by the same author
Glass
Let Us Be True
Contents
Key Dates
Author’s Note
Prologue: Life is a Gift (1849)
1 White Nights (1821–45)
2 Circles within Circles (1846–49)
3 The Dead House (1850–1854)
4 The Devil’s Sandbox (1854–1859)
5 Young Russia (1860–1862)
6 Polina (1863)
7 Epoch’s End (1864–1866)
8 The Gambler (1866–1867)
9 The Idiot (1867)
10 Death for the Russian (1868–1871)
11 The Citizen (1872–1877)
12 The Prophet (1878–1881)
Epilogue
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Such an autobiography as yours might serve as material for a future work of art, for a future picture of a lawless bygone age. When the angry strife of the day has passed, and the future has come, then a future artist will discover beautiful forms for depicting past lawlessness and chaos . . . They will preserve at any rate some faithful traits by which one may guess what may have lain hidden in the heart of some raw youth of that troubled time.
The Adolescent
Key Dates
The dates in this book are in the Julian ‘old style’, which was 12 days behind the Gregorian ‘new style’ calendar used by western Europe at the time. I have indicated the Gregorian date in parentheses, in references to letters sent from Europe.
30 October 1821
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky born, Moscow.1
27 February 1837
Fyodor’s mother, Maria Fyodorovna Dostoevskaya (née Nechaeva), dies.
16 January 1838
Enters the Engineering Academy.
6 June 1839
Fyodor’s father, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, dies.
October 1844
Resigns from the Engineering Academy.
15 January 1846
Poor Folk published in Nikolai Alexeevich Nekrasov’s Petersburg Miscellany (Petersburgsky Sbornik).
1 February 1846
The Double published in Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennie Zapiski).
23 April 1849
Arrested for treason.
22 December 1849
Mock execution.
15 February 1854
Released from prison in Omsk.
6 February 1857
Marries Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva in Kuznetsk, Siberia.
December 1859
Moves to St Petersburg.
January 1860
First issue of the journal Time (Vremya), published in collaboration with his brother Mikhail Mikhailovich.
1860–1862
Notes from the House of the Dead published in Russian World (Russky Mir) and Time (Vremya).
1861
The Insulted and Injured published in Time.
24 May 1863
Time suppressed by government censors.
August–October 1863
Travels in Europe with Apollinaria (‘Polina’) Prokofievna Suslova.
24 January 1864
Receives permission to publish his journal under the name Epoch (Epokha).
1864
Notes from the Underground published in Epoch.
15 April 1864
Maria dies in Moscow.
10 July 1864
Mikhail dies in Pavlovsk.
Spring 1865
Epoch folds.
1866
Crime and Punishment is published serially in The Russian Herald (Russky Vestnik).
4 October 1866
Anna Grigorievna Snitkina begins work as Dostoevsky’s stenographer.
15 February 1867
Marries Anna.
14 April 1867
Travels to Europe to escape creditors.
1868
The Idiot is published serially in The Russian Herald.
8 July 1871
Returns to St Petersburg.
1871–2
Devils is published serially in The Russian Herald.
1873
The first articles in A Writer’s Diary are published in the magazine Dostoevsky is editing, The Citizen (Grazhdanin).
1875
The Adolescent is published serially in Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye Zapiski).
1876
A Writer’s Diary appears as its own publication.
1879–80
The Brothers Karamazov is published serially in The Russian Herald.
8 June 1880
Delivers memorial speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.
28 January 1881
Dies of emphysema.
1 February 1881
Funeral held in St Petersburg.
Author’s Note 1
Why bother writing a book about Dostoevsky? In most portraits, he looks like a grumpy Saint Nicholas (and incidentally, he did spend one Christmas night riding across Russia in an open sleigh). He was such a contrarian that members of both the liberal left and the reactionary right were forever convinced that he was working for the enemy. Unlike many modern readers, he was a deeply committed Orthodox Christian, though he was famously eloquent about spiritual doubt. I know some people find the length of his four best-known novels imposing; perhaps others accept that he was a great philosopher, but don’t have the patience for his insistent style, with its repetitions and digressions. He himself admitted, just as he was completing the first of his four great novels: ‘I have been painfully aware for twenty years now that my literary vice is prolixity, but I can’t seem to shake it off.’2 All in all, he could be an exasperating man, and yet it seems to me that many of his ideas remain disconcertingly relevant today: the importance of understanding that autonomy and dignity are more precious to us than the rational self-interest of economists; that more people are killed by bad ideas than by honest feeling; that a society with no grand narrative is vulnerable to political extremism. He took great pains to understand the angry young men who were threatening to topple Russia and the rest of Europe in his lifetime, perhaps because he remembered what it was like to be one of them. More than anything else, Dostoevsky was a deeply moral writer, and he refused to turn a blind eye to the suffering he saw among the slaves (for that is effectively what serfs were), the outcasts, the prostitutes, the humiliated, the sick and the silenced of his day. He was fiercely devoted to raising up the downtrodden and giving them a voice. And so, although I will be writing about Dostoevsky as a lover and a husband, I will also be writing about a broader, more inclusive kind of love, which he believed was the only possible answer to suffering in this world.
Aside from his writings, he had one of the most eventful lives of any novelist in history. He was a gambling addict and an epileptic, constantly on the brink of financial and physical ruin. As a young man, he was tried as a socialist revolutionary and narrowly survived a death sentence; yet by the end of his life he was being invited to dine with the Tsar’s family and hailed as a national prophet. He was at different times an engineer, a soldier and a poet. He had an impressively turbulent love life. It wouldn’t be a stretch to argue he was a foot fetishist (though Russia has a long tradition of symbolic foot-kissing). The way he proposed to his second wife is so quietly bashful that you can’t help wanting to hug him. Sadly, many of those he was closest to, from friends to lovers to family members, died far too young.
Dostoevsky’s autobiography would have been fascinating, and he had intended to write one. On Christmas Eve 1877, the twenty-eighth anniversary of his journey to Siberia, Dostoevsky wrote a four-point ‘memo for the rest o
f my life’, dividing his remaining years into four projects, the third of which was to write his memoirs. He estimated these would take him at least ten years, ‘and I am already fifty-six’.3 Sadly, his pessimism on this front was well founded, and he died before he could begin. However, the ghost of his autobiography is already present in his writings, and even his first biographer takes the trouble to note the biographical value ‘in subjective passages scattered throughout his novels’.4
Undoubtedly his most powerful writing was drawn from his lived experience, whether recounting the quasi-mystical experience of an epileptic fit in The Idiot or hard labour in a Siberian prison in Notes from the House of the Dead. This book therefore cheerfully commits an academic fallacy, which is to elide Dostoevsky’s autobiographical fiction with his fantastical life in the hope of creating the effect of a reconstructed memoir. (The fact is, this is neither a story nor a memoir.)5 Indeed, I am not an academic, and if you are looking for a biography that never crosses such a line, there are already a number in print, not least Joseph Frank’s wonderful five-volume intellectual biography, published between 1976 and 2002. At the other end of the spectrum, novelists such as Leonid Tsypkin and J. M. Coetzee have already written novels which vividly imagine the writer’s inner life. My aim is to explore whether a synthesis is possible – a tale both novelistic and true to life, representing Dostoevsky in his own words. Because Dostoevsky’s overarching project was to understand how people thought – the sometimes maddening ways we explain and deceive ourselves – and to represent that thought faithfully so that others might know themselves better.
To be clear, where I have used artistic licence, I have set some ground rules. Anything in quotation marks is a direct quote reported by Dostoevsky or one of his contemporaries and is cited in the notes. Similarly, the main narration is based on contemporaneous accounts and the work of trusted scholars, owing a particular debt to Anna Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank, Leonid Grossman, Kenneth Lantz and Peter Sekirin. Anything in italics – that is, anything written in the intimate first person and represented as his thought – might have been taken from his letters, notebooks, journalism or fiction. At one point he talks to himself; then he seems to be addressing an invisible listener, a judge of some sort. But that’s how it happens in real life.6 When writers conceive fiction, they often shear memories off from their context to use them as the building blocks of their new world. It is a kind of wilful source amnesia. By carefully parsing what is known of Dostoevsky’s life, it is possible to re-attribute many of the memories and sense impressions that litter his fiction, and to give some insight into his habits of thought. (There’s a whole new approach waiting to be discovered. The psychological data alone are enough to point to the real trail. ‘We’ve got facts!’ they say. But facts aren’t everything; knowing how to deal with the facts is at least half the battle.)7 Where I have ventured to attribute this inner life to a timeline, I have paraphrased, combined and abridged what Dostoevsky wrote to fit the context, and cited the original for those who are interested. Where there are differing accounts of an event, I have generally opted for the version that Dostoevsky himself told. Because the self is only a story that we tell ourselves to make sense of our own actions, and that, in the end, is what I am determined to recover.
Well, that is the end of my introduction. I quite agree that it is superfluous, but since it is already written, let it stand.
And now to business.8
Notes
1 I’ll keep it short: as Dostoevsky says, ‘Everyone knows what authors’ prefaces are like . . .’ (Devils, p. 499)
Prologue: Life is a Gift
1849
Today, 22nd of December, after eight months of solitary confinement, I was taken with five others to the Semyonovsky Parade Ground.9
Fyodor’s friend, Sergei Durov, was standing next to him. There were three posts stuck in the ground.
‘Surely we cannot be executed,’ Fyodor whispered.10 Durov indicated a cart nearby, on which there appeared to be several coffins covered with cloth.
Fyodor turned to his other companion, Nikolai Speshnev. ‘We shall be with Christ,’ he muttered in French.11 But Speshnev only smiled and pointed at the ground.
‘A handful of dust,’ he replied.
The sentence of death was read to all of us, we were told to kiss the cross, our swords were broken over our heads, and we were put into white shirts.12
Then the first three – Petrashevsky, Mombelli and Grigoriev – were led up, tied to the pillar for execution, and caps were pulled over their eyes.13 A company of several soldiers was drawn up against each post. I was in the second batch and there was no more than a minute left for me to live.14 I wanted to understand as quickly and clearly as possible how it was that I was living and in moments I would simply be a thing.15 Not far off, there was a church, and the gilt roof was glittering in the bright sunshine. I stared persistently at the roof and the sunshine. I could not tear myself away from it.
I had not expected that the execution would take place for at least a week yet – I had counted on all the formalities taking some time – but they got my papers ready quickly.16
At five in the morning I was asleep, and it was cold and dark. The governor came in and touched my shoulder gently, and I started.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘The execution is fixed for ten o’clock,’ he said.
I was only just awake, and couldn’t believe it at first – I began to ask about my papers. But by the time I was really awake and saw the truth of the matter, I fell silent and stopped arguing, as I could see there was no point. The governor watched me. All I could say was, ‘It’s very hard to bear – it’s so sudden.’
Those last three or four hours pass by in the preparations. You see the priest, have your breakfast – coffee, meat, even a little wine. The priest was there the whole time, talking. You get in the cart and the houses recede – but that’s nothing.17 There is still the second turning. There is still a whole street, and however many houses have been passed, there are still many left. And so to the very end, to the very scaffold. At the most terrible moments of a man’s life, he will forget anything but some roof that has flashed past him on the road, or a jackdaw on a cross.1
The most terrible part of the punishment is not the bodily pain, but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, your soul must quit your body and you will no longer be a man, and that this is certain – certain!18 That’s the real point: the certainty of it. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal. If you are attacked at night, in a dark wood, you hope that you may escape until the very moment of your death. But in an execution, that last hope is taken away, and in its place there is only the terrible certainty that you cannot possibly escape death. It is the most dreadful anguish there is. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish. No one should be treated this way – no one.
The priest, who seemed a wise man, stopped talking when we reached the drill grounds, and only held the little silver cross for me to kiss. My legs felt feeble and helpless, and I felt a choking in my throat. I had that terrible feeling of being absolutely powerless to move, though I hadn’t lost my wits. The priest pressed the cross to my lips, and I kissed it greedily, as if it might be useful to me afterwards. In that last minute, I remembered my brother; only then I realised how I love him!19
Finally the retreat was sounded, and those tied to the pillar were led back, and it was announced to us that His Imperial Majesty had granted us our lives.
My life begins again today. I will receive four years’ hard labour, and after that will serve as a private. I see that life is everywhere, life in ourselves. There will be people near me, and to be among people – that is the purpose of life, I have realised. The idea has entered my flesh and blood. Yes, it’s true! I have beheaded my lofty, creative, spiritual self. There are many ideas I haven’t yet written down. They will lacerate me, it is tru
e! But I have my heart and flesh and blood which can also love, and suffer, and desire, and remember, and this, after all, is life.
When I look back and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against myself – my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of it. Youth is wasted on the young! Now, I am being reborn into a new form.
But I have begun my story, I don’t know why, in the middle. If it is all to be written, I must begin at the beginning.20
Notes
1 The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Garnett, p. 810. Standing in the watching crowd was a seventeen-year-old in a tricorn hat named Alexander Egorovich Wrangel, with whom Dostoevsky would shake hands five years later, in a place known as the Devil’s Sandbox.
ONE
White Nights
1821–45
There are one or two things I can remember from childhood, but in a dreamlike fashion.21
Fyodor had been born in the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, a large state hospital in Moscow, where his father was a doctor. Originally from a line of clergy, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky had left his family in Ukraine some years earlier to study medicine and worked with the single-minded purpose of establishing himself and his family. Having risen through the ranks as a military doctor, he had arranged to marry Maria Fyodorovna Nechaeva, the daughter of a merchant, in 1819. A year later, their first son Mikhail was born, and on 30 October 1821, their second son, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.1
Dostoevsky in Love Page 1