Dostoevsky (98 page)

Each time Dostoevsky had gone abroad in the past, he had hurried to the roulette tables, and the same pattern was repeated now. By the time he arrived in Wiesbaden on the twenty-ninth of July to try his luck, the three thousand rubles obtained from Stellovsky had been distributed among his most pressing creditors and also parceled out to meet the needs of Mikhail’s family and Dostoevsky’s stepson Pasha; only one hundred seventy-five silver rubles had been retained for the voyage. Five days later, however, he lost everything down to his last penny, and was even forced to pawn his watch. For help he turned first to Turgenev in Baden-Baden, whom he had seen just the month previous in Petersburg and with whom he was on the friendliest footing.

Writing from Wiesbaden, Dostoevsky first explained his unfortunate circumstances and then apologetically added that, while feeling “aversion and shame” at disturbing his fellow novelist, he had nowhere else to appeal for help. And “since you are more intelligent than the others, it is morally easier to turn to you. Here is what is involved: I appeal to you as one human being to another, and I ask for one hundred thalers.” Dostoevsky promised to repay within a month out of funds he expected to receive from
The Library for Reading
and also
from “someone who
must
help me”
⁴
(perhaps Apollinaria Suslova, who shortly afterward arrived in Wiesbaden for a visit).

Turgenev rapidly sent fifty thalers, which was all he could afford at the moment. Dostoevsky gratefully acknowledged the loan: “although [it] has not entirely cleared me, all the same it is of great help. I hope to pay you back very soon.”
⁵
In addition to Turgenev, Dostoevsky also appealed to Herzen in Geneva, with whom his relations in the recent past had been cordial, but he received no immediate reply. Meanwhile, Suslova appeared on the scene to spend a few days with her still amorous ex-lover, whose circumstances were hardly propitious for renewing his efforts to regain her affections. During the intervening two years, Suslova’s desultory and wandering life in France and Switzerland had been unhappy and frustrating. Her first and deepest amorous relation had been with Dostoevsky, and she tended to blame him for her inability to establish more satisfactory ones with other men.

Dostoevsky could hardly have anticipated that his eagerly awaited rendezvous with Suslova would occur under such inglorious circumstances, reduced as he was to utter destitution and living in fear of being expelled from his hotel at any moment and taken to the police. Dostoevsky’s letters to Suslova after her departure are filled with concern over her welfare, and it is likely that, leaving herself with barely enough to continue her journey, she aided Dostoevsky with whatever funds she had available. “Dear Polya,” he writes, “in the first place I do not understand how you managed to arrive [in Paris]. To my disgusting anguish about myself has been added the anguish about you. . . . At Cologne the hotel, the carriages, the voyage—even if you had enough for the train, you were probably hungry. All this hammers in my head and gives me no rest.”
⁶

Dostoevsky had no secrets from Suslova, and it is from his letters to her that we obtain the most graphic image of the debasing conditions under which he was living and which cut his pride to the quick. “Meanwhile,” his letter continues, “my situation has gotten so bad that it is unbelievable. Scarcely had you left when on the next day, early in the morning, the hotel declared to me that they would no longer give me any meals, neither tea nor coffee. I went for an explanation and the stout German owner explained to me that I did not ‘deserve’ the meals and that he would send me tea. So that since yesterday I no longer eat and only drink tea. Yes, and . . . all the staff treat me with an inexpressible, totally German contempt. There is no greater crime for a German than to be without any money and not pay on time.”
⁷

Two days later, Dostoevsky adds some new details in another letter sent without postage. “My affairs are terrible
nec plus ultra
; it is impossible to go any further. Beyond, there must be another zone of misfortunes and filthiness of which I still have no knowledge. . . . I am still living without meals, and this is already the third day that I live on morning and evening tea—and it’s curious: I do not at all really wish to eat. The worst is that they hem me in and sometimes refuse me a candle in the evening [especially] when some bit of the previous one is left over, even the smallest fragment. But I leave the hotel every day at three o’clock and only return at six, so as not to give the impression that I do not dine at all. How much like a Khlestakov [a character in Gogol’s
The Inspector-General
]!” Dostoevsky concludes with a plea to Suslova to raise some money for him from her friends in Paris if possible, and adds, as a despairing postscript: “now I no longer see at all what will become of me.”
⁸

To the distress induced by his circumstances was added the humiliation of failing to receive any answer from Herzen. “Herzen torments me,” he admits to Suslova. “If he received my letter and
does not wish
to respond—what a humiliation and what behavior! really, did I deserve this, and for what reason?”
⁹
A postscript to this letter announces with relief that Herzen had finally replied, and though he could not spare the full amount requested, he had offered to send a lesser sum if this would help. Dostoevsky wonders why Herzen has not simply dispatched the smaller sum and decides forgivingly that he was probably short of funds, but now, he tells Suslova, it is impossible to bring himself to answer with another pleading entreaty.

Despite the bleak picture of solitary misery that emerges from Dostoevsky’s letters, he was not as isolated as might be assumed. There were other Russians in Wiesbaden with whom he struck up an acquaintance, and they played a crucial part in helping him escape from the debasement of his penury. Of particular importance was the priest in charge of the Russian Orthodox Church, Father I. L. Yanishev. A man of unusual culture, Father Yanishev became well-known in Orthodox theological circles because of his endeavors to ground moral theology on the psychological analysis of human character, and in one book he paid special attention to a problem of vital concern to Dostoevsky, the freedom of the will. Father George Florovsky, in his great work on the history of Russian theology, writes about him with a shade of disapproval, because his teachings were “above all, a justification of the world. ‘Earthly blessings’ are accepted as the
necessary
milieu
outside of which moral awakening is impossible
—‘without which virtue is impossible.’ . . . In the contemplative mysticism of the ascetics, Yanishev found only quietism.”
¹⁰

Instead of such “quietism,” Yanishev favored a Christianity understood as charitable love for others—a love that he called “the center and crown of the Christian faith.”
¹¹
The novelist certainly did not need Yanishev to teach
him
, the erstwhile Christian Socialist, that Christianity was primarily “charitable love,” but if the two talked of such matters Dostoevsky would certainly have been pleased to find such a conception defended by so eminent a clergyman. And when the young novice Alyosha Karamazov is told by his mentor Father Zosima to quit the monastery and test his Christianity in the hurly-burly of everyday life, he is being instructed to follow one of the chief tenets of Father Yanishev’s teachings. Dostoevsky remained in contact with Father Yanishev even after Wiesbaden, and two years later wrote of him to Apollon Maikov: “He is a rare person, worthy, meek, with a sense of his own dignity, of an angelic purity of soul and a
passionate
believer.”
¹²
More immediately pressing issues than theological ones were naturally on Dostoevsky’s mind when the two men first met, and Father Yanishev aided the distraught man of letters not only with spiritual counsel but also with a down-to-earth loan.

It was during this period of protracted mortification that Dostoevsky, while strolling one day among the linden trees at Wiesbaden, poured some of his troubles into the sympathetic ears of Princess Shalikova, a distinguished lady who also frequented the company of Father Yanishev and was herself an author under various pseudonyms. At it turned out, she was also a distant relative of Katkov, the powerful anti-radical editor of
The Russian Messenger
, and she encouraged Dostoevsky to apply to him as a possible publisher. Princess Shalikova may also have conveyed some indication of Katkov’s recent appreciation of Dostoevsky
as a writer
. Whatever was said, the result is well-known: Dostoevsky wrote to Katkov sometime during the first two weeks in September with the first outline of the conception of what became
Crime and Punishment
. At this stage, Dostoevsky was thinking not of a novel but of a story or novella, which he had been working on “for two months” and was on the point of completing. He promised Katkov that it would be finished in one or two weeks, at most a month, and then outlined its central theme, which, he assured the editor, “in no way contradicts [the policy] of your journal; rather the contrary”:

In conclusion, Dostoevsky asked to be paid the modest sum of one hundred twenty-five rubles per folio sheet, although it was well-known that writers like Turgenev and Tolstoy received a good deal more, and he pleadingly requested an immediate advance of three hundred rubles to rescue him from his present difficulties, whose details he left unspecified. No reply arrived immediately, and with the help of Father Yanishev (and Wrangel) Dostoevsky managed to pay his bills and return to Russia. When Katkov finally sent the advance to Wiesbaden, Dostoevsky was already back in his native land. Father Yanishev forwarded the money, and this was the beginning of Dostoevsky’s long relationship with
The Russian Messenger
, which published all his major novels except
A Raw Youth
. It was also the beginning of a much more prolonged period of literary labor than Dostoevsky had imagined when he promised to complete his “story” in a few more weeks.

Dostoevsky’s return to Petersburg in mid-October immediately plunged him back into the swarm of menacing creditors from whose persecution he had fled to Europe. To make matters worse, Dostoevsky’s epileptic attacks increased in frequency shortly after his return (as if, he remarked to Wrangel bitterly, to make up for the three months’ respite afforded him in Europe). All this misery was further aggravated by “family disagreements, the countless troubles connected with the affairs of my late brother, of his family, and of our deceased journal.”
¹⁴
Mikhail’s widow and her children held Dostoevsky responsible for their straitened economic situation, and he was deeply aggrieved at their hostility.

Dostoevsky complains about the difficulties of literary composition under such nerve-racking conditions, and it might be thought that he would have avoided complicating them further. Instead, even though most of the story he had proposed to Katkov already existed in a next-to-final draft, he decided to recast his plan. “At the end of November,” he explained to Wrangel two months later, “a good part (of the initial plan) had been written and was ready; but I burned it all; I can confess this to you now. I didn’t like it myself. A new form, a new plan carried me away, and I started afresh.”
¹⁵
This new plan involved writing a much longer work, a novel in six parts whose title would be
Crime and Punishment
.