Dostoevsky (97 page)
Authors: Joseph Frank
Dostoevsky spoke quickly, agitatedly and stumblingly. . . . The most frightful, the most terrible sin—was to violate a child. To take a life—that is horrible, Dostoevsky said, but to take away faith in the beauty of love—that is the most terrible crime. And Dostoevsky recounted an episode from his childhood. When I lived in Moscow as a child in a hospital for the poor, Dostoevsky said, where my father was a doctor, I played with a little girl (the daughter of a coachman or a cook). She was a delicate,
graceful child of nine. . . . And some disgraceful wretch violated the girl when drunk and she died, pouring out blood. I recall, Dostoevsky said, being sent for my father in the other wing of the hospital, but it was too late. All my life this memory has haunted me as the most frightful crime, the most terrible sin, for which there is not, and cannot be, any forgiveness, and I punished Stavrogin in
Demons
with this very same terrible crime.
18
As can be seen from Sofya’s recollections, Dostoevsky’s verbal comportment may have led Anna’s mother to regret having admitted him into the intimacy of the family circle. Another occasion when she undoubtedly had second thoughts about her tolerance occurred during a farewell party consisting of mostly Russian-Germans, very staid, official, and stuffy—exactly the sort of group in which Dostoevsky felt most uncomfortable. He resented that Anna, as elder daughter, shared the obligations of receiving with her mother and was not allowed to confine her attentions exclusively to himself. Even worse, he conceived a furious jealousy for a handsome young officer present, who was obviously attracted to Anna and to whom, he convinced himself, Anna would be forced to become engaged against her will. He expressed his displeasure and created a scandal by unpleasant remarks uttered in a loud voice (for example, that the Bible had not been written for society women to read) and by a generally boorish behavior. It was after this evening, according to Sofya, that Anna’s previous reverence for Dostoevsky sharply altered. The private conversations between the two changed in tone; now they seemed to be disputing, sometimes acrimoniously, rather than engaging in a friendly exchange of ideas.
As the moment approached for Anna’s return to Palibino, Dostoevsky became more censorious and despotic, and Anna less docile and more assertive. “The continual and very burning subject of their argument,” writes Sofya, “was Nihilism. The debate over this question continued sometimes long after midnight.” “ ‘All of contemporary youth is stupid and backward!’ Dostoevsky once shouted. ‘Shiny boots are more valuable for them than Pushkin!’ To which Anna retorted coolly that ‘Pushkin has in fact become out of date in our time,’ knowing that nothing could drive Dostoevsky into more of a fury than a lack of respect for Pushkin.”
19
All the same, one evening when Sofya was bravely struggling with Beethoven’s
Sonate Pathétique
, which she knew to be among Dostoevsky’s favorites, he and Anna treacherously slipped away to another room unobserved. And when the disconsolate pianist went to find her lost audience, she burst in on a proposal of marriage. There is some uncertainty whether Anna accepted, in the emotion of
the moment, and then was freed from her pledge by Dostoevsky (that is the story he told his second wife), or whether she ever gave any reply at all. Sofya does not mention an engagement, and one assumes that, if it had existed, Anna’s family would have been informed. Whatever the truth, Anna told Sofya: “I do not love Dostoevsky in such a way as to marry him.” Besides the difference in age and ideas, Anna realized, with salutary insight, that Dostoevsky needed a wife entirely submissive to his will. “Look,” she told her younger sister, “I am sometimes surprised at myself that I cannot love him! He is such a good man! . . . But he does not at all need someone like myself! Besides, he is so nervous, so demanding!”
20
Dostoevsky would find exactly the sort of wife he needed a year later, but he always maintained cordial relations with Anna and her sister.
He saw a good deal of Anna in the mid-1870s, even though, in the interim, she had married a well-known French radical named Charles Victor Jaclard and committed herself wholeheartedly to a life of revolutionary activity. Not only was she the first translator of parts of Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital
into French, but she also established warm personal relations with Marx and played a leading role among the women (they included a surprising number of Russians) who participated courageously in the defense of the Paris Commune of 1870. It is likely that Dostoevsky drew on his courtship of her for the portrait of Aglaya Epanchina in
The Idiot
, whose engagement to Prince Myshkin upset her respectable family as much as Anna’s friendship with Dostoevsky had initially done with hers. Once more, however, after his attempt to win Anna’s hand had come to an amicable but irreversible end, Dostoevsky was thrown back on the isolation from which he so achingly longed to escape.
Meanwhile, whatever Dostoevsky’s gloom over the failure of
Epoch
, the end of his impossible labors must nonetheless have come as something of a relief. Even when he still believed that
Epoch
could be a success, he had looked forward to the moment when he could return to his essential creative task as a novelist. Now he was being forced to do so, and for us it is evident that his failure as an editor and journalist was his salvation as an artist. During the next five years, under the pressure of necessity but never at the cost of artistic integrity, he would write three of his greatest novels—
Crime and Punishment
,
The Idiot
, and
Demons
—and establish his reputation once and for all as belonging to the very front rank of Russian literature. As these works were to prove, it was in the fierce give-and-take of argument and polemic that he had gradually hammered out his own position and found the great theme that was to occupy him throughout the remainder of his life—the moral-psychic dangers involved in the desire of the radical Russian intelligentsia to establish human life on new, “rational” foundations that would replace the God-given order still alive in the Russian moral sensibility.
1
Pis’ma
, 1: 375; first week of July 1864.
2
Ibid., 4: 272–273; July 29, 1864.
3
Ibid., 1: 399; April 5, 1865.
4
Ibid., 400; April 14, 1865.
5
Ibid., 401.
6
Ibid., 396; March 31, 1865.
7
Ibid., 397–398.
8
Ibid., 398.
9
Ibid., April 9, 1865.
10
Ibid., 401; April 14, 1865.
11
Ibid., 401–402.
12
The letters of Martha Panina were published by G. Prokhorov in “Nerazvernuvshiisya roman F. M. Dostoevskogo,”
Zvenya
5 (1936), 582–598; the citation is on 600.
13
Ibid.
14
S. V. Kovalevskaya,
Vospominaniya
(Moscow, 1974), 70.
15
Ibid., 73.
16
Ibid., 50.
17
Ibid., 77.
18
S. V. Belov, “Z. A. Trubetskaya, Dostoevsky i A. P. Filosofova,”
Russkaya Literatura
3 (Moscow, 1973), 117.
19
Kovalevskaya,
Vospominaniya
, 81.
20
Ibid., 88.
The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871
CHAPTER 32
Khlestakov in Wiesbaden
Dostoevsky was again eager to travel abroad because it was there that he could hope to meet his ex-mistress Apollinaria Suslova, the young feminist writer who had never been entirely out of his mind during the past two years and with whom he had carried on a secret correspondence even as his wife was dying. Suslova had remained in Europe when Dostoevsky returned to Russia, and letters between the pair constantly went back and forth. Unfortunately, all of this correspondence has been lost (except for the draft of one letter preserved in Suslova’s diary). That Dostoevsky still dreamed of renewing his relations with Suslova is evident from a letter he sent her younger sister, Nadezhda (who later became a close friend of Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya). Nadezhda Suslova was then pursuing her medical studies in Zurich, and since Apollinaria, living in Montpellier, was to join her there, Dostoevsky wrote letters to both addresses.
Nadezhda herself, whom Dostoevsky admired and often visited in Petersburg, had criticized him harshly for his supposed ill treatment of her sister; and he appeals to Nadezhda’s firsthand knowledge of his character to counter the damaging effect of Apollinaria’s complaints. For the past several years, he reminds her, “I have come to seek in your company some peace for my soul during all the times of trial, and recently it was only to you that I came when my heart was too full of grief. You have seen me in my sincerest moments and you can judge: do I feed on the sufferings of others, am I brutal, (inwardly), am I cruel?”
1
Apollinaria, he tells her sister, is herself “a great egoist. Her egoism and her vanity are colossal. She demands
everything
of other people, all the perfections, and does not pardon the slightest imperfection in the light of other qualities that one may possess.” Dostoevsky predicts that she will always be unhappy, because “the person who demands everything of others but recognizes no obligation can never be happy.” What little we know of Apollinaria Suslova’s later life would seem to bear out this prophecy.
2
“I still love her,” Dostoevsky confesses, “I love her very much, but already I wish not to love her. She
does not deserve
such a love.” Dostoevsky insists that what Suslova finds insulting in his letter “is that I have dared to oppose her, dared to tell her I was suffering. . . . She has no humanity at all in her relations with me. She knows that I still love her. Why then does she torture me? Don’t love me, but also don’t torture me.” If Dostoevsky’s behavior patterns exhibit a strong masochistic component, such words illustrate that there was a limit to his presumed enjoyment of suffering; but neither could he forget that Suslova had once loved him, nor relinquish the tantalizing hope that she might surrender herself again. For all his misgivings, he could not let slip what seemed his last chance for personal happiness, and the pursuit of Apollinaria was certainly among the reasons why he determined, at whatever cost, to return to Europe during the summer of 1865.
The major obstacle to such a plan was a lack of funds, and just how hard-pressed Dostoevsky was at this time can be seen from a notice he received from the local police warning him to pay his creditors six hundred rubles. In case of default, he could expect a visit from the police to make an inventory of his personal belongings preparatory to their sale at auction. Dostoevsky turned for help to the Literary Fund, which granted him the loan of six hundred rubles, thus rescuing him from the loss of all his household effects.
Continuously subjected to such harassment, Dostoevsky was all the more eager to leave the country for a time. On June 8 he wrote to Kraevsky, his old editor of the 1840s and still at the head of
Notes of the Fatherland
, to offer him the plan for a new work and to request an advance of three thousand rubles. “My novel is called
The Drunkards
,” Dostoevsky explains, “and will deal with the present problem of alcoholism.”
3
Dostoevsky promised to have the first
chapters ready by October 1865; in case of death, or if he failed to meet the deadline, he offered as guarantee the right in perpetuity to all his previous works. But Kraevsky declined the proposal, even though Dostoevsky specified other conditions protecting the rights of the publisher. In any event, Dostoevsky’s plan for
The Drunkards
came to little more than the idea he mentioned in his letters. Totally hemmed in by the affairs of
Epoch
, he would hardly have had time to work out ideas for a new novel.
The Drunkards
was never written, but it did provide the subplot involving the Marmeladov family in
Crime and Punishment
.
As a last resort, Dostoevsky turned to a publisher named Stellovsky, ill famed for driving hard bargains. Stellovsky had already approached Dostoevsky with an offer of two thousand rubles in return for the right to publish a single edition of his works with no royalties accruing. Dostoevsky had turned down this miserly proposition, but, driven back to Stellovsky by necessity, he now agreed to accept even more severe conditions. The publisher would advance three thousand rubles in exchange for the right to print an edition of Dostoevsky’s complete works. In addition, Dostoevsky agreed to furnish a new novel of specified format by November 1, 1866, and in case of failure, Stellovsky would have the right to publish
all
of Dostoevsky’s future works without compensation to the author for a period of nine years. Despite the risks of entering into such a contract, Dostoevsky accepted. After revising his works for Stellovsky’s new edition and obtaining a provisional promise from the journal
The Library for Reading
to forward him an advance in return for a story or some travel articles, he left for Europe at the end of July.