Dostoevsky (52 page)

The demise of Isaev made it possible for Dostoevsky to dream at last of possessing, legally and publicly, the lady of his heart; but it was unthinkable to ask for her hand while remaining in his lowly status as a soldier. All this time, to be sure, he had been pulling whatever strings he could to obtain promotion. Upon joining the Siberian Army Corps he had asked Mikhail to approach the authorities in St. Petersburg and persuade them to transfer him to a corps on active service in the Caucasus. Dostoevsky believed that his chances of obtaining a full pardon in the future might be enhanced if he were to exhibit his loyalty by serving in a combat zone. In addition, Wrangel now asked Governor-General Gasfort to send Dostoevsky’s poem “On the First of July, 1855” to the recently widowed empress. In this work, Dostoevsky urges her to take comfort in the great deeds of her vanished spouse at the same time that he asks pardon for himself:

The poem did finally reach the empress. Dostoevsky was promoted to the rank of
unter-ofitser
(a noncommissioned grade) in November 1855, and could hope for more important signs of favor in the future. Wrangel left Semipalatinsk a month later for St. Petersburg, and while in the capital he intended to devote himself to advancing Dostoevsky’s cause. A long delay thus occurred between the date Wrangel set foot in the capital and the first letter in which he could give some hope to Dostoevsky, waiting on tenterhooks in his dreary exile for the news that would decide his future. Meanwhile, rumors reached him that Marya Dimitrievna had accepted another suitor. The distraught Dostoevsky sat down to pour out his anguish in a letter but was interrupted by the arrival of one from her, which lacked, as he tells Wrangel, even “a trace of our future hopes, as if that thought had been completely put aside.” And then, finally, came the question he had long feared: what should she do if she received an offer of marriage from a man “of a certain age with good qualities, in the service, and with an assured future?”
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Dostoevsky’s reaction to this missive, with its request for brotherly advice, reveals the melodramatic intensity that will so often mark the love entanglements of his fictional characters. “I was as if struck by lightning, I staggered, fainted, and wept all night. . . . In all my life I have never suffered so much. . . . My heart is consumed by deathly despair, at night there are dreams, shrieks, spasms in my throat choke me, tears sometimes stubbornly refuse to flow, sometimes come in torrents.” One can understand why Dostoevsky should exclaim, “Oh! Let God preserve everyone from this terrible, dreadful emotion! Great is the joy of love, but the sufferings are so frightful that it would be better never to be in love.”
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Worst of all, though, was the moral conflict in which he was plunged. Did he have the right to stand in the way of her making a reasonable marriage when his own prospects were so uncertain? But when he imagined Marya Dimitrievna, “ill, nervous, so refined in heart, cultivated, intelligent,” burying herself in Kuznetsk forever, and with a husband who perhaps “for his part might consider blows as being perfectly legal in marriage”—this simply drove him out of his mind! He had the eerie sense of living through the pathetic finale of his own first novel, with Marya Dimitrievna cast “in the situation of my heroine of
Poor Folk
, who marries [the brutal] Bykov (how prophetic I was!).” And he was certain that she did love him and was thinking of another only out of the direst necessity. “
Mais elle m’aime, elle m’aime
, I know that, I see it—by her sadness, her anguish, her melancholy, by the continual outbursts in her letters, and by much else that I will not write about.”
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Dostoevsky appealed to Wrangel, with an urgency verging on hysteria, to redouble his efforts in Petersburg so as to obtain for him a transfer to the Civil Service or a promotion to commissioned rank. Most important, he needed permission to publish (Dostoevsky claimed he would have a “novel” and an article completed in September). He also sent Wrangel, in violation of army regulations, a personal letter addressed to General E. I. Totleben, an old acquaintance from his days in the Academy of Military Engineers and now a national hero because of the brilliant fortifications he had devised for the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Wrangel had already paid him a visit on Dostoevsky’s behalf, but it was Dostoevsky’s idea, as a last resort, to appeal directly to the man of the hour and enlist his enormous prestige to accelerate a favorable decision.

“I was guilty,” he admits to Totleben after briefly outlining the facts of his arrest, trial, and conviction. “I was condemned legally and justly; a long tribulation, torturing and cruel, sobered me up and changed my ideas in many ways. But then—then I was blind, believed in theories and utopias.” And here, for the first time, Dostoevsky attributes his earlier belief in “theories and utopias” to the nervous illness from which he had suffered beginning in the spring of 1846 up to his arrest two years later. “I had been ill for two years running, with a strange, moral sickness. I was a hypochondriac. There were even times when I lost my reason. I was excessively irritable, impressionable to the point of sickness, and with the ability to deform the most ordinary facts and give them another aspect and dimension. But I felt that, even though this sickness exercised a strong and evil influence on my fate, it would have been a very pitiful and even humiliating justification.”
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Mental illness now becomes associated for Dostoevsky—both as a cause and as symptom—with ideological delusions that exercise “a strong and evil influence” on the destiny of those susceptible to their pernicious appeal.

As Dostoevsky’s dossier tortuously wound its way through the Byzantine labyrinth of the Russian bureaucracy, matters went from bad to worse for the two separated lovers. To Mikhail, Dostoevsky tries to justify his decision to marry—a decision that, as he is well aware, seemed madness in the eyes of his family, given the precariousness of his situation—and solicits his aid in reassuring Marya Dimitrievna that, if she were to become his wife, the family would give her a warm welcome. With Wrangel, Dostoevsky is more frank about the difficulties of his sentimental imbroglio. The specter of “a man of a certain age” had vanished because this worthy gentleman had been invented only to test Dostoevsky’s affections. “If I had answered with indifference,” explains Dostoevsky,
“she would have had proof that I had really forgotten her. When I received that letter I wrote a desperate one, terrible, which tore her apart, and then another. She had been ill these last days; my letter really finished her off. But it seems that my despair was sweet to her, although she suffered for me.” “I understand her: her heart is noble and proud,” he assures Wrangel.
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Wrangel’s visit to the magnanimous General Totleben, and Dostoevsky’s skillful letter to his erstwhile fellow cadet, at last succeeded in overcoming the first obstacle to his union. The powerful and influential hero agreed to intervene on Dostoevsky’s behalf and to ask the Ministry of War either to promote him to ensign or to release him to the Civil Service at the lowest rank. In either case, Dostoevsky would also be accorded the right to publish his literary work under the normal conditions of the law. It was this information that evoked Dostoevsky’s ecstatic reply of May 23, 1856, to the first affirmative word he had so far obtained from Petersburg, and the belief that “The affair, if I understand correctly, is on the right path.”
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Notable too is Dostoevsky’s enthusiastic response to what he hears from Wrangel about the new monarch. “God grant happiness to the magnanimous sovereign! And so, it’s all true, what everyone has said about the ardent love that all feel for him! How happy this makes me! More faith, more unity, and if there is love as well—then everything can be done!”
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This last sentence can almost be taken as a statement of the political ideal to which Dostoevsky was to dedicate his life—the ideal of rallying Russia to faith, unity, and love in support of the rule of Alexander II. For in March 1856, speaking before the gentry of Moscow, Alexander II had made his famous declaration: “It is better to begin the abolition of serfdom from above, than wait until it begins to abolish itself from below.”
⁴⁰
Dostoevsky had become a revolutionary
only
to abolish serfdom and
only
after the seeming dissolution of all hope that it would be ended, to quote Pushkin, “by the hand of the Tsar.” But now the glorious day had dawned of which Pushkin could only dream, and the tsar whom Dostoevsky was to support so fervently for the rest of his life was the Tsar-Liberator who had finally decided to eradicate this intolerable moral blight from the Russian consciousness.

Despite the good news that Dostoevsky had received, his state of mind soon returned to its unalterable gloom. The plan had been for Marya Dimitrievna to move to Barnaul, the center of the mining district of the Altai region, where Dostoevsky hoped to be employed, but she now refused to go. Even worse, her letters also suggested, as he tells Wrangel, “that she could not make me happy,
that we are both too unhappy, and that it would be better for us . . .” (at this point, two pages have been ripped from the manuscript of the letter by the vengeful hand of Dostoevsky’s second wife). When the letter resumes, we learn that Dostoevsky had decided to go to Kuznetsk and investigate matters for himself. “I am ready to go to jail if only I can see
her
. My situation is critical. We must talk it over and decide everything at one stroke!”
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Once on the spot, Dostoevsky’s suspicions of having been replaced were amply confirmed. “What a noble, what an angelic soul!” he writes to Wrangel. “She cried, she kissed my hands, but she loves another.”
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The other was the young schoolmaster, Nikolay Vergunov, who had befriended the Isaevs on their arrival and whose relations with Marya Dimitrievna had become close. No doubt Marya Dimitrievna had begun to lose patience with the slow improvement of Dostoevsky’s prospects; perhaps she had lost faith in them entirely. A young schoolmaster in hand, even with a pitiable income, was preferable to an even more penurious writer whose glowing anticipations of fame and fortune might never be realized. Dostoevsky himself refuses to utter one word of blame about what he might well have considered a betrayal.

What occurred between the threesome, during Dostoevsky’s two days in Kuznetsk, rivals the stormiest scenes of a three-decker novel and was transposed by Dostoevsky a few years later in the pages of
The Insulted and Injured
. He depicts himself (or his fictional hero, a young writer who is the author of
Poor Folk
) as retreating helplessly before the infatuation of his beloved for another; but in real life Dostoevsky played a different role. He was far from willing to abandon the field without a struggle, and his best weapon turned out to be his imagination as a novelist. For he sketched in, with all the resources of his art, the appalling problems that might arise in the future because of incompatibilities in age and character between Marya Dimitrievna and her young lover, aged twenty-four. Dostoevsky became so agitated, even in recounting these events to Wrangel, that his handwriting is barely legible.

“And [gap in text] will he not later,” he told Marya Dimitrievna and now repeats for Wrangel, “in several years, when she is still [gap in text], will he not wish for her death? . . . Might he not later reproach her with having calculated on his youth and taken over his life solely to satisfy her voluptuous demands?” Naturally, all these agitated premonitions had not been put so bluntly in face-to-face conversation; Dostoevsky had been more subtle, sketching his menacing visions as conjectures while maintaining that Vergunov could not possibly behave in such a fashion. “I didn’t convince her of anything” he estimates, “but I spread some doubt; she wept and was tormented.”
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At this point, a peripety occurred that reminds us of those sudden climactic moments in Dostoevsky’s work when mutual hostility turns to love. “I felt pity for her, and then she completely came back to me—she felt pity for me! If you know what an angel she is, my friend! You never knew her; at every instant something original, sensible, clever but also paradoxical, infinitely good, truly noble (a knight in female clothing), she has the heart of a knight; she will be her own ruination. She doesn’t know herself, but I know her!” Dostoevsky also met Vergunov, who broke down and wept in his presence. “I met him; he cried, but only knows how to cry,” he remarks, with a touch of disdain.
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At Marya Dimitrievna’s suggestion, Dostoevsky wrote a letter to Vergunov summing up all the weighty reasons he had advanced against the approaching union of the pair. She kept spinning like a weathervane and told Dostoevsky before his departure, “ ‘Don’t cry, don’t grieve, everything is not decided; you and I and nobody else!’ These are her exact words,” he assures Wrangel. “I don’t know how I spent those two days. It was bliss and unbearable torture! At the end of the second day, I left
full of hope
.”
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