The couple had seven children in total,2 all crammed into a tiny apartment on the hospital grounds: Mikhail and Fyodor behind a little partition; their oldest sister Varvara on the couch, and the little ones strewn variously around their parents’ bedroom as a traditional prophylactic.
The young Fyodor was an energetic, curious child, constantly talking to strangers and wandering off to explore, only to be gathered up by his doting mother. I remember huge trees near the house – lime trees I think they were – then sometimes the brilliant sunshine at the open windows, the little flower garden, the little paths, and you, mother. I remember clearly when I was taken to the church, and you held me up to receive the sacrament and kiss the chalice; it was in the summer, and a dove flew through the cupola, in one window and out the other.22
Dr Dostoevsky saved as much of his salary as he could, taking on private patients out of hours. When Fyodor was seven, his father was awarded the Order of St Anna for ‘especially zealous service’, which now officially put the Dostoevskys in the ranks of the hereditary nobility, albeit on the bottom rung. They hired staff – a coachman, cook, maid, and a nanny, who was quite tall and so fat that her stomach almost reached her knees. Once, the nanny caught a cough and claimed to have consumption; the young Fyodor found the idea of her wasting away extremely funny.
Apart from Sundays, when Maria would play guitar to her children, the early days blurred into one another. Their life in Moscow ran by clockwork. Wake at six; lessons at eight; lunch at one; two hours of silence while father took his nap, and one of the little ones shooed flies away from his face with a lime branch. Dinner; prayers; bed. The two older boys would sometimes play games with the children of patients or staff in the hospital gardens, and Fyodor would strike up conversations with adults even though he knew he wasn’t allowed.3
When they were let out of the grounds at all, it was for a quick walk in the early evening, on the rare occasion that the weather was mild enough. More often than not, they would look out of the window at the poor, sick people drifting around the courtyard in their camel-coloured gowns, or beg the nanny to read them a story. She would whisper to them in the darkened room, so as not to disturb the parents: tales from One Thousand and One Nights, or Bluebeard. Fyodor was rapt. I began reading avidly, and soon I was entirely absorbed in books. All my new cravings, my ambitions, the still vague impulses of adolescence, suddenly found a new outlet. Soon my heart and mind were so enchanted, and my imagination was developing so widely, that I seemed to forget the whole world which had surrounded me until then.23 He read whatever he came across: at first it was a collection of stories from the Old and New Testament; later it would be Charles Dickens and Nikolai Gogol. Fyodor loved the contemporary poet Alexander Pushkin most of all, reading his poems over and over, poring over them with Mikhail and memorising whole chunks by heart.
Now that Dr Dostoevsky was one of the gentry, he was allowed to own land, and the family took on heavy debt to buy a small estate called Darovoe, a day’s ride from Moscow, along with the small hamlet of Cheremoshnia next to it. The estate only numbered a hundred souls, and the land was not particularly fertile, so that most years the peasants barely harvested enough to feed the livestock,4 but for a young boy whose whole world had consisted of an urban compound of poor, sick people, Darovoe was a paradise. Each spring, from the age of nine, Fyodor’s mother and siblings would pile into the coach and he would take the coachman’s seat, and they would leave Dr Dostoevsky behind for the calm and safety of the countryside, where the children could run around all day playing games, watched over by the peasants. One such game was ‘horsies’, which entailed the young masters of the house pulling together teams of peasant children, racing these ‘horsies’ along the road, and feeding them table scraps. In the evenings, the Dostoevsky children would help shell peas while the damp wood crackled in the hearth, and before bed, Fyodor would write out a note politely requesting that, if he died in the night, they wait a few days to bury him, in case he woke up.24 Everything, everything comes back so clearly. Thinking back, I could weep.
The house stood on a hill, and beneath it, next to a grove of linden trees and birches, Maria created a large pond. From that first summer, Fyodor spent so much of his time here that it came to be known as Fedya’s Grove. How fresh it used to seem, yet how cold! Lights would be beginning to shine in the huts at the pond’s edge, and the cattle would be wending their way home. Above, the sky would be a cold blue, save for a fringe of flame-coloured streaks on the horizon.25 There was nothing he loved more than this place full of mushrooms and wild berries, beetles, hedgehogs and squirrels, and the smell of damp wood. It was almost silent here, lending epic proportions to the slightest disturbance, whether the fluttering of a frightened bird, a bulrush rubbing against its neighbour in the breeze, or a fish nibbling at the surface of the pond. Across the water there would sometimes gather a thin mist, flattening shapes, the trees loitering in the depths like formless giants. But the point of a paradise is that it is lost, and this memory – of safety, security, exploration, games, a loving mother – was all the sweeter for its brevity.
One dry, bright, windy day at the end of that first summer, Fyodor’s peace was shattered by a voice shouting: ‘Wolf!’
Terrified, the little nine-year-old sped out of the copse towards the only adult he could find, a serf named Marko Efremov who had been ploughing the field thirty paces away. Fyodor grabbed at his sleeve and told him breathlessly about the wolf. The peasant scanned the field and the forest, then smiled at Fyodor indulgently.
‘You’re imagining things,’ he said reassuringly.26
Poor Fyodor was deathly pale and trembling, and the peasant reached out to stroke his cheek. Although he was a burly man of fifty with grey hair salting his beard, he was as tender as a mother. It began to dawn on Fyodor that he must have been hearing things, even if he couldn’t shake the impression it had made on him. The peasant made the sign of the cross over Fyodor, and then himself, and stood there watching over him while Fyodor walked back to the house, nodding encouragingly until he was out of sight. If I had been his own son, he could not have looked at me with such love. What had prompted him to do that? He was our serf, and I his master’s little boy.27
That was the last time Fyodor saw the estate intact. On the third day of Easter week, 1832, the family was sitting around the table in Moscow, having tea, when one of the peasants from Darovoe burst in.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Dr Dostoevsky. ‘What is it?’28
‘The estate has burned down.’
In preparation for the festivities, a serf named Arkhip Saveliev had decided to do a hog roast on Good Friday. But it had been a windy day and the flames had blown against his hut, spreading onto the straw, and from there to the entire estate.
When they went to see the damage, the snow was falling in big wet flakes, melting as it touched the earth. The huts were blackened shells, half of them so badly burned that only the support beams were left standing. As we drove in, there were peasant women drawn up along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and wan, with their faces a sort of brownish colour, especially one at the edge, a tall, bony woman who looked forty, but might have been only twenty, with a long thin face. And in her arms was a little baby crying. And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms, with its little fists blue from cold.29
Both the doctor and his wife saw it as a punishment from God. Maria gave each of the peasants 50 roubles, sinking the family further in debt.5 They rebuilt with difficulty. The barn and the granary had burned to the ground, so they didn’t even have enough seed for sowing. In the lean years that followed, the peasants would remove the thatch from their roofs to feed the starving animals. Dr Dostoevsky’s mood darkened. He worried aloud about Fyodor’s mischievous side, telling him that if he wasn’t careful he’d end up wearing the red hat of a Siberian convict. The doctor was particularly hard on
his two eldest boys, who were now attending boarding school in preparation for their future careers as military engineers. Every day he grew more morose and discontented and irritable; every day his character kept changing for the worse.30 On the weekends, when they returned from boarding school, he would stand them by the table to decline their Latin verbs and, if either of them made the slightest mistake, Dr Dostoevsky would explode with rage. I could not bear the thought that one of the two people I so longed to love did love me and treated me kindly, while the other intimidated me.31 The boys were not allowed to go anywhere alone, they were not allowed to bring friends home, and they did not receive pocket money.
The doctor’s bitterness and jealousy permeated the household. Whenever I got home from school I would find everyone low-spirited, and my mother shedding silent tears, and my father raging.32 The doctor complained bitterly to his wife that Darovoe was being badly run, that he was being passed up for official recognition, that he was wasting so much money on the boys’ education, that the peasants deserved flogging. When he discovered that Maria’s brother was carrying on an affair with one of their maids, he slapped his brother-in-law in the face and banned him from ever setting foot in their apartment again. How he could treat my poor mother so I cannot understand. It used to rend my heart to see how hollow her cheeks were becoming, how sunken her eyes.33
Maria grew thinner and thinner, pained by coughing and yet desperate to cough. It soon became clear that she had tuberculosis, a disease which progressed slowly, but had no cure.6 By late 1836, Maria’s hair was cropped and her skin sallow. She was forever out of breath. Ominous red spots burned on her cheeks, and her lips were parched from fever.34 Fyodor and the other children would keep her company, reciting her favourite poems to cheer her up.
Maria was confined to her room and soon there was no longer any hope of recovery. The doctor, who had been visiting every day, stopped attending. Maria called for the icon to be brought to her, and blessed the whole family while they wept. I went to mother, lay down beside her, hugged her in my arms and said nothing. Mother hugged me, too, and asked no questions. I looked at her, but she seemed not to see me – she only held my hand tight in hers. I softly pulled away.35 She died at seven o’clock on the morning of 27 February 1837, at the age of 37. I closed my eyes, and saw her face with quivering lips. She crossed herself facing the church, and afterwards made the sign of the cross over me.36
Dr Dostoevsky agonised over Maria’s death. He locked himself in his room, talking aloud to his dead wife, headbutting the wall and moaning. Only alcohol temporarily quelled his despair. Not a man given to literary flourishes, he instructed Mikhail and Fyodor to find an epitaph for their mother’s gravestone. They chose a line from the poet Nikolai Karamzin: ‘Lie here, beloved dust, until the joyful dawn.’37 In the midst of their grief, news reached Moscow that Alexander Pushkin, by now recognised as Russia’s greatest poet, had been shot dead in a duel, and so, in the immediate aftermath of Maria’s death, the whole nation was in mourning.
You will never know, mother, how I loved you then! Mother, where are you now? Do you hear me? Mother, mother, do you remember the dove in the church?38
There was nothing left for Fyodor and his older brother in Moscow. Two of their younger siblings were sent to live with their uncle and aunt, and the older boys were expected to go to the military academy to study as engineers in the hope that, one day soon, they might supplement the family’s anaemic income. And so, little more than a month after his mother died, at fifteen years old Fyodor packed his belongings and they began the 700-verst journey to St Petersburg.7 I looked around for the last time, feeling sick at heart and full of misgivings about the harsh and hostile future that might be waiting on the road.39
The weather was warm, that May. The three of them travelled at a leisurely pace, without changing horses, and would spend two or three hours at each coach stop. I recall how weary we finally became of the journey, as it dragged on for almost a week. My brother and I were eager to enter a new life and were prone to dreaming of ‘the beautiful and the sublime’ (the phrase was fresh then and spoken without irony). We had agreed that when we arrived in St Petersburg, our first stop would be the scene of Pushkin’s duel, and we would look for his former apartment in the house on the Moika.40
One afternoon, they stopped to rest the horses at a posting station in Tver. As Fyodor sat at the inn, looking out of the window at the station building, a troika pulled up and a government courier jumped down.8 He was tall and well built, with a purplish face. He ran into the station to knock back a glass of vodka while the young driver threw his coat over his arm and got into another carriage with fresh horses. As he did so, the courier flew down the steps, jumped into the carriage and started punching the back of the driver’s neck. The startled driver, in his turn, whipped the poor shaft horse with all his might. The horses started, but that did nothing to appease the courier: he raised his terrible fist over and over, punching the back of the driver’s neck as hard as he could, and the driver in turn, barely clinging on, lashed out at the horses until they were out of sight. The government beat its servants, just as the servants beat the animals. This disgusting scene stayed etched in my memory as a symbol of cause and effect. Every blow that rained down on the animal was the direct result of every blow that fell on the man. If I should ever found a philanthropic society I would make this courier’s troika the society’s seal, as an emblem and an admonition.41
They soon arrived in St Petersburg. At its centre was the Palace Square, home of Tsar Nicholas I, from which power and influence rippled outwards concentrically. There, at the heart of the city, were the three seats of Russian Imperial power: the Admiralty; the Winter Palace; and a huge cathedral that was still under construction. In the middle of the square stood a column bearing the statue of Tsar Alexander I, a single 600-ton monolith that had been raised to celebrate victory over Napoleon. Nearby was a bronze equestrian statue of the city’s namesake, Peter the Great, nicknamed ‘The Bronze Horseman’ after a famous narrative poem by Pushkin. If there were any lingering doubt that this statue stood in for the might of the Russian Empire, it had been raised on a granite pedestal known as the Thunder Stone: the largest single block of stone ever moved by humans, it weighed well over a thousand tons, and had been dragged six versts by 400 men over the course of nine months.
If the Palace Square was the heart of the city, the artery that supplied its lifeblood was Nevsky Prospect, running south-east towards the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. It was here that members of society would take their afternoon stroll, officers jostling with literati, shopkeepers and the endless green uniforms of civil servants. Towards the top of Nevsky Prospect were the accumulated delights of Europe, parfumeries, Buchhändlerin and barbieri jostling with signs in Cyrillic. In the morning, the street was filled with the smell of freshly baked bread as the old women came out in their rags to beg alms; but it remained quiet until midday, when the tutors and governesses would come out with their wards, correcting their posture. From two o’clock, the avenue blossomed into colour, as clerks finished up their business and couples walked arm in arm, the women in their finest gowns and the men sporting distinguished whiskers, some stopping for tea or to read a newspaper. The further you ventured away from the palace, the more the veneer of civilisation broke down until, eventually, you would find yourself among little huts and workshops, warehouses and sheds. In the dead of night, passers-by might be treated to the uncommon sight of prostitutes, in their silk dresses and jewellery, with feathers in their hats, being made to sweep the pavements by a detachment of police constables.
The great critic Vissarion Belinsky once observed that the court was a city within the city, a state within the state. But by the time Fyodor arrived, there were other ripples of influence originating elsewhere in the city: the literary circles formed around people like Belinsky, which would meet and discuss ideas that could never be committed to print. It is indeed a well-known fact that the whole of Petersburg
is nothing but a collection of an enormous number of small ‘circles’, each with its own constitution, laws, logic and oracle. It comes from our national character, which is a little shy of social life and prefers to stay at home.42 But it would be some years before Fyodor’s spectacular entrance into the Belinsky circle, and his equally rapid fall from grace.
Having been built by decree, St Petersburg was a Europeanised and strangely artificial city, nothing like the Slavic Moscow that Fyodor knew. It is the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe.43 It was so new that in places it was still under construction; when he arrived, Russia’s first railway was being completed, running from Semyonovsky Square to Tsarskoe Selo outside the city. It was an incredible time to be studying buildings, with the city changing all around him, including some of the most ambitious architecture in the world. The Winter Palace, recently restored after a major fire, boasted 1,057 rooms, 117 staircases, 1,945 windows and 1,786 doors. I don’t know if I am right, but I always imagined Petersburg as the spoiled younger son of a highly respectable father, a man belonging to a past age. His son gets a smattering of high life, acquires European airs and grows a moustache.10 Papa is horrified, aware only of the moustache and of his son’s helping himself freely to the money in his father’s capacious pocket and observing, too, that his son is a bit of a freethinker and an egoist. But his son wants to live and he is in such a hurry that one can’t help wondering where he gets all his energy from.44
Mikhail was refused entry to the famous Engineering Academy at Mikhailovsky Castle on the grounds that he had tuberculosis, and so he went on to a less picky academy in Revel.11 Fyodor had a hoarse voice from a chest infection he’d picked up before they set out, but was pronounced healthy and accepted in St Petersburg. He didn’t receive a scholarship to cover his fees as his father had hoped – to get one of those, you had to offer lavish bribes.
Dostoevsky in Love Page 2