Dostoevsky (85 page)

By the time Dostoevsky arrived in Paris, on August 14, 1863, the unhappy fate of his romance with Suslova had already been sealed. Just a few days before, she had fallen into the masterful Spanish arms of the irresistible Salvador; and since her diary begins at this very moment, we can follow the course of events. She broke the news in a letter that she confides to her notebook; it begins brutally:

Such words were certainly meant to wound to the quick, and they convey the impression that Suslova’s easy acquiescence may have been partly prompted by a desire to take revenge on Dostoevsky. In any case, her attitude toward him as a person, if not as a lover, is ambivalent and will remain so. The text in her diary continues, “How generous, how high-minded he is. What an intellect! What a soul!”
¹²

Whether or not Suslova had really abandoned herself to Salvador so easily, she was already aware that his flaming Latin passion had cooled considerably after conquest. Dostoevsky turned up in the midst of this drama between Polina and her Latin lover, calling on her before her letter arrived. On seeing her emerge to meet him, trembling and upset, he asked what was wrong, and she blurted out that he should not have come, “because it’s too late.” Dostoevsky then “hung his head,” almost as if having expected the blow, and said, “I must know everything, let’s go somewhere, and tell me, or I’ll die.” The two left in a carriage for Dostoevsky’s hotel, and, she writes, he “kept hold of my hand all the way, pressing
it hard from time to time and making some sort of convulsive movements.”
¹³
Once in Dostoevsky’s room, a scene occurred that Suslova later used verbatim in a short story: “He fell at my feet, and, putting his arms around my knees, clasping them and sobbing, he exclaimed between sobs: ‘I have lost you, I knew it!’ Then, having regained his composure, he began to ask me about the man. ‘Perhaps he is handsome, young, and glib. But you will never find a heart such as mine!’ ”
¹⁴
Dostoevsky had all along feared losing her to a younger and handsomer rival, and his worst forebodings had now been realized.

She finally broke down and began to weep herself, explaining that her own love was unrequited. Probably encouraged by what must have been Suslova’s unflattering picture of her seducer, he told her, Suslova’s account continues, “that he was happy to have met a human being such as I was in the world. He begged me to remain his friend. . . . Then he suggested that we travel to Italy together, while remaining like brother and sister.” The conversation concluded with a promise of further meetings, and an acknowledgment by Suslova of Dostoevsky’s continued hold over her affections. “I felt relieved after I had talked with him. He understands me.”
¹⁵

For the next week, matters remained in this indecisive stage. Suslova saw Dostoevsky regularly while at the same time writing letters, both proud and pleading, to Salvador, unable to make up her mind to send them. In September, finding out that Salvador’s excuses not to see her were ruses to quit her company as rapidly as possible and for good, she writes: “I became hysterical. I screamed that I was going to kill him. . . . I made everything ready, burned some of my notebooks and letters. . . . I felt wonderfully well.” Not having slept all night, Suslova rushed to Dostoevsky at seven in the morning the next day. Opening the door for her in his nightclothes, the startled Dostoevsky then “went back to bed wrapping himself up in his blanket. He looked at me with astonishment and apprehension. . . . I told him that he should come to my place right away. I wanted to tell him everything and ask him to be my judge.”
¹⁶

By the time Dostoevsky arrived, Suslova’s mood had changed completely: she came to meet him munching a piece of toast, and declared with a laugh that she was now much calmer. “Yes,” he said, “and I am very glad about that, but who can tell anything for sure when it concerns you?” Now for the first time Suslova told him the whole story, concealing nothing, and Dostoevsky advised her to forget about the unhappy betrayal. “I had, of course, sullied myself, but . . . it had only been an accident. . . . Salvador, being a young man, needed a mistress, and I happened to be available so he took advantage of me, and why shouldn’t
he have done so?” Suslova now admits that “F. M. was right. I understood perfectly well, but how hard it was for me!”
¹⁷

Dostoevsky was still afraid that Suslova might “come up with some foolishness,” and warned her against doing anything rash. Her reply tells us a good deal about herself, as well as about her future relations with Dostoevsky and the portrait he was to paint of her later in
The Gambler
. “ ‘I would not like to kill him’ I said, ‘but I would like to torture him for a very long time.’ ” A passage in her diary elaborates on this impulse: “right now I suddenly feel a desire to avenge myself, but how? By what means?” Suslova finally decided to send Salvador a sum of money in payment for the “service” he had rendered her, hoping by this gesture to wound the
hidalgo
dignity that had previously impressed her in his character.
¹⁸
The insulting letter was sent, but it elicited no more reply than all the others.

A few days later, Suslova and Dostoevsky departed on their long-planned trip to Italy. He would have been less than human if he had not hoped that his role of friend and counselor would eventually return again to being that of lover, but Suslova was seething with an unappeased desire for vengeance, and in the absence of Salvador she turned on the hapless Dostoevsky instead. He too, after all, was an ex-lover who had betrayed her expectations, and while grateful for his continued sympathy and solicitude, she also took a sadistic pleasure in treating him as she no doubt imagined herself treating Salvador had he been within her reach.

In a diary entry for September 5, made on their first stop in Baden-Baden, Suslova confesses, “A thirst for revenge burned in my soul for a long time after, and I decided that, if I do not become distracted in Italy, I will return to Paris and do as I had planned” (presumably kill Salvador).
¹⁹
Other diary entries reveal her ego in the process of obtaining satisfaction for the painful wounds inflicted by the unhappy past: “While we were enroute there, he [Dostoevsky] told me he had some hope. . . . I did not say anything to this, but I knew it was not going to happen.”
²⁰
Suslova’s behavior continued to inflame his passion while frustrating its satisfaction. Certainly she derived some consolation from the ardency of Dostoevsky’s wooing. She describes lying on her bed, summoning Dostoevsky to hold her hand. “I felt good,” she notes. “I took his hand and for a long time held it in mine. . . . I told him that I had been unfair and unkind to him in Paris, that it may have seemed as though I had been thinking only of myself, yet I had been thinking of him, too, but did not want to say it, so as not to hurt him.”
²¹

No wonder Dostoevsky suddenly leaped to his feet, stumbled, explained that he wished to close the window, but then admitted, “with a strange expression” on his face, that he had just been on the point of bending to kiss her foot. Desiring then to undress and go to bed, Suslova indicated as much indirectly, but Dostoevsky invented excuses for not leaving the room immediately and then came back several times on one pretext or another (the two had adjoining rooms). The next day he apologized for his behavior and “said that I must probably find it unpleasant, the way he was annoying me. I answered that I didn’t mind, and refused to be drawn into a discussion of the subject, so that he could neither cherish hope nor be quite without it.”
²²
Suslova later excerpted this scene from her notebook and used it, dialogue and all, in a short story.

Although Suslova’s evasiveness was surely a major factor in the darkening of his disposition, his severe losses at roulette contributed their share as well. At the start, he tells Mikhail, “I came to the table [at Baden] and in
a quarter of an hour
had won 600 francs. That fired me up. Suddenly, I began to lose, I couldn’t stop, and I lost everything, down to the last kopek.”
²³
His letters home plead with Mikhail to scrape together whatever he can and send it immediately, and he asks his sister-in-law to retrieve for him one hundred rubles from the amount dispatched earlier for Marya Dimitrievna. The diplomatic maneuvers involved in such a task were extremely intricate, and Dostoevsky takes several pages to explain how the feat might be accomplished without arousing Marya Dimitrievna’s stormy susceptibilities.

As if all this were not enough, Dostoevsky’s agitated stay in Baden-Baden was complicated by the obligation to call on Turgenev, who had settled there recently in a
ménage à trois
with Pauline Viardot, her husband, and family. Turgenev would have been offended if he had heard of Dostoevsky’s passage by accident, but Dostoevsky also knew that, if he caught sight of Suslova, tongues would immediately start to wag in Petersburg. “At Baden I saw Turgenev,” Dostoevsky reports to Mikhail. “I visited him twice and he came to see me once in return. He did not see A. P. I did not want him to know. . . . He spoke to me of all his moral torments and his doubts. Philosophic doubts, but which undermine life. A bit fatuous. I did not hide from him that I gambled. He gave me
Phantoms
to read, but gambling prevented me from reading and I returned it unread. He said that he wrote it for our journal and that if, once in Rome, I asked him for it, he will send it there. But what do I know of the journal?”
²⁴

The sensitive Turgenev was still suffering from the uproar caused by
Fathers and Children
, especially from the unrelenting hostility of that portion of the radical press (
The Contemporary
and
The Spark
) that considered the work a defamation of
the younger generation. The failure to read
Phantoms
, destined for
Time
or whatever journal replaced it, was of course a terrible faux pas, and Mikhail’s cry of anguish when he read the above passage can be heard in his response: “Do you know what Turgenev means for us
now
?”
²⁵
Nothing could have been a greater affront to Turgenev’s considerable literary vanity, especially at this troubled moment of his career.

Dostoevsky had asked that the money he so urgently requested be forwarded to Turin, where it would await them once the ill-matched pair, alternating between tenderness and tantrums, had crossed the Alps by way of Switzerland. On arrival, however, they found nothing, and both lived in constant fear of being summoned to pay their hotel bill and dragged to the police. “Here, that’s how things are done,” Dostoevsky informs Mikhail, “no arrangement is possible . . . and I am not alone here. It’s horrible!” But the eagerly awaited funds finally came to the rescue. Meanwhile, Dostoevsky had tried to do some writing—perhaps a travel article, perhaps some notes for
The Gambler
, but, he tells Mikhail, “I tore up everything I had written in Turin. I have had enough of writing on order.”
²⁶

After a stormy sea voyage from Genoa, with a stopover in Livorno, the two arrived in Rome. “Yesterday morning,” he wrote to Strakhov, “I visited St. Peter’s! The impression is very strong, Nikolay Nikolaevich, and gives one a shiver up the spine.”
²⁷
The shiver, one presumes, was not caused by aesthetic appreciation but rather by the mighty power for evil that Dostoevsky always associated with the Roman church. Despite the harassments attendant on his wanderings, and prompted by Strakhov, Dostoevsky had found time to further his education. “Tell Strakhov that I am carefully reading the Slavophils,” he had instructed Mikhail, “and that I have found something new.”
²⁸

What he could not have discovered through Belinsky and Herzen was the systematic
theological
basis that the Slavophils had provided for their ideas. Slavophil theology was bitterly anti-Catholic and traced all the evils of mankind, past and present, back to the Roman Catholic pope’s assumption of the temporal power once possessed by the Roman emperors.
²⁹
St. Peter’s, in Dostoevsky’s
eyes, could only have been seen as the living embodiment of such un-Christian claims to worldly grandeur, and his visit to Rome thus coincided with an important phase in the evolution of his ideas. Slavophil thought now gave his personal prejudices a wide-ranging conceptual foundation, and it was only after this second trip to Europe that Dostoevsky begins to express the opposition between Russia and Europe in primarily religious terms. “The Polish War,” he confides to his notebook during the winter of 1863–1864, “is a war of two Christianities—it is the beginning of the future war between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, in other words—of the Slavic genius with European civilization” (20: 170).