover, the flow of his inspiration was hampered by writing for a journal in which he hesitated to express himself freely. “The mere fact that
Notes of the Fatherland
will be afraid to publish certain of my opinions practically cuts off my hands.”
¹⁶

A week before returning to Russia he writes that “although there
really
is an improvement, that is . . . less dry coughing, breathing is easier, and so on . . . a certain (diseased) place remains, and that diseased place in my chest refuses to heal completely.” Nonetheless, “in everything else I feel incomparably healthier than before: energy, sleep, appetite—all of this is excellent.”
¹⁷
He left Bad Ems on July 27, and, according to Anna’s account, “he was not able to deny himself his deep desire to visit once more the grave of our first daughter, Sonya. He went to Geneva and visited the children’s cemetery of Plein Palais twice; and from Sonya’s grave he brought me a few sprigs of cypress, which in the course of six years had grown thick over our little girl’s monument.”
¹⁸

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.