6 The stately pace of deterioration and the comely pallor it brought on made tuberculosis the preferred coup de grâce among the Romantics: Lord Byron once said that ‘I should like to die from consumption’. He later died from a fever made worse by doctors who insisted, against his pleas, on letting his blood with unsterilised instruments.
7 A verst is just over a kilometre.
8 The Russian carriage was traditionally harnessed in a troika formation with three horses abreast. They were driven so that the front horse would trot while the two side horses cantered, apocryphally to keep wolves at bay, and could reach speeds of 30 mph. The Russian horse whip (nagaika, нага́йка), a thick leather braid ending in a leather or even metal ball, also doubled as a defence against wolves.
ONE
Circles within Circles
1846–49
I don’t think my glory will ever be greater. Everywhere there is a passionate curiosity about me. Everyone considers me a prodigy. Belinsky couldn’t love me more. The other day, the poet Ivan Turgenev returned from Paris and immediately became attached to me with such devotion that Belinsky reckons he has fallen in love with me. I have practically fallen in love with him myself. A poet, a talent, an aristocrat, handsome, rich, intelligent, educated, twenty-five years old.67 A head taller than Fyodor with sky-blue eyes, and fluent in French and German, Turgenev already had the air of a man of the world. He had spent time abroad, studying at the University of Berlin at the same time as Karl Marx and meeting George Sand, who was infamous in literary Russia as one of the only radical voices from the continent that had slipped through the net of censorship. Turgenev was not yet making much of a living from his writing, but his mother had an estate numbering 5,000 serfs, so he could afford to take his time.1 He was everything, in short, that Fyodor wished to be.
In the evening Turgenev read my work to our entire circle, that is, to twenty people at least, and it caused a furore.68 Belinsky said that he has complete faith in me, because I am so versatile. I have a deep well of ideas, but I can’t talk about any of them to Turgenev for fear that tomorrow, all of Petersburg will know about it. If I began to recount all my successes for you, I would run out of paper.69
Fyodor was soon invited into the circle of Ivan Panaev, another of St Petersburg’s taste-makers. The first night he went along with Nekrasov and Grigorovich, his face was contorted into a rictus of social anxiety, but the others encouraged him, and he began to come out of his shell. Panaev was great fun – funny and childish. I think I fell in love with his wife. She is not only intelligent and pretty, but very nice and straightforward. Avdotya was about the same age as Fyodor, and was quietly at work on her own short stories. He took to her immediately. She went out of her way to be welcoming and kind to him, seeing that he was so nervous. He watched her move around her salon like a dancer, every movement keeping time with some silent music. She was beautiful, too, with silken black hair, a perfectly straight nose and olive skin. But it is not enough to grow fond of people – one must possess the art of making people fond of you.70 Fyodor later found out that Madame Panaeva was already ensconced in a ménage à trois with Nekrasov.
As he grew in confidence, Fyodor began to speak more freely (and loudly) at the meetings of their circle. It didn’t take long before he found himself arguing about both literary and political matters, even with Belinsky, whose flippant attitude to Christianity wounded Fyodor deeply. At the same time Fyodor was working hard to finish The Double, the story of a low-ranking civil servant called Golyadkin who is haunted by a doppelgänger, a man just like him, and yet suave, attractive, somehow imperceptibly better at being himself. In the crucial scene before he meets his double, Golyadkin inveigles himself into a party, where he stands awkwardly in front of his boss’s daughter, the beautiful Klara, stammering and floundering and blushing, before retreating to the corner of the room and fantasising about saving her from a falling chandelier. Golyadkin lurches forward to grab Klara’s hand for a dance and she shrieks; he is detached from her by the other guests and directed quite firmly towards the stairway at the entrance, where he stumbles and falls down the stairs into the courtyard. Shortly after that, he is confronted by his second self, and the impostor begins to take his life from him, piece by piece. It ends in the only way possible: he is driven off to the asylum.
The Double was published by Notes of the Fatherland in February 1846, just weeks after Poor Folk was published in Nekrasov’s Petersburg Miscellany. Belinsky praised Dostoevsky’s talent and depth of thought in general terms, but he also stuck the knife in: ‘It is obvious that the author . . . has not yet acquired the tact of measure and harmony, and, as a result, many criticise even Poor Folk not without reason for prolixity, though this criticism is less applicable there than to The Double.’ Fyodor had been right that his fame had peaked in the autumn, but he could not have foreseen how quickly it would desert him. This new development revealed the terrible paradox at the heart of paranoia: yes, perhaps it is unreasonable to believe that people are insulting you behind your back, but that doesn’t mean they are not. Grigorovich, for reasons best known to himself, began reporting to Fyodor that the others were having great fun at his expense. Turgenev and Nekrasov had been passing around a strange poem about a poor knight, a fragment without a beginning or an end,71 in which they pretended to be Belinsky addressing Fyodor, ‘The Knight of the Doleful Countenance’:
Upon the nose of lit
You blossom like a zit72
They take a malicious delight in spotting every one of my mistakes.73 They even teased Fyodor for the sudden illness that had overtaken him at the party of a local Count, Mikhail Yurevich Vielgorsky. While there, he had been introduced to an attractive young blonde named Senyavina, who had been keen to meet him, but Fyodor had sadly failed to capitalise on this opportunity for a flirtation by losing consciousness and falling to the floor.
Soon Belinsky, Nekrasov and Panaev abandoned Notes of the Fatherland for a rival magazine, The Contemporary. Now openly hostile to the direction Fyodor’s writing was taking, Belinsky wrote that his new story, ‘Mr Prokharchin’, was ‘affected, maniéré, and incomprehensible’.2 Fyodor’s only defender was the new chief critic of Notes of the Fatherland, Valerian Maikov, a literary prodigy even compared to Dostoevsky. Two years younger than Fyodor, he had already made a name for himself as a formidable critic, and he saw that, whereas Gogol was a social poet, Dostoevsky’s talent was for psychology. ‘In The Double,’ he wrote, ‘he penetrates so deeply into the human soul, he looks so fearlessly and passionately into the secret machinations of human feeling, thought and action, that the impression created by The Double may be compared only with that of an inquisitive person penetrating into the chemical composition of matter.’74
The two young men quickly became close friends, their sympathies instinctively aligned. Maikov began preparing a long article about Dostoevsky’s impressive output: Poor Folk, The Double, ‘A Novel in Nine Letters’, ‘Mr Prokharchin’ and now The Landlady. As soon as Maikov had finished it, the article would rehabilitate Dostoevsky as one of the most significant writers of his generation. Maikov was still working on it when, one summer’s day, he went out into the countryside near St Petersburg for a long walk and a swim, caught sunstroke, and died.
This did not help with Fyodor’s hypochondria. He now became morbidly fascinated by reading medical textbooks, particularly those on phrenology, mental illness and the nervous system, reading lists of symptoms in the hope of naming what it felt like to be him. Some nights he couldn’t sleep. He suffered from subtle hallucinations; he wrote fervently, almost manically.3 He began to mistrust his own senses and on one night convinced himself that he was going to die. As it got darker my room seemed to grow larger and larger, as though the walls were retreating, and at dusk I gradually began to sink into a sort of mystic terror. It is a most oppressive, agonising state which I don’t know how to define, something unnatural, passing all understanding, even as it takes shape and stands before me
as a hideous and undeniable fact. It seems to me something like the anguish of people who are afraid of the dead.75
It was around this time that Fyodor’s doctor, Stepan Yanovsky, bumped into him in St Isaac’s Square, being propped up by a soldier, his collar undone. He was delirious, and all he would say as Yanovsky led him home was, ‘I am saved!’ The doctor let some blood, which came out black – a worrying sign. Even when the patient had settled down, it was clear that he was anxious and unhappy. He seemed to have been suffering from some sort of nervous breakdown. When a man is dissatisfied, when he hasn’t the means to show what is best in him, to express himself fully (not out of vanity, but because of the urgent necessity of realising himself), he at once gets involved in some quite incredible situation; he takes to the bottle, or becomes a gambler, or a rabid duellist.76 Or, he might have added, a revolutionary.
I loved to recall and visit at certain dates the places where I was once happy in my own way. I loved to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past, and often wandered like a shade, aimless, sad and dejected, down the streets and alleyways of St Petersburg, and although the past was no better I felt as though somehow it had been.77 It was on one of these strolls that Fyodor met the man who would lead him to the firing squad.
He had been making his way down Nevsky Prospect when he was approached by a rather short, theatrical figure in a cloak. The man’s black eyes glowed between his thick beard and his broad-brimmed hat.
‘May I ask what the idea of your next story is?’ the stranger enquired.78
He introduced himself as Mikhail Vasilievich Butashevich-Petrashevsky. Born two days after Fyodor, Petrashevsky now worked as a translator in the Foreign Office. He didn’t work for the income since he was independently wealthy, but the Foreign Office gave him access to banned books, a number of which had made it into his personal library.
Petrashevsky was a strange combination of frivolous and committed, a utopian socialist in the mould of Fourier.4 On the one hand, Petrashevsky had tried to put his principles into practice and start a commune for his peasants. (They had gone along with the idea until building work on the ‘phalanstery’ was completed, at which point they burned it to the ground.) On the other hand, he sometimes seemed little more than a prankster – once, when his boss ordered him to cut his hair short, he had turned up to work wearing a long wig. He hosted his own circle, this one more overtly political than Belinsky’s. If you were being ungenerous, you might say that the common denominator in all these pursuits was that he liked being the centre of attention.
Petrashevsky may have been rich, but his house on Pokrovsky Square was small and sparsely furnished (though he did have a piano). Fyodor found it a welcome change from the Belinsky circle. The guests would often stay talking until two or three o’clock in the morning, possibly enticed by the free food and drink. If we had drunk a great deal – and that did happen sometimes – we flew into raptures, and even on one occasion sang the ‘Marseillaise’ in chorus.79 Fyodor recognised Valerian Maikov’s younger brother, Apollon, who was starting out as a poet, and although he didn’t quite have his brother’s genius, they talked easily, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes together. Sometimes Fyodor would browse Petrashevsky’s extraordinary library, borrowing books on socialism, whether Europhile or Slavophile, Christian or atheist. But mostly, he would stand among the chattering guests as they set the world to rights. We talked of the abolition of censorship, of phonetic spelling, of the substitution of the Latin alphabet for the Russian, of someone’s having been sent into exile the day before, of some scandal, of the advantage of splitting Russia into nationalities united in a free federation, of the abolition of the army and the navy, of the restoration of Poland as far as the Dnieper, of serfdom, of manifestos, of women’s rights, and so on.80
One item of serious interest was the speech that Tsar Nicholas had given to a group of nobles about finding ways to free the serfs by turning them into tenants. It wasn’t clear how that would work in practice, but the fact that the Tsar was even considering it was a huge step. Of all the issues they discussed, it was the liberation of the serfs that Fyodor believed in most passionately. He may technically have been a landowner, but some of his fondest childhood memories were of wandering around Darovoe, chatting to the labourers and playing with their children. He had once run two versts to get a glass of water for a peasant woman’s baby while she was out in the field. The idea of owning people as property seemed immoral to Fyodor.
The possibility of emancipating the serfs had been floating around liberal society for some time, a perennial favourite when conversation ran dry. But one morning in the early spring of 1848 socialist ideas took on a new urgency. On Nevsky Prospect, people were snatching newspapers out of each other’s hands, a current of shock running down the street: Italy was in revolt. It seemed that the reforms of Pius IX had provoked uprisings in Milan, Venice and Naples. Soon after, there came reports of revolutions in Berlin and Vienna. On the question of the serfs, the Tsar suddenly fell silent.
In the feverish atmosphere, Petrashevsky’s meetings began to attract a number of new people. Fyodor brought along his twenty-year-old friend Golovinsky. Petrashevsky invited along a colleague from the Foreign Office, Antonelli. He was a typical liberal, the son of a painter like Maikov, and immediately threw himself into any conversation criticising the government or the church.
Then there was Nikolai Alexandrovich Speshnev, who had just returned from Europe. Rumour had it that he had seen action as a volunteer for the liberals against the Catholics in Switzerland. He was not very talkative, he was elegant without exaggeration, surprisingly modest, and at the same time bold and self-reliant. Our dandies gazed at him with envy, and were completely eclipsed by him. His face, too, made a great impression on me81 – it was a strange sort of face, not unlike a mask. His eyes were a little too blue somehow, their gaze a little too fixed. There was something terribly unpleasant about it.82 Speshnev spent a lot of his time in Petrashevsky’s library, reading, and wouldn’t often take part in the conversations going on in the next room – but where the others flirted with ideas, Speshnev really appeared capable of anything. Once, when the group was happily sitting around complaining about censorship, he interjected: ‘Since only the spoken word remains to us, I intend to use it without any shame or conscience, with no sense of dishonour, in order to propagandise for socialism, atheism, everything, everything that is good in the world. And I advise you to do the same.’83 Fyodor had hardly expected to get on with a militant atheist, but there was something about his passion and conviction that distinguished him as an exceptional man. Here, among the champagne socialists, was a true revolutionary.
One last colourful addition to the circle is worth mentioning. Rafael Chernosvitov was a little older than most, an ex-army officer turned Siberian gold prospector with a wooden leg. His colourful language reminded Fyodor a little of Gogol, but there was also something disconcerting in his sudden appearance in the group, especially since he seemed not to be anyone’s friend in particular. Chernosvitov was also remarkably candid about the potential for a peasant uprising. Can there possibly be an informer among us here?84 Quietly, Fyodor warned Speshnev that he might be a spy, but Speshnev’s curiosity got the better of him, and he and Petrashevsky took Chernosvitov off for a tête-à-tête. At this private meeting, Chernosvitov assured the other two that, if they really wanted to know, all the free Siberian peasants had weapons already. Speshnev allowed himself to speculate that, if the army were to be drawn east across the Urals, Moscow and St Petersburg would be left undefended and vulnerable. Petrashevsky, meanwhile, had turned white, and abruptly ended the conversation. It was one thing to talk of reform over a glass of wine, quite another to plot a violent uprising. For all his gleeful provocation, Petrashevsky did not, after all, want to overthrow the Tsar.
The extent to which Petrashevsky had lost control of his own circle became increasingly clear as a few of them began to talk in more concrete terms about
what should be done. One evening at dinner, Fyodor read out Belinsky’s famous open letter to Gogol, in tribute to his lost friend and mentor – Belinsky had recently died, and now the two would never have an opportunity to reconcile. The letter decries serfdom and calls for the government to follow the rule of law: ‘This is a country where people sell other people, where there is no guarantee for the individual, for honour, for private property. There is no police order, but instead a huge network of thieves and robbers. The most urgent questions of national importance for Russia at present are the abolition of serfdom; the abolition of physical punishment; and the enforcement of laws that already exist. Russia is sleeping in apathy!’85 There was a roar of approval in the room, but Petrashevsky tried to quell his audience: yes, reform was necessary, but there was no reason it might not be done through the proper channels. Change the laws and the rest would surely follow.
Speshnev had already given up on Petrashevsky. It was no longer necessary to argue with such people. Instead, he had begun to cultivate his own circle, by invitation only, at the house of the poet Sergei Durov. Among their number was Fyodor Dostoevsky.
They still talked of art and music and poetry, and indeed most of them were writers. Here, among a handful of like-minded friends, they were free to discuss their ideas, even their most dangerous ideas, with an implicit trust that there were certain matters that could not be broached among the loose tongues of the Petrashevsky circle. The bond was strong enough that, when he heard Dostoevsky was short of money, Speshnev lent him 500 roubles, enough to keep most people going for several months. I’ll never be able to pay back such a sum, and he won’t take the money back; that’s the kind of man he is. From now on, he is my Mephistopheles.86 Instead, at their next meeting Speshnev suggested that Fyodor write a seditious paper which they might smuggle out to be published in Europe. Someone else suggested getting hold of their own printing press. They were thrilled by their own audacity, each egging the other on. Speshnev began working on a written oath that they might sign, to bind their fates together: ‘I, the undersigned, do hereby undertake to pledge myself unreservedly to a full and complete participation in the rebellion and the subsequent fighting at such time as the Committee decides to come out in open rebellion, and I further undertake to provide myself with firearms and other weapons . . .’87 It was as if, during those final days, I was trying to run away from a clear and full understanding of my situation.88
Dostoevsky in Love Page 4