Dostoevsky in Love

by Alex Christofi

  Although there was an emphasis on academic excellence, the Academy still ran along the lines of a military school. Alongside their lectures, the students practised fencing, dancing, singing and, of course, endless marching. For his father’s sake Fyodor applied himself to his studies, but in his spare time he read Hoffmann, Scott, de Quincey, Schiller, Hugo, Balzac and Pushkin (always Pushkin). When a new George Sand novel was published, he sat up all night reading it in a fever of excitement.

  Very much a poet in engineer’s clothing, Fyodor still understood how much appearance meant to his peers and how closely it would be read. He was barely considered a gentleman as it was. I am afraid of one thing only: gossip. My enemies, all those wicked tongues, what will they say when they see me without a greatcoat? I mean, it’s for other people that you go around in a greatcoat, and I suppose you wear boots for them too. I need boots to uphold my honour and my good name; whereas in boots full of holes both honour and name are lost.45 He had all the paranoia of an ambitious member of the lower-middle class, desperate to break into society but convinced that he would be outed by some invisible code. He took to buying tea to supplement his morning and evening ration, and often wrote to his father asking for money.

  When he heard that Fyodor had not passed his first year (having been rude to his maths teacher), Dr Dostoevsky had a minor stroke. A few months later, one of Fyodor’s letters requesting money received a strained response about the state of affairs in Darovoe: ‘From the beginning of spring not a drop of water, not even dew. Heat and terrible winds have ruined everything. What threatens is not only ruin but total starvation. After this, can you really keep grumbling at your father for not sending you money?’46 In the envelope was the money that he had asked for. It was the last letter he would ever receive from his father, who died a week later.

  He was found one morning by some peasants in a ditch.47 Dark rumours circulated among the family about the goings-on at Darovoe. Before his death, their father’s drinking had got worse, and he had been prone to bouts of rage, whipping the peasants savagely. A peasant girl, Akulina, had been taken into the main house at the age of ten or eleven, and although she was still only fourteen, she had been assisting in Dr Dostoevsky’s medical practice. The doctor had also made a mistress of the sixteen-year-old chambermaid, Katya, and she had given birth to a child, which had suffered a cot death.48 It seemed macabre, but not unbelievable, that the doctor had been murdered by his peasants. A bottle of spirits down the throat and a cloth in the mouth. The body lying untended in the field for two days. At first glance, the allegations looked serious.49 It was never proven – could never be proven – either way. But if he wasn’t murdered, the alternative was that he had died as a consequence of stress, of drinking to put off the feeling of stress, of working to put off the ruin of the family, of working towards Fyodor’s future as an engineer – a future that Fyodor himself was no longer working towards. Fyodor never explicitly acknowledged guilt, but as he built a new life in St Petersburg, far from the burned wreckage of his father’s dreams, the first of his great archetypes was taking shape in his head: the drunken man, the dissolute man, the man marked for death.

  I confess to you that Petersburg, I don’t know why, has always been a mystery to me. Since my childhood, almost forsaken, abandoned in Petersburg, I was somehow always afraid of it.50 Now orphaned, and with his beloved brother Mikhail 350 versts away in Revel, Fyodor spent most of his free time brooding on his bed or walking alone through the wide, flat streets, peering into the city as if willing it to give up its secrets. It never obliged, except for one especially cold January evening soon after his father’s death. There was a particular moment, as Fyodor was crossing the Neva, when he perceived it all with perfect clarity. It happened just as the last of the sunset burned out on the horizon and the sky turned crimson over the city. The great expanse of the Neva, swollen with frozen snow, sparkled with needles of frost. Frozen steam poured from the noses of passing horses; columns of hot smoke, meanwhile, rose like giants from the roofs, rushing upward, intertwining and making it appear as if a whole new city was forming above the old one, in the air. It seemed, in that moment, as if the whole world, the real one down on the earth, with its inhabitants, strong and weak, its poor houses and gilded mansions, was only a fantastical vision, a dream that would one day rise up like steam into the sky and vanish. I shuddered and at that moment my heart seemed to be flooded with a warm rush of blood, a powerful, unknown sensation. It was as if at that moment I came to understand something that until then had only been stirring vaguely within me, and had yet to be understood; it was as if my eyes were opened to something new, to a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only from dark rumours and mysterious signs. I believe it was at that very moment that my existence began.51

  Having graduated and received permission to live independently, Fyodor was employed in the drafting department, working on projective geometry and field cartography. I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking, burrowed away in my little hole. Every day when I turned up at the office I tried to behave as independently as possible, and to assume a lofty expression, so that I might not be suspected of being abject.52 As soon as I finished I would run home to my garret, put on my tatty dressing gown, leaf through my Schiller, and begin to dream, to suffer pains sweeter than pleasure, and to love.53

  Fyodor took a succession of rooms, some more salubrious than others. Although he drew a salary, Fyodor seemed to repel money. He couldn’t afford real coffee, instead drinking a foul concoction made from barley. Still, he had just enough to sign up to the lending library at Smirdin’s bookshop if he didn’t buy boots (instead, he covered up the holes with ink). He often ran out of money entirely, living on bread and milk that he’d bought on credit with the shopkeeper. Occasionally he’d write to his younger brother Andrei for a few roubles so that he could buy kindling.

  There was an old man in his quarters with the unusual nickname Mammal, who had a consumptive wife. Mammal’s boots were worn thin and his five children often went hungry. There was also a young woman, Nadia, with whom Fyodor would read novels. Even now I can’t recall those evenings without trembling. In return for reading to her, she darned his old stockings and starched his two shirt-fronts for him. Meeting her sometimes on the filthy staircase, with eggshell crunching like grit underfoot, she would blush. She was a dreamer too, pretty, kind and gentle. But she had a fiancé.

  Eventually, he moved in, a petty official who wore a coat with a cat-fur collar, which presumably he hoped would be taken for marten. He was about forty-five, and had a wart on his nose. And then they moved away together. I remember how I said goodbye. I kissed her pretty hand for the first time in my life. She kissed me on the forehead and smiled so oddly, so strangely, that it left a claw mark on my heart for the rest of my life. And she began laughing – why? It is all so painfully imprinted on my memory.

  Fyodor tried to console himself with literature. He thought he might turn his hand to writing plays. He started and quickly abandoned one called Jew Yankel. He tried translating George Sand and Balzac. At the Academy, he had met a few other students who were interested in literature, and sometimes they would meet up to talk about Gogol or play cards. I spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle the seething within me by focusing on external impressions. Reading, of course, was a great help, but at times it bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything. And so, furtively, timidly, in solitude, at night, I indulged in filthy vice, with a feeling of shame which never deserted me.12

  Fyodor would sometimes write to his wealthy aunt for money, too. In the end he managed to beg 1,000 roubles and, feeling flush, went out for an evening’s stroll. He stopped to watch a game of billiards at Dominic’s Café, where someone offered to teach him how to play dominoes. It was a fascinating game – a mix of luck and logic. It must have taken him about 25 rounds, but eventually he lost all the money he had brought out with him, and trudged home.
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br />   Eventually, he found a lender who was willing to give him some money up front if he signed away his next four months’ salary, which he did. It didn’t help that he had also been giving people money to hear their life stories: there were the patients of his friend Dr Riesenkampf, and there was also a young German acquaintance who was a great raconteur but who sponged off him mercilessly. What could he do? He knew he was destined to be a writer, but you cannot speak before you have listened.

  Although his financial future was by no means certain, Fyodor committed himself to the inevitable and tendered his resignation from the drafting department. I resigned because I had to resign. I couldn’t stand the service any longer. Life is bleak when one’s time is wasted.54 He didn’t have a copeck to buy clothes. He had written to his relatives offering to renounce his interest in the family estate for another 1,000 roubles up front, but they seemed not to trust him when he said he’d never ask for money again.

  He moved in with Dmitri Vasilevich Grigorovich, a sullen young man whose French was better than his Russian, and who had been in the year above Fyodor at the engineering academy. Grigorovich had already published a couple of short stories in the manner of Gogol, and was working on an essay, ‘The Organ Grinders of St Petersburg’. Crucially, for Fyodor, he had literary connections. Day and night, the two young men would read, and write, and talk about literature, above all Gogol, whose Dead Souls had just been published and was already one of the most famous works in the Russian language. I read like a fiend, and reading had a strange effect on me. I re-read some book I’d read before, and it was as if new strength began to stir in me. I penetrated into everything, I understood with precision, and I drew from it the ability to create.55 He daydreamed of faces, a whole crowd of them, unable to see that their limbs were on strings, and unaware that behind them stood a laughing puppeteer. Gogol could write like that, but Fyodor wanted to give his characters more dignity. Fyodor imagined two poor neighbours: an old titular councillor, among the lowest ranks of the civil service, but honest, moral and devoted to his work, and a young woman, impoverished and sad. Their story broke my heart.56

  After serving his notice, Fyodor spent all his time working on his new story, a rather original novel by his own estimation,57 which he thought would be about the length of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. He found himself totally caught up in the world of his characters and did nothing but write and rewrite. If I was ever happy it was before I had ever read or shown anyone my manuscript; in those long nights spent in exalted hopes and dreams and passionate love of my work, when I was living with my characters, as though they were my family, as though they were real people; I loved them, I rejoiced and grieved with them, and sometimes shed genuine tears over my artless hero.58

  He recopied the manuscript of Poor Folk in the autumn and finished it in November 1844. In December he decided to go back through it again and rewrote it, and in February, again, he pruned, polished, interpolated and deleted. It is almost twice as good now. But I’m through with it; I have promised myself not to touch it again. It is always the fate of first books to be corrected again and again, endlessly.59 It was spring by the time he was happy with it, the time of St Petersburg’s famous White Nights, when the daylight stretches out through the evenings and it begins to seem as if it will never be dark again. His first novel sat on his desk, a thick notebook covered with small handwriting.

  Fyodor wanted to send it to the popular radical journal Notes of the Fatherland, where Belinsky was chief critic, but he knew that there were heaps of manuscripts in their offices that never got read. I had been reading Belinsky with great interest for some years, but he seemed to me to be severe and menacing, and I had thought to myself: ‘He would only laugh at my Poor Folk’. But only sometimes.60 When he considered his options (self-publish it, throw himself into the Neva, etc.), he found himself at a loss. Then, one day, he spoke about the manuscript to Grigorovich, who mentioned that his friend Nikolai Nekrasov was starting a new magazine, and asked if he might show it to him. Nekrasov was the same age as Fyodor, but he already had an impressive career behind him. Having refused to join the army, his father had cut him off, and he had lived in abject poverty for years, building a reputation for himself as a poet and a talented critic for Notes of the Fatherland. Nekrasov was friends with the budding short-story writer Ivan Turgenev and even knew Belinsky himself.

  Fyodor went with Grigorovich to hand Nekrasov his manuscript, but he was so crippled with nerves that he made his excuses and bolted almost immediately. He went for a long walk through St Petersburg and, not wanting to go home just yet, called on an old college friend. They stayed up late, and so did the sun, dipping only reluctantly as the new day approached. When I came home it was already four o’clock, as bright as day. The weather was fine and warm, and when I got in I didn’t go to bed, but sat looking out of the open window. Suddenly the bell rang and startled me.61

  Nekrasov and Grigorovich rushed into Fyodor’s room and embraced him in raptures, on the brink of tears. While Fyodor had been out, they had taken Poor Folk back to Nekrasov’s place, intending to read the first ten pages and make a decision. After ten pages they decided to read another ten, and they had carried on like that all night, taking turns to read the manuscript aloud. The moment they had finished it, they had come to see him.

  They spent about half an hour with me then, and in that time we talked of God knows how many things, catching each other’s meaning before we had finished a word, speaking hastily of poetry and of truth and of the state of things – and of Gogol too, of course. But mainly we spoke of Belinsky.62

  ‘I intend to take Belinsky your manuscript today,’ said Nekrasov triumphantly, shaking Fyodor by the shoulders. ‘Let’s see what happens. What a man you are! You and he must meet one another, for he is a splendid fellow. Now, I must be off – go to bed, and then come and see me later.’ They left, but of course he couldn’t sleep.

  When Nekrasov did come back, he delivered the good news that Belinsky loved Poor Folk too. It was almost unbelievable – Fyodor had become a literary sensation, literally overnight. Nekrasov suggested going to meet Belinsky, but Fyodor was so nervous that he refused to leave the house. All my life up to now, in all my dreams of how I would behave with people, I always imagined myself being very clever. It was very different in reality – I was always very stupid; and I confess sincerely, I always got terribly flustered.63

  ‘What am I to him?’ Fyodor asked, cringing.64 ‘What would I do there? What do we have in common? He is a scholar, a well-known writer, a famous critic. What am I?’

  ‘Fyodor Mikhailovich! What humility! And for whose sake? Haven’t I read Poor Folk? Hasn’t Belinsky read it?’

  ‘So, what of it?’ Fyodor asked slyly, suppressing a smile. His crippling self-consciousness wrestled with his vanity until, at last, Nekrasov managed to bundle him out of the door.

  Belinsky lived in a big house on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and the Fontanka Canal, where people sold apples and gingerbread. He had a courtyard apartment with windows facing onto the stables. Fyodor got as far as the doorbell before retreating back down the stairs, and Nekrasov had to warn him that he was going to annoy Belinsky more by his absence before Fyodor would agree to go back up and announce himself.

  They were shown into a neat office with houseplants, polished floors, a tidy desk, and the faces of literary giants everywhere: portraits and busts of Voltaire and Rousseau, Pushkin and Gogol. Belinsky appeared among them, a short man with blond hair and such a hard stare that it was difficult for anyone to meet his eyes, let alone Fyodor, who, at moments like this, had a habit of squeezing himself together as if he was trying to gently and quietly fade from the room.13

  When they were all seated, Belinsky shrieked in excitement: ‘Do you, you yourself, realise what you have written?’65

  Fyodor sat there, failing to disappear.

  ‘You, as an artist, could have written this only guided by your God-given instinct. But have you understood al
l the terrible truth you have shown us? It cannot be that you, with all your twenty years, have understood that.’ Belinsky fell into raptures over the old clerk, the way he had pinpointed the whole tragedy of these characters so vividly, through such significant little moments. It was precisely the sort of social novel that Russian literature had been crying out for, and that Belinsky had demanded to see from the new generation. ‘To you, an artist, the truth has been revealed and proclaimed; it has come to you as a gift. So cherish your gift, remain faithful to it, and be a great writer!’

  Fyodor left in a state of ecstasy. He stopped at the street corner, looked up at the luminous day, at the passers-by, and felt that something quite decisive had just occurred, something he had not anticipated in his wildest dreams. I recall the moment with complete clarity, and I could never forget it after. It was the most wonderful moment of my life.66

  Notes

  1 The second part of Russian names, the patronymic, is an indication of the father’s name. So all of Mikhail’s boys were Mikhailovich, and the girls Mikhailovna.

  2 Their fifth child Vera also had a twin, who had suffered a cot death.

  3 A curious hearsay account of this period turned up later. According to the Soviet scholar Sergei Belov, Zinaida Trubetskaya overheard Dostoevsky recounting in the late 1870s how he used to play with a dainty nine-year-old girl who was the daughter of a cook or coachman, and who liked to show him flowers. One day, a drunk raped her, and she died of blood loss before Dr Dostoevsky could save her. Woe to him who offends a child! (The Brothers Karamazov, p. 353)

  4 At that time the size of estates was counted by the number of male serfs or ‘souls’ who were tied to the property.

  5 At the time, you could rent an expensive apartment in St Petersburg for a year for about 450 roubles, and there are 100 copecks in a rouble. In the second half of the nineteenth century, skilled artisans earned an average of 117 copecks a day; unskilled workers 71 copecks a day; and agricultural workers 30 copecks a day. See ‘Wages and prices in Imperial Russia’, The Russian Review, 69:1 (January 2010), pp. 47–72.