Dostoevsky in Love

by Alex Christofi

  Fyodor offered himself as a tutor to Pasha, a smart but distracted young boy who took no interest in his studies, and befriended husband and wife as if he were a well-wisher, taking any opportunity to lecture Isaev while he got to know Maria better. The better he knew her, the more convinced he was that he loved her, and that she loved him in return. He finally had an answer to the inscription on his mother’s locket: ‘The feeling of love fills up my heart; when will you feel it, for your part?’3 What might his mother have thought of her second son if she had known that he would first fall in love in his mid-thirties, as an army private in Siberia, and with a married woman?

  Against the expectations of everyone who knew him, Isaev actually managed to find another job. It was a humiliating demotion to assessor, but it was work all the same. The snag was that the job was in Kuznetsk,4 more than 700 versts deeper into Siberia, which meant that Fyodor would have to say goodbye to Maria, possibly for ever. ‘You see, she has agreed to go, she didn’t protest. That is what is so galling,’153 Fyodor explained to Wrangel.

  On the day the Isaevs were due to leave, Fyodor invited them over to say farewell before seeing them off. Wrangel dutifully topped up Isaev’s champagne glass until he was insensible, whereupon they lumped him in Wrangel’s carriage; Fyodor got into a second carriage with Maria so that they might have some privacy. It was a clear, moonlit night. They stopped at the forest on the outskirts of town, where the lovers wept and embraced. Then Fyodor and Wrangel picked up Isaev, transferred him to Maria’s carriage, said their goodbyes, and the horses started up.

  Fyodor stood rooted to the spot, tears rolling down his cheeks. He could see the carriage disappearing down the forest path; next he could only hear it; then it was gone. Gently, Wrangel took his hand and he came to, as if waking from a long sleep, and got in the carriage without a word. Back at his lodgings, he paced silently back and forth in his soft shoes, as was his habit, while the sun came up. Suffering and pain are always mandatory for broad minds and deep hearts. Truly great people, it seems to me, should feel great sadness on this earth.154

  For two weeks now, I’ve been so sad that I don’t know what to do with myself.155 He moped around the town like a lovesick teenager, waiting for the coachman to come from Kuznetsk in the hope of receiving a letter. He went over to the Isaevs’ old apartment and took their potted ivy into his care; the dog greeted him enthusiastically but wouldn’t leave the house. He wrote to Maria, but the letter only reminded him of the distance between them. Come twilight, when he would normally have paid a visit to the Isaevs, he was desolate. My heart has always been that way – it latches onto the things that are dear to it, and when the time comes for me to tear it away, it bleeds.156

  When he had nothing else to do, he wrote reminiscences about his time in prison. He had been composing in his head during the whole of his incarceration, seething with ideas. He had been aching to get it all down on paper, but then he had met Maria, and – I couldn’t write. Something long overdue had finally happened, carried me away and absorbed me. I was happy, I couldn’t work.157 Now that she had left, he was miserable, but at least he could write again. He was even working on a comic novel, The Village of Stepanchikovo, about a passive-aggressive middle-aged pseudo-intellectual who begins meddling in an unsuspecting family’s affairs. He was also catching up on a five-year reading backlog. Turgenev had collected his first batch of stories together in 1852, A Sportsman’s Sketches, which had propelled him to fame. I like Turgenev best. It is a shame, however, that with all his immense talent he is so uneven. I like Lev Tolstoy very much, too, although I don’t think he will write much. (Still, I may be wrong.)5

  Try as he might to distract himself, he was desperate to see Maria. He hatched a plan to meet her in Zmiev, 150 versts from Semipalatinsk. He would claim to his superiors that he was sick, and Maria would have to come up with her own excuse to get away from Isaev. Fyodor arranged a sick note from a sympathetic doctor and set out with borrowed horses for Zmiev, a day’s ride away. When he got there he didn’t find Maria. Instead, she had sent a note saying that she could not be there as her circumstances had changed. Wearily, he got back into his carriage and rode all day home again. Then, in August 1855, she wrote to inform him that her husband had died. So she was left with a child in a far-flung, savage district in hopeless beggary.6 Fyodor had wanted to be with Maria before, but now what he wanted might also be seen, given her circumstances, as chivalrous. He sent her his last 25 roubles, along with a proposal of marriage, and waited for the coachman to ride hundreds of versts to Kuznetsk, and for her reply to be ridden back again through the snow a week later. In her reply, she declined; she could not marry a private.

  Fyodor felt the distance between them keenly, and his attempt to make sure Maria didn’t forget him had all the subtlety of a debutant. He wrote to tell her about all the parties he had been attending for Shrovetide, throwing in mention of the local ladies he had been dancing with. It backfired spectacularly. Maria replied that she felt tortured by the thought that her only friend was already forgetting her. Worse still, before he could formulate a reply she wrote again, asking for his advice as a friend: what if a nice old man in a secure position wanted to marry her instead?

  Fyodor wept all night. I barely understand how I go on living. The joy of love is great, but its sufferings are so intense that it would be much better never to love at all.158 He became fixated by the idea that he was now living out the exact plot of his own novel, Poor Folk. The beautiful, abandoned young woman and the poor, devoted older man who loved her as dearly as his own life, but who could not provide for her; the young woman whisked away from him by a richer man she didn’t even love. Fyodor replied to the letter threatening to kill himself and begging her not to commit herself yet. I have never lived through such despair – a deadly anguish is tugging at my heart; at night I have horrible dreams; I cry out in my sleep; I am choked by spasms in my throat; and my tears are either stubbornly dammed up or gush out . . . Come what may, I just cannot give her up. At my age, love is no whim.159

  This was his first true love and, having no basis for comparison, he held nothing back, but pinned his self-esteem to the relationship. There was no apparent alternative, no possibility of criticism. The first person to truly see someone in this way holds over them the possibility of taking away their mirror; the lover is scared to lose the object of their love, yes, but more scared that if they leave, they will lose sight of themselves. The fact that such a relationship has never come before raises the horrifying possibility that it might never come again, that this might be the only love, the one true love spoken of so often in art. So the artistically inclined are prone to falling for the narrative convenience of a single, predestined love, and to chasing it in terror. The pleasure and the suffering are inextricable. In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.160

  Maria wouldn’t marry Fyodor until he had money – but he couldn’t get money without first obtaining permission to publish his work, or at the very least, a promotion to the rank of officer. Meanwhile, the townspeople of Kuznetsk were plotting against him, flinging marriage proposals at Maria, wearing her down, tormenting her with her own hopelessness. She wrote that she loved him more than anything, but here she was entertaining a proposal from another. Worst of all, Mikhail, who had always been Fyodor’s closest confidant, had barely written to him at all since he had been released. He wrote Mikhail another long letter telling him everything, but without much hope of a reply. ‘My brother, can it be that you have changed towards me? How cold you are, you don’t want to write, once in seven months you send some money and a letter of three lines. Just like charity. I don’t want charity without a brother! Don’t insult me! My friend! I’m so unhappy!’

  In her next reply, Maria appeared comforted by Fyodor’s misery. This was the answer she had been looking for: he hadn’t forgotten her. And yet she also wrote, ‘We have suffered too much,
have been too unfortunate, to dream of marriage.’ Her instinct for melodrama chimed perfectly with Fyodor’s desire to live one out. He hatched a more audacious plan than the trip to Zmiev: he would go all the way to see her. With Belikhov’s help, he was assigned to guard the delivery of a wagonload of ropes to Barnaul, which would take him most of the way. From there, he continued on without permission to Kuznetsk.

  When he arrived, Maria began to cry. Her lips faintly quivered, as though she wanted to utter something, some greeting to me, but she said nothing. My heart ached as I looked at those pale, hollow cheeks, feverishly parted lips, and eyes that gleamed under long, dark lashes with feverish fire. But my God, how lovely she was!161 He quickly learned that Maria had met a twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher named Nikolai Borisovich Vergunov and planned to marry him, despite his income being as pitiful as Fyodor’s. That struck Fyodor as a very bad idea, and he told her all the reasons why – well, about a tenth of it.162 He stayed for two days, swallowing the feeling that he had been humiliated and insulted, and meeting with both Maria and Vergunov himself. He had fair hair, large, soft, dreamy blue eyes, in which there were occasional flashes of the most spontaneous, childish gaiety. He was weak, confiding and faint-hearted; he had no will whatever. He had at most one virtue, a good heart, positively a dangerous possession with his other failings.7 Fyodor tried instead to dissuade the two of them from entering into such an unequal marriage, pointing out in a brotherly way that Vergunov didn’t have any money and was going to ruin her for the sake of his own happiness (imagine, he was offended).163 When he realised that haranguing them was only pushing her and Vergunov closer together, he changed tack. Fyodor talked to Vergunov on his own, and in the end they even became close. He cried, but that’s all he knows how to do.164 Maria responded well to Fyodor’s more dignified bearing towards the end of the trip and, before he took his leave, she told him, ‘Don’t cry, don’t be sad – not everything is decided yet.’165

  Knowing that his rival would be right beside her and he far away, and seeing that she might marry Vergunov anyway, Fyodor swallowed his pride. I felt that I might be mistaken in my conclusions about him if only from the fact that he was my enemy.166 Deciding to live up to his own high ideals and perform a true act of love, Fyodor wrote to Wrangel asking him to pull a few strings to see if he could get Vergunov promoted, so that the newlyweds might have a better life. This is all for her, for her alone, if only so that she won’t be impoverished.167 A cynic might judge that, having noted how his selfishness had repelled her, Fyodor had decided to risk everything on a grand gesture. Whatever the motivation for helping his rival, it impressed Maria greatly, and Fyodor held out hope that she might put off the marriage to Vergunov until he could obtain his own promotion.

  On 30 October 1856 – not a moment too soon – he received his commission as a second lieutenant. He obtained permission for fifteen days off from Belikhov and rushed to see Maria. She is all that matters in my life. I think of nothing else. All I want is to see her, to hear her voice. I am an unhappy madman. This kind of love is a disease.168 On his arrival, he was struck by how ill she looked. Her hair was still beautiful, but her cheeks were red and blotchy. Her lips were crusted, her breathing uneven and broken. Her eyes had a feverish gleam, but their gaze was sharp and still, and her consumptive, distressed face made a painful impression.169 He explained everything about his situation to her, honestly and frankly, his new position as an officer and his hopes to be allowed to publish imminently, and asked whether she would be his wife. This time she said yes.

  Fyodor borrowed 650 roubles from a local captain of engineers attached to one of the nearby mining operations, and another 600 from his uncle to set them up. The ceremony was held on 6 February 1857, with the local police chief and his wife acting as the bride’s parents. In a Russian wedding, it was traditional for the bride to be washed while her party sang, for her maiden’s braid to be taken out, and plaited again as two braids, but perhaps Maria decided to forego this ritual for her second marriage. At the wedding itself, Nikolai Vergunov was in attendance – he was by all accounts a simpleton, but still one whose unfeigned kindness extended to celebrating the wedding of his erstwhile fiancée to his rival. At thirty-five years old, it might finally have seemed that Fyodor was starting a new life in which he could approach happiness. But he made a lot of predictions, and not all of them came true.

  As they stopped in Barnaul that night, Fyodor had his first full epileptic fit. He’d had fits before, but had been reluctant to call his condition by its name, and in the past his doctors had assured him that they were simply nervous fits. This one was of a different order.

  It began as a flash of light. Suddenly he felt his whole body seized with tension. The sense of life, the consciousness of self, were multiplied ten times during that lightning strike. My mind and heart were flooded with extraordinary light; all my unease, my doubts, my anxieties were submerged in a lofty calm, full of serene harmony, joy and hope. But this moment, this flash, was only a prelude to that final second when the fit began. That second was, of course, unendurable.170

  Thinking of that flash of beauty later, as he nursed his crumpled body, he would try to tell himself that it was nothing but a disease, an interruption of health. And yet, in spite of himself, he felt the opposite. Up to then he hadn’t suspected such a feeling could exist, a feeling of completeness, of proportion, of reconciliation – an ecstasy, even. It is not earthly – I don’t mean that it’s heavenly, but that an earthly creature cannot endure it. He must be physically changed or die.171 Language was too weak to express it. It was not as though the experience had made him hallucinate, or even distort his reason, as you might expect from hashish, opium or wine. It was rather an extraordinary quickening of consciousness – not merely understanding that he was alive, but feeling the life course through the tips of him like electricity. At that second, that is at the very last conscious moment before the fit, I had time to say to myself clearly and consciously, ‘Yes, for this moment one might give one’s whole life!’172 He thought it was, perhaps, the same moment that existed for the epileptic Mohammed, when Allah showed him all the heavens and returned him to earth in the time it took for a drop of water to fall from his pitcher. And yet Maria only saw her husband fall to the ground, gnashing his teeth, his body pulsing to an imperceptible rhythm, wracked into unholy forms.

  It scared my wife to death and filled me with sadness and depression.173 The learned doctor told him that, in spite of the other advice he’d been given, Fyodor had real epilepsy and could expect to suffocate during any one of the fits as a result of his throat closing. Given that he might have a fit at any time, sometimes several in a month, and that there was no known cure or prevention, it seemed likely that this was how he would die. It could happen in a month or in a year, or in ten – there was no way of knowing. I begged him to tell me the whole truth, on his honour. He advised me to beware of the new moon.174

  The marriage never really recovered after that first night. The black cat has run between us.8 Maria, by some accounts, felt she had been duped into marrying an invalid (she must have whispered it hoarsely from her own sickbed). Although her soul overflows with the noblest sentiments, she is fiery and irritable, and quick to slap you down. It’s her eyes that scare me . . . Yes, her eyes. The red blotches on her cheeks scare me too, not to mention her breathing. Have you seen how people breathe with this sickness, when they’re all worked up?175 Almost as soon as they were married, Fyodor had stopped mentioning her in his letters, or if he did, it was as an afterthought, a single sentence tacked onto pages of entreaties for money or news about a change in his situation.

  Say you’ve come to cherish a certain dream: you’ve been enchanted by an idea, a theory, a conviction, or, well, a woman. You rush off in pursuit of love with all the intensity your soul can muster. But no matter how well your heart bribes you, if it is founded on a delusion, something you exaggerated and distorted because of your initial rush of feeling – solely
to have an idol you can bow down to – then, of course, you know it deep down; doubt weighs on your mind and prevents you from living peaceably.176 It was a miserable time for Fyodor, having finally grasped what he had been chasing for three years, only to find that it didn’t make him happy. It seems to me that I’ve already experienced everything on earth and there is nothing left to strive for.177 After all, Christopher Columbus was happiest not when he reached America, but when he was still discovering it; life was what mattered, not the discovery itself but the process of discovering.178 Perhaps, when it came to it, he had valued the chase more than the object. We shall have to work out our future happiness by suffering; pay for it somehow by fresh miseries. Everything is purified by suffering.179

  He finally received permission to publish again and scrabbled to complete the various ideas that had been bubbling away for years. I’m trying to write a novel but it’s difficult – I can’t get on. I daresay I could knock it off somehow, and it might turn out interesting, but it’s a pity to spoil a good idea. I’ve even thought of ditching the novel and knocking off a short story, something light and graceful without a trace of pessimism.180 And so first he turned his hand to two comic tales, Uncle’s Dream and The Village of Stepanchikovo, parts of which had been gestating even in prison.9 He continued making notes on his time in Omsk, as well, and was considering writing the first great prison novel. But what excited him most was The Insulted and Injured, a novel inspired partly by the desperate love triangle that he had been caught up in with Maria and Vergunov. The story concerned a good man, a novelist, who was hopelessly in love with a destitute but beautiful young woman who had fallen into a doomed relationship with a kind imbecile (the imbecile was in love with someone else, too, which technically made it a love quadrangle). The mere mechanical exercise of writing counts for something. It will soothe me, cool me, arouse anew in me my old literary habits, will turn my memories and sick dreams into work, into occupation.181