by Jim Bernhard
Dostoyevsky married a young widow, Maria Isaev, and worked as a journalist for several publications. Maria died after seven years of marriage, and a distraught Dostoyevsky began to gamble heavily, which left him broke most of the time. But he kept cranking out novels and reached a watershed in his development with Notes from the Underground, followed shortly by Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. At last, Dostoyevsky was recognized as one of Russia’s preeminent authors.
When he was forty-six, he married his twenty-two-year-old secretary, Anna Snitkina, with whom he had four children. Anna helped Dostoyevsky shake his gambling habit, which had drained his finances, and he devoted himself to his final masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879.
Dostoyevsky’s religious views pervaded much of his writing. Nominally Russian Orthodox, with a profound hatred of Roman Catholicism, he did not attend regular services, and referred to himself on some occasions as a Deist. Despite the imprecision of his views, he was devoted to Jesus Christ, to the theological concept of the trinity, and to a firm belief in personal immortality. Although it is in the voice of one of his characters, Dostoyevsky probably agreed with this notion from The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no immortality, then there is no virtue. If you destroyed the belief in immortality, then love and every living force that inspires the world would also die.”
Troubled by epilepsy from the age of nine, Dostoyevsky also developed pulmonary problems, for which he received periodic treatment at European spas. An inveterate smoker who rolled his own cigarettes, he was diagnosed with early-stage emphysema in August of 1879. Seventeen months later, in January of 1881, at his home in St. Petersburg, he began hemorrhaging from his throat and lungs, which his wife attributed to his agitation while searching for a lost penholder. A second and a third hemorrhage followed within days, and on the afternoon of January 28, Dostoeyvsky told his children farewell, and died that evening at the age of fifty-nine.
Among the last words he murmured were this quotation from the Book of Matthew: “But John stopped him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.”
Throngs of admirers—some accounts said almost a hundred thousand—attended Dostoyevsky’s funeral at Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg. He was buried on the monastery grounds, in Trinity Cemetery, where the composer Tchaikovsky was later interred. Dostoyevsky’s tombstone is inscribed with this New Testament passage from the Book of John: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
LEO TOLSTOY
Suffering from malaria and typhoid fever, but mostly from a fractious marriage to Sonya Behrs, an ailing Leo Tolstoy complained, “My illness is Sonya.” He died, in fact, trying desperately to get away from her.
Author of two acknowledged masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy holds a place of honor among the world’s great novelists. Born September 9, 1828, on his family’s estate in Russia’s Tula province, he was the youngest of four boys, sons of a minor Russian nobleman, from whom they inherited the title of Count. Leo’s mother died when he was two, his father just seven years later, and he was raised by an aunt. He was educated primarily at home by French and German tutors, then enrolled briefly at the University of Kazan, where his carefree partying resulted in his withdrawal without a degree.
He tried farming on the family estate, where he frolicked with the female serfs, then had a stint as a junior officer in the army, during which he fought in the Crimean War and also published an autobiographical memoir called Childhood. After leaving the army, he devoted himself to writing, and published a second autobiographical work, Boyhood, and a short novel called The Cossacks. He became a well-known literary figure, an anarchist, and a gambler—losing all of his money during a spree in Paris. Chastened, he returned to live on the family estate, married Sonya, a doctor’s daughter, and devoted himself to becoming a serious writer, when he wasn’t busy siring thirteen children. War and Peace was published in installments during the 1860s, and Tolstoy’s reputation was secure. He followed that with Anna Karenina during the 1870s.
Sonya assisted him with both of these major works, but she was not sympathetic to his spiritual conversion in the late 1870s. He turned first to the Russian Orthodox Church, but regarded it as shallow and corrupt, and consequently developed his own personal, mystical, ascetic religion, based on strict adherence to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Tolstoy also renounced meat, alcohol, and tobacco, and he endeavored to give away most of his belongings—an act of extreme charity to which Sonya vigorously objected. He mollified her by signing over all his royalties on previous works to her, but the two of them remained at odds for the rest of his life.
Tolstoy directly confronted the prospect of death through the title character in the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a judge who is dying of an incurable illness. At the moment of death, he expresses repentance for a hedonistic life, in which he had no thought for others, and his pity for his wife and children. Having purged his soul, Ilyich also loses the fear of death that had plagued him:
And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. “How good and how simple!” he thought. “And the pain?” he asked himself. “What has become of it? Where are you, pain?”
He turned his attention to it.
“Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be.”
“And death . . . where is it?”
He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no death.
In place of death there was light.
“So that’s what it is!” he suddenly exclaimed aloud. “What joy!”
To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for another two hours. Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent.
“It is finished!” said someone near him. He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.
“Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more!”
He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.
Tolstoy endured poor health for the last years of his life. Besides depression, malaria, typhoid fever, and other, age-related ailments, he suffered from a form of psychologically induced epilepsy, which resulted in hallucinations, fainting, fever, delirium, and amnesia. In a letter to his friend and editor Vladimir Chertkov a few months before his final illness, Tolstoy seemed to welcome the prospect of his own death. He wrote:
“It is getting closer and closer—the sure unfolding of the blessed mystery, which we’ve been groping towards. This closing-in of death cannot but draw me towards it and fill me with happiness.”
At his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, about 120 miles from Moscow, on the night of November 10, 1910, he woke to find Sonya rifling through his papers. What she was looking for is not clear—probably either a new will or a diary that she wished to publish against Tolstoy’s wishes. Whatever it was, her meddling infuriated Tolstoy, who decided to leave home at once. He awakened his youngest daughter, Alexandra, and accompanied by the family physician, Dr. Dushan Makovitsky, they fled the house in the wee hours, traveling in a third-class railway compartment to avoid recognition. They stopped to rest the next night at a monastery, but fearing Sonya was hot on their trail, they sneaked away at four o’clock in the morning to continue their journey by train to Novocherkassk.
Exhausted and chilled, Tolstoy developed a fever and was taken off the train at the village of
Astapovo to rest in the stationmaster’s home. His condition worsened into pneumonia, and friends and medical personnel were summoned to his side. When the press got wind that he was there, the town filled with journalists eager for news of the ailing literary master. They were housed in a railway car, since Astapovo had nary a hotel.
Tolstoy lapsed into labored breathing, paroxysms of pain, and a persistent bout of hiccups. He repeatedly urged his doctors and friends to keep Sonya from visiting him, as it would be “calamitous” for him. Sonya arrived on November 19, but doctors refused to let her see him. She insisted, however, and at two o’clock in the morning on November 20, she was allowed into his room. At six o’clock, Tolstoy died, at the age of eighty-two.
The funeral was a hastily assembled ceremony two days later at Yasnaya Polyana. Thousands of people showed up for the simple occasion—Tolstoy’s coffin was placed in a room containing a bookcase, a portrait of his brother, and a statue of Buddha. For two and a half hours, the assembled crowd filed past the coffin to pay their respects, as two choirs outside alternated in singing “Eternal Memory,” a Slavonic church chant. Tolstoy’s body was then carried to a wooded knoll on the estate and laid to rest in a simple grave with no stone and only a mound of earth to mark it.
EMILY DICKINSON
Emily Dickinson was a confirmed homebody. Born December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, she lived there all her life, seldom even leaving her house after her late thirties. She lived with her parents and younger sister, Lavinia, and became a virtual recluse. Her father was a lawyer and, briefly, a United States congressman.
Emily attended the Amherst Academy, receiving a firm grounding in Latin, English and classical literature, mathematics, and the natural sciences. She then went on to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (later College), but stayed only one year. She read deeply, and found inspiration in Shakespeare, the Book of Revelation, Donne, Wordsworth, Keats, Emerson, and the Brownings. Raised a strict Calvinist, she strayed from orthodox beliefs and, as an adult, in keeping with her eremitic life, did not attend church.
She began to write poetry—short, pithy, trenchant verses—on a regular basis, although with little thought to having it published. No more than a dozen of her poems saw print during her lifetime. The first collected volume appeared four years after her death, cobbled together by two well-intentioned, but ill-advised, friends who took the liberty of “correcting” her distinctively idiosyncratic punctuation and syntax.
Dickinson never married or had any overt romantic relationship, although she corresponded with several male friends with whom she had great intellectual affinity. She was deeply affected by the deaths of several of her loved ones. A young lawyer who befriended the family died of tuberculosis in his twenties. When Dickinson was forty-three, her father died of a stroke, and a simple funeral was held in the family home; she observed the ceremony from her room, behind a door that was slightly ajar. Her mother, to whom she was never close, died eight years later, and Emily’s favorite nephew died the following year of typhoid. She wrote: “The Dyings have been too deep for me.”
Death and thoughts of immortality permeated both her life and her poetry. Having lived for fifteen years in her youth adjacent to the town cemetery, she was perhaps understandably haunted by what she called the “deepening menace” of death and a fear of immortality. In a letter to a friend, she called the thought of eternity “dreadful” and “dark.” In one poem, she calls death the “vermin’s will,” and in another, she refers to it in terms of the spirit putting on an “overcoat of clay.”
Dickinson donned her clay overcoat on May 15, 1886, at the age of fifty-five. She had been in poor health for more than two years, suffering from nausea, severe headaches, and fainting spells. It has been suggested that she had what would today be called bipolar disorder. Diagnosis was difficult, since her visits to her Amherst physician, Dr. Otis F. Bigelow, consisted of her walking slowly past the open door of his examining room while he remained inside observing her. She never allowed him to even take her pulse. “Now what besides mumps could be diagnosed that way!” the understandably frustrated Bigelow complained.
Emily was confined to her bed for the last seven months of her life. On the day of her death, her brother Austin recorded in his diary: “She ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the whistles sounded for six [p.m.].”
Her death was attributed to Bright’s disease, or nephritis, a kidney ailment, but later scholars believe the actual cause was heart failure, induced by severe hypertension.
Clad in a white dress and lying in a white coffin at her funeral in the family home, Dickinson was said to look far younger than her years—“Not a gray hair or a wrinkle,” as a friend reported, “and perfect peace on the beautiful brow.” A minister led a prayer, and a friend read Emily Brontë’s poem on immortality that begins:
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
and ends exultantly with:
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
The honorary pallbearers, including the president and several professors of Amherst College, carried her coffin only to the back door, where it was taken by six Irish laborers who had worked on the Dickinson property. Following her instructions, they carried her body around her flower garden, through the barn, and across a field of buttercups to West Cemetery, where she was interred in the family plot in a grave lined with evergreen boughs. The original grave marker carried only her initials, but years later her niece replaced it with a marble stone that read “Called Back”—the title of a popular novel, and the only words in a letter she wrote to her cousins during her final illness.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Louisa May Alcott, the daughter of Bronson Alcott, the Transcendentalist teacher and writer, was born on her father’s thirty-third birthday, November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. By strange coincidence, she died on the day of his funeral, March 6, 1888, in Boston. Her father’s association with the Transcendental movement provided young Louisa with an education by such redoubtable figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as her supremely redoubtable father himself. Financial setbacks for the Alcott family forced Louisa to take up work in her twenties as a seamstress, a governess, a domestic helper, and an occasional teacher.
She also began to write and found success with some early sketches, such as Transcendental Wild Oats and Flower Fables. Sometimes she wrote under the pen names Flora Fairfield and A. M. Barnard. She served briefly as a nurse in a Union hospital during the Civil War, and her experiences gave her another book, Hospital Sketches. Major success came to her after the war with the publication of Little Women, loosely based on her own childhood, followed by further episodes in the fictional March family saga in Little Men, Eight Cousins, and Jo’s Boys.
Alcott never married, although she is said to have had a romantic attachment (whatever that may mean) to Ladislas Wisinewski, a young Pole she met in Switzerland during a European sojourn. In her journal, she refers to him as “Laddie” and “Laurie,” a name she later used for a character in Little Women. She writes that he was “very gay and agreeable, and being ill and much younger we petted him. He played beautifully, and was very anxious to learn English, so we taught him that and he taught us French.” She must have nursed him back to good health, for later she notes: “Laurie very interesting and good. Pleasant walks and talks with him in the château garden and about Vevey. A lovely sail on the lake, and much fun giving English and receiving French lessons.” Alcott deleted from the journal many of her comments about Laddie.
She enigmatically explained her spinsterhood in a comment that raises curiosity rather than dispelling it: �
�I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body . . . because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”
Alcott’s views on life and death were formed by her Transcendentalist background, which emphasized the here and now with little thought devoted to the possibility of an afterlife. As a young woman in Boston, she occasionally attended Unitarian services. In her diaries, she spoke of religious feelings and belief in a higher power, but she never affiliated with any organized religion.
As Alcott entered her fifties, she suffered from a variety of ailments, including frequent vertigo, headaches, rheumatism, muscular and skeletal pain, skin rash, dyspepsia, constipation, and what the New York Times referred to as “nervous prostration.”
She was under treatment at a rest home near Boston and came to visit her father a few days before his death. On the ride back home, according to the Times, she caught a cold that settled at the base of her brain and developed into cerebral-spinal meningitis. Her death on March 6, 1888, at the age of fifty-five, was thought to have been partly caused by mercuric poisoning from a medication she had received years earlier as treatment for typhus. Later medical studies, however, suggest that she suffered and possibly died from systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease that can cause tissue damage in many parts of the body.
Alcott is buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord, Massachusetts, in the section known as Authors’ Ridge, where Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne also lie.
MARK TWAIN
Waggish old Mark Twain could be irreverent about death: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” Or, putting on his serious hat, he could be philosophical: “Death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old and weary and broken of heart.”