Dostoevsky in Love

by Alex Christofi

  One of the other patients sneezed into a checked cotton handkerchief that was full of brown snuff. He sneezed again, wrinkling his nose to reveal ancient, blackened teeth in his dribbling red mouth. Then he opened his handkerchief, examined the phlegm, and smeared it on his brown hospital dressing gown. I began an involuntary inspection of the dressing gown I had on. By now, it had begun to warm on me and smelt more and more strongly of medicines, plasters and some kind of pus, which was not to be wondered at, since it had been on the backs of patients for innumerable years.128

  It was while in hospital that Fyodor began to understand what it was to get the lash in Siberia. Two lines of soldiers in uniform were drawn up, each with a thick stick in their hand, to form the formidable ‘green street’. The prisoner was stripped and his arms bound to rifle stocks by two officers, whose job it was to drag him the entire length (since he would inevitably stumble after the first few blows landed). As a rule, 500, 1,000, or even 1,500 strokes could be endured, but if the sentence was any more than that, it would be divided into halves by the doctors, and after the first half the prisoner would be taken to the military hospital for a break to improve their chances of living through the second half. Fyodor met one man who had been subjected to 4,000 strokes, and he himself seemed a little surprised he had survived. Men leaving the hospital for the second half of their punishment were usually gloomy and disinclined to talk. The convicts never talk to the man, and do not attempt to speak of what is in store for him. No unnecessary talk, no attempt at consolation.129 I asked many questions about the pain – I wanted to find out how bad it was, or what it could be compared with. But I could not get a satisfactory answer. They all gave the same answer: it burns; it scorches like fire; it is as though your back were being roasted.130 The prisoners all said that the birch was worse than the rods – it bit the skin more, somehow, and with a birch a man might be beaten to death in as little as 500 strokes.

  The hospital was the only place where Fyodor could take notes, in a minor conspiracy of smuggled paper arranged with a sympathetic doctor. He made notes on some of the prisoners he had met: as well as Petrov there was Aristov, a well-educated, good-looking man who chillingly refused to make a distinction between good and evil; there was also Ilinsky, a young man convicted of killing his father, though he maintained his innocence and didn’t seem the type. Either of them would make fascinating characters when he started up writing fiction again. Fyodor also had countless hours to reflect on his own life up to now. Lying alone on the hospital bed, abandoned by those I loved so fondly and intensely, some trivial incident of the past, often unnoticed at the time and soon forgotten, came back all at once to my mind and suddenly took on a new significance, completing and explaining to me what I had failed to understand before.131 But the doctor couldn’t protect him for ever, and as soon as he had recovered, Fyodor was sent back to prison.

  One of the prisoners, a Pole called Rozhnovsky, seemed surprised to see him alive. It turned out there had been a mistake in the hospital registers and Fyodor had been marked as dead. Despite the ongoing evidence, Rozhnovsky and a few of the others called him ‘dead man’ from that point on.

  I did at last become accustomed to my life in prison. But it took me almost a year, and it was the hardest year of my life. It is imprinted on my memory for ever. I believe I remember every successive hour of it.132

  More than the physical hardship, it was difficult not to have any news from Mikhail or from friends in St Petersburg. With every season that passed, new works were being published, new genres developing, new themes, new types of characters. It was not entirely true that he couldn’t read or write, but both activities were severely restricted. He had the New Testament that he had been given by one of the Decembrist wives, and one of the officers was kind enough to smuggle him in a couple of books by Dickens. He could only write when there was a free bed in the hospital, where one of the doctors sometimes let him rest. He managed to write a letter to Mikhail once, through the official channels, but he never received a reply. I feel like a limb that has been lopped off.133 Other political prisoners had received letters – why not him? Could Mikhail really not be bothered to write, if only to tell him that he was well? Had he been put off by a surly clerk, and accepted the first answer he was given? Was he even alive? What had happened to his children?

  Should I describe all my years in prison? I don’t think so. Those long, wearisome days were as monotonous as drops of water falling from a roof after rain. I remember that all that time, though I had hundreds of companions, I was terribly lonely, and at last I grew fond of that loneliness. In my isolation I reviewed all my past life, down to the smallest detail, pondered over my past, and even at times blessed fate for sending me this solitude. I swore to myself that the mistakes and lapses of the past would never happen again.134

  One season replaced another. In the summer, the convicts would go out to work making bricks three or four versts from the fortress, then carrying them a few hundred paces to the new barracks that were being built. They would spend the short nights scratching at fleas and would be woken at five in the morning, just as the itching finally eased up. The prisoners would travel to work with their mascot Vaska, a beautiful white goat that had turned up one day, at the head of the column. They twisted flowers around his horns and hung garlands over him; there was even talk of gilding his horns in the workshop. At the camp they let him jump up on the tables or butt people for laughs. But one day the Major stopped them on the way to work and ordered the goat to be killed, cooked and put in the prisoners’ soup.

  I think men pine more bitterly for freedom in the bright sunshine than in the grey days of autumn and winter.135 Sunshine made everyone impatient and quarrels more frequent. People would stare out at the steppe, stretched out for a thousand versts before them, and sigh deeply. It seemed as if anyone could simply run off and live in the forest somewhere, sleeping under the canopy of the stars. On those days, Fyodor would stare hungrily through the gaps in the stockade on their return to the fortress.

  When winter came around, the days grew shorter and they would be locked up in the draughty barracks for hours on end, with ice on the windows and the nauseous smell of animal fat coming off the candles. But at least there was Christmas Day, one of the three days of the year when the prisoners were not sent off to work. Everyone approached the day with great solemnity. Efim Belykh took out the pristine clothes he had been saving and brushed them down; straw was laid down on the floor; everyone went to bed much earlier than usual. In the morning, the guard wished them his best, as the stars began to dim and the frost to sparkle, smoke curling up from the kitchen chimneys. In the kitchen the wives of Omsk left them gifts of pastries and fine bread. The priest came to give them a blessing in front of the icon. One year they even staged a play. But every year a number of them would get surreptitiously drunk, and begin to quarrel, and the next day they would inevitably be sent back out to work again in the deep snow.

  In the last year of his sentence, Fyodor managed to get hold of one of the St Petersburg journals. It was as though news had come to me from another world: my former life rose up before me full of light and colour, and I tried from what I read to guess how far I had dropped behind.136 It seemed that so much had happened while he had been away. He pored over every line for hidden meanings and allusions, looking for traces of conversations that he recognised. He leapt at any article signed by a name he knew, though there were many he had never seen before. How sad it was for me to realise how remote I was from this new life, how cut off from it all.137 And yet in some ways, this enforced solitude had also been a kind of salvation. With only a New Testament for company, Fyodor had spent the past four years thinking deeply about God and religion. At such a time one thirsts for faith as withered grass thirsts for water. I am a child of this century, a child of doubt and disbelief, I always have been and always will be (I know that), until they close the lid of my coffin. But despite all that, there is nothing more beautiful, more pro
found, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous, more perfect than Christ. Moreover, if someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ wasn’t real, I would rather stay with Christ than with the truth.138

  On the day of his release, Fyodor went around the barracks to say his goodbyes. Strong, calloused hands reached out to him. Others held back, eyeing him with undiminished hatred. Then the drum beat, and they went off to work, leaving him behind. Ten minutes later, he was taken to the smithy. One of the prisoners who worked there turned Fyodor around and lifted his foot onto the anvil. The prisoner struck at the iron and the fetters simply fell away. He stared at them. It already seemed hard to believe that they had been on his legs moments ago.

  ‘Well, God be with you!’139 said the prisoners, gruff but pleased.

  Yes, God was with us! Freedom, new life, resurrection from the dead . . . What a glorious moment!140

  Notes

  1 Others describe him as having a grey pallor, grey-blue eyes, little dark red or ‘scrofulous’ spots, and being covered with moles.

  2 Five feet, six and a half inches. His contemporary Baron Wrangel described him as ‘a bit taller than average’, though others described him as shorter than average, possibly owing to his posture. According to Max Roser, the average height for a Russian male in 1850 was five feet, five inches (165 cm).

  3 Kvass is a small beer made from fermented rye bread and considered non-alcoholic in most Slavic countries. Russians had been drinking it for about a thousand years as an alternative to water.

  4 This is the 4,000-km-long river in which Ermak Timofeevich, Cossack conqueror of Siberia, was killed and washed away in a Tatar ambush in 1585.

  FOUR

  The Devil’s Sandbox

  1854–1859

  John 11:44: And the dead man came out.141

  They let him out in Omsk – a nasty little town with hardly any trees.1 Fyodor hadn’t seen or spoken to his brother since Christmas Eve, 1849, and Mikhail was the first person he wrote to, regaling him with the gory details of his imprisonment. In the letter Fyodor asked for money, and a copy of Notes of the Fatherland, and books, and he also wanted to know whether there was any way to arrange a transfer to the Caucasus. But most of all he needed money and books. Why, they are sure to allow me to publish in six years or so, and possibly even before that. Books mean life – they are my food and my future!142

  He was soon posted to the 7th Line Battalion of the Siberian Regiment in Semipalatinsk.2 To cheer me up, people tell me, ‘You’ll meet nothing but simple folk there.’ Yes, but I’m more wary of a simple man than of a complicated one.143 He didn’t relish being a private again – it wasn’t much better than being a prisoner, and on the odd occasion it was worse (once, when he was cleaning out the barracks, a sergeant kicked him in the face). He stood guard at the windows of the local prison or at the army grocery shop, dreaming of life elsewhere. But he soon became acquainted with town society through the commander of the barracks, Belikhov – a friendly, tipsy man who would later shoot himself after embezzling government funds – and his life became a little easier after that.

  Whenever he had time off, he explored the town, a bleak settlement not far from the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility, which consisted of unpainted wooden buildings scattered around the River Irtysh, with seven mosques and a solitary Orthodox church. The place was so dusty that locals called it the Devil’s Sandbox. To the north was a Cossack settlement, to the south a sad desert of Tatars, and in the middle, the fortress. There were about five or six thousand inhabitants including the garrison, and out of those, perhaps ten or fifteen who subscribed even to a single journal. The town shared a piano. The women gossiped; the men drank vodka and played cards. The idea that the same country was at war in the Crimea seemed hopelessly abstract here – they might as well ask what was going on in Hong Kong.

  Fyodor soon received special permission to live in his own quarters, close to the barracks. In the first place I wanted a separate tenement, not a room in other people’s lodgings; secondly, though I could make do with one room, it must be a large one, and, of course, it had at the same time to be as cheap as possible. In a confined space, even thought is cramped.144 He found himself an isolated log house in the middle of a heath. In order to protect it from bandits, there were no windows at the front of the building, only two at the back, facing onto a tall fence. The main room was dim, with a low ceiling and clay walls, but it was big and, crucially, he was alone. It is now almost five years that I have been under guard among a crowd of people, and I never had a single hour alone. To be alone is a normal need, like eating and drinking – otherwise, this forced communism becomes an unbearable torture. It was this that made me suffer most during those four years.145

  In fact, he was not wholly alone – the place was host to a number of cockroaches already. He had rented it from an old widow for five roubles a month, for which he would get cabbage soup sans cockroaches, black bread and porridge; she would do the laundry, and the eldest of her two daughters, a widow at twenty-two, would come around to clean what could be cleaned. Sometimes she would stay after she’d finished the cleaning, sometimes even slip into her negligé, a red sash around her waist. (He had, after all, been in prison a long time.) Out in the town, Fyodor also met a seventeen-year-old girl he became extremely fond of, Elizaveta Nevrotova. He would see her in the marketplace, selling white loaves like the girls who had visited the prison to support their families. He was bound to his service as a private, of course, and she had no education, but he wrote her letters all the same. ‘My beloved Elizaveta – Yesterday, I wanted to see you.’146

  One day in autumn, he received the ominous message that the Public Prosecutor for Civil and Criminal Affairs wanted to see him. Fyodor dressed in his red stand-up collar and grey army greatcoat and went to bite the bullet. He arrived to find a young man of twenty-one who immediately set about apologising for not having called on him in person, and began handing over letters and parcels for him. There was a letter from Maikov, and another from Mikhail, with 50 roubles enclosed, and the prosecutor had underwear and books for him, too. It transpired that this young man, Baron Alexander Wrangel, had been in the crowd at Fyodor’s mock execution and knew all about his situation. While Fyodor was standing there looking through the parcels, the Baron received a letter of his own. Opening it there and then, the Baron read a little, burst into tears, and threw his arms around the surprised private. Fyodor could not resist this sort of emotional honesty, and they became friends then and there.

  The two men would meet often. Fyodor found Wrangel kind, a little proud – but only on the surface and I rather like that147 – impressionable, studious, moderately cultured. What would anger most men only saddened him – the sign of a great heart.148 This was a man who could be trusted, a man with whom one could discuss ideas. (Wrangel was also generous enough to loan him 125 roubles, which didn’t go amiss.) The two men soon took a cottage together and would stay up late into the night, Fyodor drinking tea and pinching a little of Wrangel’s tobacco for his pipe, or going out to swim together in the river. Fyodor would help Wrangel in the garden, wearing a faded rose-coloured jacket, his silver watch chain dangling around his neck. They went out into the steppe on horseback, too, but Fyodor never wrote about the landscape. He felt nothing for the yawning sky, whole clouds roaming across it like a ghostly caravan, the endless carpet of flowers, the double horizon of the earth and the birch trees – he was interested only in people.

  Sometimes the landlady’s daughters would join them for a spot of gardening and he would find himself reciting Pushkin, even singing opera. But these were distractions. He needed to get permission to return to European Russia and he had to begin writing again. That was the most important thing. Life could not continue until he was allowed to publish. I have the strong impression that very soon, any moment now, something decisive is going to happen to me, that I am approaching the critical point in my life, that I have ripened and that something is about to happen, s
omething quiet and bright, perhaps dreadful, certainly inevitable.149

  On 18 February 1855, Tsar Nicholas I died in the Winter Palace, officially of pneumonia, although there were rumours that he had poisoned himself after the humiliating turn of the war in Crimea. When the news reached Semipalatinsk on 12 March, it raised the possibility of an amnesty for Fyodor, particularly since Nicholas’s son, Alexander, was rumoured to be more liberal. Fyodor immediately penned a sycophantic poem dedicated to his dead tormentor, and another to the new Tsar Alexander – the Tsar is dead, long live the Tsar – hoping that these prostrations might set a precedent. But this was not the decisive event.

  One day, his commanding officer, Belikhov, invited him to dinner, where he met Alexander Isaev, a local excise officer who had been struck off a few months earlier for drunkenness. He had depended on his salary for an income, and his young family was now slipping into poverty as local society looked disinterestedly on. He was a curious fellow, passionate and stubborn, honourable and unseemly, civilised in his conversation and yet almost never sober. But it wasn’t him who attracted me, it was his wife.150

  Madame Isaeva had the same Christian name as his mother: Maria. She was terribly thin, quite tall, with a delicate and elegant figure.151 At twenty-eight years old she was pretty, intelligent and cultured, a rare combination in this part of the world. He found her at times playful, and at others extremely volatile. She had that scornful kind of cynicism that is the last refuge of an idealist who has been disappointed too many times by the realities of the world, sick, irritated and embittered by being under-appreciated and misunderstood.152 She was physically frail and given to coughing, like the heroine of a good romantic fable. Fyodor found himself spellbound, as if he were looking in on some warped memory of his own past: Maria the consumptive, put-upon mother, her husband the sometimes violent drunkard, and their son, the seven-year-old Pasha, the awkward little boy looking awkwardly on.