Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  When Dostoevsky was absent—he spent a good deal of time alone in cafés reading French and Russian newspapers—Anna did not scruple to look through his letters. “It isn’t the thing, I know, to read one’s husband’s letters behind his back,” she remarks guiltily, “but I couldn’t help it. The letter was from S[uslova]. After I had read it, I felt cold all over, and shivered and wept with emotion. I was so afraid the old inclination was going to revive and swamp his love for me. Dear God, do not send me this miserable fate! Just to think of it makes my heart stand still.”16 Suslova’s letter has regrettably been lost, along with a later one that Anna picked up at the post office just after seeing Dostoevsky off for Hombourg. Carefully opening the flap so that it could be resealed, she decided that “it was a very stupid, clumsy letter and says but little for the understanding of the writer. I am quite sure she is furious about Feodor’s marriage. . . . I went over to the looking-glass and saw how my face was covered with little red spots from excitement.”17 Such a possible challenge to her marriage certainly fortified Anna’s resolve to endure all the onerous burdens that it entailed.

  The romance of Dostoevsky and Anna had blossomed in the course of their work together on The Gambler, and there is a certain irony in their future union being inaugurated under the auspices of this creation. Nothing placed more of a strain on Anna than the renewed onset of Dostoevsky’s gambling obsession once they began living abroad. Three weeks after settling in Dresden, Dostoevsky began to speak of making a trip to Hombourg to try his luck, and Anna, though dreading the prospect (“when I think of his going away and leaving me here alone, cold shivers run down my spine”), raised no objection. Instead, she assured him that she could look after herself satisfactorily, and confided in her diary: “I see how this place begins to weary him and put him in a bad temper. . . . And, as the thought of this trip fills his mind to the extinction of everything else, why not let him indulge in it?”18

  For Dostoevsky, the passion and excitement of the play, which he conveys so vividly in The Gambler, was obviously the lure, but there were always objective reasons allowing him to rationalize his desire, and these reasons had just recently acquired a new urgency. Just before leaving, two of his creditors filed charges that could have led to his arrest and incarceration in debtor’s prison. As he wrote a bit later to Apollon Maikov, “it was touch and go that I wasn’t seized.”19 Dostoevsky could thus no longer return to Russia without risking imprisonment, and his only chance of regaining his homeland was to obtain enough money to pay his debts. In addition, there was his hope of establishing a family, with all the new expenses that this would entail (for Anna had become pregnant shortly after their departure from Russia). Never had Dostoevsky been under greater psychic pressure to obtain funds quickly, and he was haunted by the image of others easily doing so at the roulette tables.

  Dostoevsky took the train to Hombourg on May 4/16, filled more with trepidation and remorse than excitement as he left Anna in tears at the station. He wrote her a day later: “I am acting stupidly, stupidly, even more, badly and out of weakness, but there is just a miniscule chance and . . . to hell with it, that’s enough.”20 Even though planning just a four-day interval, Dostoevsky remained in Hombourg for ten days, winning and losing, and finally being wiped out entirely. He pawned his watch, and so, as Anna remarks on his return, she never knew what time of the day or night it was.

  The agitated letters he wrote her daily are painful to read, and continually oscillate between self-castigation for yielding to temptation and frantic reassertions of the possibility of winning if one could manifest the self-control so antithetical to the Russian national character. “Here is my definitive observation, Anya: if one is prudent, that is, if one is as though made of marble, cold, and inhumanly cautious, then definitely without any doubt, one can win as much as one wishes.” Someone in the casino was always performing such a feat; this time it was a Jew who played “with horrible, inhuman composure” and “rake[d] in the money,” leaving every day with a thousand gulden. Dostoevsky reports that he has short stretches of such composure, and always wins while they last, but very soon he loses control and is carried away into disastrous recklessness. Like Aleksey Ivanovich in The Gambler, he finds the whole business morally repugnant, and implores his wife: “Anna, promise me never to show these letters to anyone. I do not want tongues to wag about this abominable situation of mine. ‘A poet remains a poet.’ ”21

  What is so striking about these letters, aside from their pathetic disclosure of Dostoevsky’s weakness and capacity for self-delusion, is the depth of the guilt-feelings they express. Dostoevsky had berated himself in the past because of gambling losses he could ill afford, but he had never given way to such extreme self-flagellations. Never before, to be sure, had anyone been so helplessly dependent on him as Anna, and never before had he felt so morally reprehensible in sacrificing her to his compulsion. As he remarks, after confessing to gambling away the money she had sent for his return fare: “Oh, if only the matter concerned just me, . . . I would have laughed, given it up as a bad job, and left. One thing and one thing only horrifies me: what will you say, what will you think about me? And what is love without respect? After all, because of this our marriage has been shaken. Oh, my dear, don’t blame me permanently!” Entreating Anna to send him the fare again, he pleads with her not to come herself out of mistrust. “Don’t even think of coming here yourself because of not trusting me. Such a lack of trust—that I will not come back—will kill me.”22

  As his losses mounted and the hopelessness of his situation became self-evident, what appeared to be the only means of salvation was the panacea of getting back to work. “My darling, we will have very little money left,” he writes, “but don’t grumble, don’t be downcast, and don’t reproach me. . . . I’ll write Katkov right away and ask him to send me another 500 rubles to Dresden. . . . As for me, I’ll get down to work on the article about Belinsky and while waiting for a reply from Katkov will finish it. My angel, perhaps this is even all for the best; I’ll be rid of that cursed thought, the monomania, about gambling. Now again, just as the year before last (before Crime and Punishment), I’ll triumph through work.”23 Such resolutions were invariably the result of Dostoevsky’s gambling misfortunes.

  Dostoevsky at last returned to a long-suffering and lonely Anna, who had valiantly tried not to give way to despair in his absence. He wrote his promised letter to Katkov requesting another advance, and life resumed its ordinary round while the pair waited for a reply and lived frugally on some money (much less than they had expected) sent by Anna’s mother. One of the few amusements of the Dostoevskys in Dresden, aside from listening to concerts in the public parks, was to visit the Dresden art museum, the Gemäldegalerie. Anna remarks that Dostoevsky would hurry “from one room to another . . . and never will stand except in front of his favorite pictures.”24 These pictures were all—with the exception of Claude Lorrain’s Acis and Galatea—representations of Christ or of Christ and the Madonna. Just a few months before he began to struggle with creating a new novel, Dostoevsky was thus immersing himself in the emotions derived from contemplating the images of Christ and the Mother of God painted by some of the greatest artists of the Western Renaissance tradition. These were no longer the highly formalized iconic images he would have seen in Russian churches but depictions of Christ as a flesh-and-blood human being, existing in and interacting with a real world in which money existed and tribute had to be paid. Never before had he been exposed so abundantly to such imagery; and one can hardly gauge the impact it may have had on his sensibility at this moment. Can it be simply coincidence that his next novel came into being only when he discovered a character called “Prince Christ” in his notes and when, in effect, he set out to provide a Russian literary counterpart to the pictures he had so much admired in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie?

  Dostoevsky’s intention had been to move to Switzerland after receiving the funds from Katkov, but in planning the trip, the alluring i
dea of a stopover at Baden-Baden to recoup his gambling losses tempted him once again—especially since, in his letters to Anna from Hombourg, he had complained that his concern over her welfare was a source of emotional disturbance that prevented him from putting his infallible “method” for winning into practice. It had been a mistake not to have brought her along; but if they were together in Baden, this obstacle to success would be eliminated. As Anna writes sadly in her memoirs, “he spoke so persuasively, cited so many examples in proof of his theory, that he convinced me too,” and she agreed to spend two weeks in Baden-Baden, “counting on the fact that my presence during his play would provide a certain restraining influence. Once this decision was made, Feodor Mikhailovich calmed down and began to rewrite and finish the article he was having trouble with,” the piece on Belinsky.25

  The pair left Dresden for Baden-Baden on June 21/July 3 and arrived a day later—with so little money that they rented two rooms over a smithy in which work began at four in the morning. Anna, suffering some of the symptoms of her pregnancy, often felt weak and queasy, and was subject to accesses of depression and apathy. For the most part, however, she gallantly concealed her fears and misgivings from her husband and exhibited an extraordinary staunchness in coping with the nerve-racking demands placed on her by Dostoevsky’s shortcomings.

  He began to gamble immediately, with the usual results, but occasionally winning sums large enough to give them a certain security for the moment while allowing him to continue gambling for smaller stakes. This was what he intended to do, and he turned over the amounts he gained to Anna for safekeeping; but after losing the allotted amount he always returned and begged for more. Anna found his pleadings impossible to withstand because he was so tormented by the conflict between his remorseful sense of baseness and his irresistible obsession. A typical scene occurred on their third day, when half their money had vanished; after losing five more gold pieces, Dostoevsky “was terribly excited, begging me not to think him a rogue to have robbed me of my last crust of bread only to lose it, while I implored him only to keep calm, and that of course I did not think all those things of him, and that he should have as much money as he liked. Then he went away and I cried bitterly, being so cast down with sufferings and self-tormentings.”26

  In the midst of her own worries about the future (she worked to improve her shorthand skills, and began to practice translating from French as a possible source of family income), Anna found herself continually called on to calm Dostoevsky’s own despondency and self-castigations. Once he went out to gamble, promising to return home quickly, and came back only seven hours later, without a penny and “utterly distracted.” Anna tried to quiet him, “but he would spare me none of his self-reproaches, calling himself stupidly weak, and begging me, Heaven knows why, for forgiveness, saying that he was not worthy of me, he was a swine and I an angel, and a lot of other foolish things of the same kind . . . and to try and distract him I sent him on an errand to buy candles, sugar and coffee for me. . . . I was terribly disturbed by the state he was in, being afraid it may lead to another fit.”27

  One such attack is described, and helps us to understand why Anna felt that almost anything—even yielding without protest to Dostoevsky’s mania—was better than risking the possibility of provoking an epileptic seizure. “I wiped the sweat from his forehead and the foam from his lips, and the fit only lasted a short while and was, I thought, not a severe one. His eyes were not starting out of his head, though the convulsions were bad. . . . As, bit by bit, he regained consciousness, he kissed my hands and then embraced me. . . . He pressed me passionately to his heart, saying he loved me like mad, and simply adored me. After the fits he is always seized with a fear of death. He says he is afraid they will end in his death, and that I must look after him.” Dostoevsky also asked Anna to make sure, when she awoke the next morning, to check whether he was still alive.28

  Dostoevsky himself was astonished at Anna’s extraordinary tolerance of his failings, even when this meant pawning not only their wedding rings but the earrings and brooch he had given her as a present and, as a last resort, Dostoevsky’s overcoat and Anna’s lace shawl and spare frock. He even commented to her that, “if I had been older . . . I should have behaved quite differently and told him . . . that if my husband was trying to do some stupid things, I, as his wife, must not allow anything of the kind.” On another occasion, when she had given way once more to his entreaties, he said, perhaps half-seriously, that “it would have been better for him to have a grumbling wife who would be . . . nagging instead of comforting him, and that it was positively painful to him the way I was so sweet.”29 Anna’s refusal to blame or berate Dostoevsky could have increased his sense of guilt by blocking the possibility of turning against an accusatory judge, but such a surge of guilt never led to more than a momentary access of moral self-scrutiny.

  Anna’s forbearance, whatever prodigies of self-command it may have cost her, was amply compensated for (in her eyes) by Dostoevsky’s immense gratitude and growing attachment. When Anna remarked once that she may have affected his luck adversely, Dostoevsky replied, “ ‘Anna, my little blessing, whenever I die remember only how I blessed you for the luck you brought me,’ adding that no greater good fortune had ever come his way, that God had been lavish indeed in bestowing me upon him, and that every day he prayed for me and only feared one day all this might alter, that to-day I both loved and pitied him, but once my love were to cease, then nothing would be the same.” “That, however,” Anna hastens to write, “will never happen, and I am quite certain we shall always love one another as passionately as we do now.”30

  “One had to come to terms with it,” she wrote in her memoirs many years later, “to look at his gambling passion as a disease for which there was no cure.”31 Such a conclusion merely extended to gambling the same attitude she took toward Dostoevsky’s personal irritability. Although this trait often led to an abusive treatment of herself as well as others, she blamed Dostoevsky’s epilepsy and refused to accept it as his genuine nature. On the morning after the seizure mentioned, she noted, “Poor Feodor, he does suffer so much after his attacks and is always so irritable, and liable to fly out about trifles, so that I have to bear a good deal in these days of illness. It’s of no consequence, because the other days are very good, when he is so sweet and gentle. Besides, I can see that when he screams at me it is from illness, not from bad temper.”32

  As the nerve-racking days passed without noticeable change, so that no end seemed in sight, even Anna’s apparently infinite indulgence began to wear thin. Just after Dostoevsky had gone to pawn her brooch and earrings, she writes, “I could no longer control myself and began to cry bitterly. It was no ordinary weeping, but a dreadful convulsive sort of sobbing, that brought on a terrible pain in my breast, and relieved me not in the slightest. . . . I began to envy all the other people in the world, who all seemed to me to be happy, and only ourselves—or so it seemed to me—completely miserable.”33 Anna confesses to herself that she wished Dostoevsky to stay away as long as possible; but when he returned that day to tell her he had lost the money obtained for her jewelry, and wept as he said “Now I have stolen your last things from you and played them away!” she sank on her knees before his chair to try and calm his wretchedness. “Do what I might to comfort him, I couldn’t stop him from crying.”34

  There are only a few instances in which she openly criticizes her husband; and these outbursts are always motivated by his incessant concern for the family of his dead brother. None of the torments of her present situation would bother her at all, Anna insisted, “if I knew that all this misery was unavoidable, but that we should have to suffer so that an Emilya Feodorovna and her lot can live in clover, and that I should have to pawn my coat so that she can have one, arouses a feeling within me the reverse of nice, and it hurts me to find such thoughtlessness and so little understanding and human kindness in anyone I love and prize so much.” This is the most extreme upsurge of revolt in
the Baden pages of her diary, and just a few sentences later, Anna shrinks back from her own audacity: “I am furious with myself for harboring such horrid thoughts against my dear, sweet, kind husband, I am a horrid creature, surely.”35

  Dostoevsky had written Katkov again for another advance, though he had hesitated doing so from Baden-Baden, whose reputation as a gambling spa would make the reason for this new appeal evident; but he swallowed his pride in the face of dire necessity. Meanwhile, scenes of the kind already described were repeated daily, and when their last resource—her mother—seemed to be exhausted, Anna began to display her dissatisfaction more openly. “I told him . . . for a whole month I had borne it and said not a word, even when there was nothing else left to us, for still I could hope from some help from Mama, but that now everything was finished, it is impossible to ask Mama for any more, and I would be, moreover, ashamed to do it.”36

  She turned on Dostoevsky just after receiving a letter from her mother and learning that their furniture might be lost. “When Feodor began to speak of ‘the damned furniture,’ it hurt me so that I began to weep bitterly, and he was quite unable to calm me down. . . . I simply could not control myself, and said the very idea of winning a fortune through roulette was utterly ridiculous, and in my anger I jibed at him, calling him a ‘benefactor of humanity.’ . . . I am quite convinced that, even if we did win, it would only be to the benefit of all those horrid people, and we should not profit one jot or tittle.” Hurt by Anna’s phrase, Dostoevsky accused her the next day of being “harsh”; and this charge led to an explosion in the diary, where she lists all her many grievances and regretfully compares her own forbearance with the abusiveness of Dostoevsky’s first wife. “It isn’t worthwhile controlling oneself,” she writes. “Marya Dimitrievna never hesitated to call him a rogue and a rascal and a criminal, and to her he was like an obedient dog.”37