Dostoevsky (174 page)

Dostoevsky left Staraya Russa on May 22, seen off by Anna, the children, and his mother-in-law. Anna had desired to travel to Moscow herself with the children, but such an expedition was beyond their means. Worried about Dostoevsky’s health, in view of the anticipated strain, Anna made him promise to write every day, and he faithfully kept his word—often writing not once but twice. A full, firsthand account thus exists of the swirling round of activities in which he became engulfed during a stay that was expected to be no more than a week, but lasted twenty-two days.

This prolongation was partly due to the death of Tsarina Marya Alexandrovna on the very day of Dostoevsky’s departure. He heard about it from fellow passengers, and his first thought was that the festivities would be cancelled, but he decided to continue his trip nonetheless. Arriving in Moscow, he spent his morning returning visits from various notables, including Ivan Aksakov, and then went to call on Yuriev. “An enthusiastic meeting with kisses,” he reports with an edge of irony. He was not at all impressed with the editor, whom he compares with the scatterbrained Repetilov in Griboyedov’s
Woe from Wit
. “He’s a fibbertigibbet as a person, a Repetilov in a new form.” That evening he went to see Lyubimov and Katkov, who received him cordially, but were anxiously awaiting a new installment of his novel for June (“when I get home I’ll have to work like the devil”).
⁵

A dinner had been arranged in Dostoevsky’s honor at the Hermitage on the twenty-fifth because “all the young Moscow writers are wildly anxious to meet me.” Twenty-two guests attended, among them Ivan Aksakov and Nikolay Rubinshtein, founder and director of the Moscow Conservatory, who had been placed in charge of the musical arrangements for the festival; there were also four university professors. He was impressed with the lavishness of the meal: “quail, amazing asparagus, ice cream, a river of fine wines and champagne . . . after dinner, over coffee and liqueur, two hundred magnificent and expensive cigars appeared.” Six laudatory speeches were given, and “mention was made of my ‘great significance as an artist of worldwide sensitivity,’ as a journalist, and as a Russian. . . . Everyone was in an enthusiastic state. . . . I replied to everyone with a quite successful speech that produced a great effect; moreover, I made Pushkin the topic of the speech.”
⁶

During the dinner, Dostoevsky announced that he was planning to leave on the twenty-seventh and, he tells Anna, “an absolute din arose: ‘We won’t let you go.’ ” Earlier in the day, Prince Dolgoruky had told representatives of the society that the festivities
would
take place sometime between June 1 and 5, and Dostoevsky was admonished: “All of Moscow will be grieved and indignant if you leave.”
⁷
When he pleaded that he had to work on
The Karamazovs
, it was instantly proposed that a deputation be sent to Katkov to demand a revision of the publication schedule. Under this pressure, he wavered and said he would come to a decision the next day.

On May 27, he learned that the Moscow Duma would be covering the room and board of all the invited delegates. Far from being pleased, he objected strenuously but was told he would insult all of Moscow if he persisted in refusing. Why, even the surviving members of Pushkin’s family, all residing in the same hotel, had accepted the hospitality of the Duma! In view of Dostoevsky’s concern about expenses, one might think that his resistance was feigned, but a writer known to have accepted
any
kind of official support was assumed to have lost his independence, and Dostoevsky wished to avoid such an imputation at all costs. He thus tells Anna that he will “purposely go to restaurants for dinner so as to reduce as much as possible the bill that will be presented to the Duma by the hotel.”
⁸
He did not want any gossip to spread that he was exploiting the situation unduly for his own advantage.

On the afternoon of May 26 it was learned that the ceremonies would take place on June 4, and most of the deputations, from all parts of Russia, decided to remain. Preparations for the great event were in full swing; “the windows of the buildings surrounding the square are being rented out for fifty rubles a window.”
⁹
Dostoevsky explained again to Anna that “
I should
stay . . . it’s not just [the Society] who need me, but our whole party, our whole idea, for which we have been struggling thirty years now because the hostile party (Turgenev, Kovalevsky, and almost the entire university) definitely want to play down Pushkin’s significance as a spokesman for the Russian national character, denying that very national character. . . . I have fought for this my whole life and can’t flee the field of battle now.”
¹⁰
Moreover, as he had told the more practical Anna just the day before, “if my speech at the gala meeting is a success, then in Moscow (and therefore in Russia too) from then on I will be better known as a writer (that is, in the sense of the eminence already won by Turgenev and Tolstoy). Goncharov, for instance, who doesn’t leave Petersburg, is known here, but from afar and coldly.”
¹¹

Turgenev had been assigned the delicate, unenviable task of journeying to Yasnaya Polyana to persuade Tolstoy to attend the Pushkin celebration, even though Tolstoy by this time had renounced literature for reasons comparable to those of the radical critics who had denounced Pushkin in the 1860s. Just what occurred during their meeting on May 2–3 is not known, but Grigorovich, an inveterate gossip, told Dostoevsky that “Turgenev, who has come back from seeing Lev Tolstoy, is ill, while Tolstoy has nearly lost his mind, and has perhaps quite lost it.”
¹²
A day later Tolstoy informs Strakhov: “I had many interesting conversations with Turgenev. Up to now . . . people have said: ‘What’s Tolstoy doing, working away at some nonsense or other. He ought to be told to stop that nonsense.’ And every time it’s been the case that the people giving advice have become ashamed and frightened about themselves. I think it was the same with Turgenev too. I found it both painful and comforting to be with him. And we parted amicably.”
¹³
Another report, however, claims that Turgenev was “hurt and offended” by the encounter. In a succeeding letter, Dostoevsky writes: “Katkov also confirmed about Lev Tolstoy that he has quite lost his mind. Yuriev has been trying to get me to see him. . . . But I won’t go, even though it would be very interesting.”
¹⁴

On May 31, he finally received a letter from Anna and was greatly relieved: “An oppression seems to have lifted from my heart.” The provident Anna had charged him with the task of inscribing the name of their son Feodor in the register of the nobility in Moscow; but after several reminders, he replied that “in the first place, even if it were possible, I don’t have the time, and most important it needs to be done from Petersburg,
through people
.”
¹⁵
A meeting had been held at Turgenev’s lodgings that day to make the final arrangements, and two days later Dostoevsky complains to Anna about having been excluded. On the morning of June 1, he learned that instead of the readings that had been initially assigned to him, he had been given Pushkin’s “The Prophet,” which of course he knew by heart. “I probably won’t refuse ‘The Prophet,’ but how could they not notify me officially?”
¹⁶

Such offhand treatment was as nothing compared with the blow dealt to Katkov on the same day. Visiting him that evening, Dostoevsky met Lyubimov, who told him that Yuriev, in the name of the society, had
withdrawn
an invitation to Katkov as editor of
Moscow News
, where Katkov’s attacks on the intelligentsia had appeared, on the ground that it had been sent through an error. Dostoevsky was outraged at this display of ideological partisanship, even more
so when he learned from the irrepressible tattler Grigorovich that “Yuriev was made to sign it, mainly by Kovalevsky but by Turgenev too.” “It’s vileness,” Dostoevsky fumed, “and if I weren’t so involved in these festivities I would perhaps break off relations with them.”
¹⁷

On June 3, Dostoevsky went to a meeting of the executive committee of the society, where—in spite of his previous suspicions—the final dispositions were made. “Everything was arranged to everyone’s general satisfaction,” he tells Anna contentedly. “Turgenev was rather nice to me, while Kovalevsky (a big fat hulk and enemy of our tendency) kept staring at me intently.” He would read his Pushkin speech “on the second day of the morning meeting, and on the evening of the sixth I’m reading Pimen’s scene from
Boris Godunov
. . . . on the eighth, I’ll read three poems by Pushkin (two from ‘Songs of the Western Slavs’), and at the finale, for the
conclusion
of the celebrations, Pushkin’s ‘The Prophet.’ ” His public renditions of this poem had always created a sensation and become deservedly famous. “I was purposely put into the finale so as to produce an effect.”
¹⁸

On returning to his hotel at ten o’clock, he found a card from Suvorin and hastened to the hotel where this Petersburg ally was staying with his wife. “I was terribly glad. Because of his articles he’s in disgrace with the ‘Lovers [Society]’ just like Katkov.”
¹⁹
Suvorin had written several pieces attacking Yuriev’s
Russian Thought
and, though not defending Katkov directly, had assailed his enemies. These opinions had been enough for him to fall out of the good graces of the society. “They didn’t even give him a ticket for a morning meeting.” Dostoevsky and Grigorovich planned to visit the Kremlin Museum of Antiquities the next day, and Suvorin begged that they “take him and his wife.” “Poor fellow,” Dostoevsky remarks, “he seems bored with his wife”—an attitude very far from his own sentiments. Replying to Anna’s teasing accusation that “I don’t love you,” he confesses, “I keep having terrible dreams, nightmares every night, about your betraying me with others.”
²⁰

The official opening ceremonies of “the Pushkin days” began on June 5. In the afternoon all one hundred and six delegations were received in the hall of the Duma by Prince Oldenburgsky, head of the commission for the Pushkin monument, and Governor-General Dolgoruky. “The fussing around, the chaos—it’s impossible to describe,” Dostoevsky writes. Each delegation advanced in turn to a stage covered with luxuriant greenery and dominated by a large bust of Push-kin, at the foot of which they deposited their wreaths. (Dostoevsky had been
tormented by the problem of acquiring such a wreath and paying for it out of his own pocket.) The delegates then read speeches, and the press comments on the merits of these oratorical efforts were hardly complimentary. The Populist writer Gleb Uspensky, who covered the festival for
Notes of the Fatherland
, remarked that “there were speeches so strange that even if one wanted to, one could not track down precisely where the main clause was located.”
²¹
Dostoevsky says nothing about the oratory but mentions that he managed to speak to Pushkin’s daughter while standing in line, and that “Turgenev ran up courteously,” as did the playwright Ostrovsky, “the local Jupiter.”
²²

For June 7, he begins his letter to Anna with an account of the events of the day preceding, when the Pushkin monument had been unveiled and dedicated. His pen faltered, however, at depicting this epochal event. “You couldn’t describe it even in twenty pages, and besides, I don’t have even a moment’s time. For three nights I’ve slept only five hours each, and tonight too.”
²³
As a prelude to the unveiling, a mass had been held at the Strastnoi Monastery just across the square from the monument, and Metropolitan Makary—a member of the society—solemnly wished “eternal memory” to Pushkin’s shade. The plan had been for Metropolitan Makary to lead a solemn procession from the church to the statue, which he would sprinkle with holy water, but the clergy remained within the church and the statue did not receive the expected blessing. Protests had been raised that such a blessing would be sacrilege. Thus, without benefit of clergy, the processions marched to the strains of “four orchestras and several choruses and groups of schoolchildren” led by Rubinshtein. “Delegates wore badges and carried wreaths; some waved flags of red, white, and blue with their delegation’s name stamped in gold”;
²⁴
other banners bore the names of Pushkin’s poems.

The unveiling produced an explosion of joyful hysteria, and all accounts agree that “people were ‘crazed with happiness’; many wept, and even the most hard-nosed of newspapermen admitted afterward to shedding a few tears.” A columnist in
Voice
wrote of “How many sincere handshakes, how many good, honest kisses people exchanged—often people who weren’t even acquainted.”
²⁵
One should keep this generally ecstatic mood in mind in gauging what Dostoevsky tells us about the fervent testimonies of admiration lavished on him even before his speech. Once the unveiling had taken place, the delegations, marching to the music of Meyerbeer’s “The Prophet,” paraded to the monument and laid their wreaths at its foot.