Fyodor had almost given up on hearing from his brother when he received a letter containing a very interesting proposal. Mikhail had been in industry for some time and now owned a cigarette factory, but what he really wanted to do was to start a new literary journal. With Tsar Alexander having declared an intention to ease censorship, and the expectation of liberal reforms to come, it was now almost the explicit job of the intelligentsia to suggest ways that society could be improved. Suddenly everyone was publishing articles about politics, about different models of society, and especially about the emancipation of the serfs. If they had their own journal, the brothers Dostoevsky could publish exactly what they wanted, within reason – political articles, stories, serial novels. To flag their intention for the journal to address the zeitgeist, they would call it Time.10 It might even turn a neat profit if they could attract a healthy number of subscribers.
The whole year of 1859 was spent in anticipation. In March, Fyodor was formally discharged from the army on account of his haemorrhoids and his epilepsy. It was the outcome he had been hoping for, but it also meant that he now relied entirely on his writing income and on new loans to pay back his old ones. Uncle’s Dream was published in the journal Russian Word, where he read an intriguing article ‘From the Notes of a Gambler’, which recounted the exploits of a young man who had won and lost huge sums at the roulette table in Europe. It described a certain class of more discerning gamblers who, by keeping cool under pressure, were able to earn a good living at roulette. How different life would be if Fyodor had a large sum of money to hand – perhaps, one day, he would be allowed a passport.
Although he received a copy of the journal issue containing Uncle’s Dream, he heard no word from Mikhail about the critical reception. Instead, his brother wrote to him that he had fallen ill. I visualised so graphically that he might suddenly die and that I should never see him again.182 Luckily, Fyodor was finally given permission to live anywhere except in the two capitals of Moscow and St Petersburg. Of all places, he chose Tver, the small town where he had watched the government courier lashing out at the horses. There, at least, he would be close enough for Mikhail to visit him. Better still, Fyodor, Maria and her son Pasha would finally have escaped Siberia, where they had suffered so much.
Fyodor had two fits on the journey, and the prices in some of the stopping places were literally extortionate since travellers had no option but to pay. Still, considering that it was a journey of 3,500 versts, it passed without incident. The weather was wonderful, and there weren’t any problems with the carriage or the horses the whole way. One evening at around five o’clock, as they wound between the foothills of the Urals, through the woods, they came upon the boundary between Asia and Europe. They decided to stop for a moment to mark the occasion. There was a little hut there, and an army pensioner came out to greet them. Fyodor stepped out of the carriage and crossed himself. They took out a flask covered in woven straw, and drank a toast of orange-blossom brandy with the old man, then went to pick wild strawberries. The world was coming back to life.
They passed through the forests of Perm and Vyatka. On they went, through Kazan, Nizhny, Vladimir. When they arrived at last in Tver, they found a furnished apartment of three small rooms and began to get acquainted with a town they both hoped to leave quickly. I keep up our friendships myself; Maria doesn’t want to do so, since we have no place to entertain.183 She wasn’t a pessimist at heart, but a disappointed optimist; having lived a sheltered life, she had the habit of thinking everyone better than they really were, and it was hard on her now to see the world as it was. But she could be spiteful, too: during one argument, she shouted at him, ‘There isn’t a woman living who can love an ex-convict!’11 To all who met her, when she agreed to see anyone at all, she appeared as a woman living on without knowing why.
Tver made no better an impression on Fyodor now than it had when he was a teenager. Bleak, cold houses of stone, no activity, nothing of interest, not even a decent library. A real prison!184 But Mikhail was soon well enough to travel and, on the night of his arrival, Fyodor went to pick his brother up at the station three versts away. The train arrived at three in the morning. Almost ten years after embracing on a snowy Christmas Eve in Peter and Paul Fortress, the brothers Dostoevsky were reunited again. But too soon, it was time for Mikhail to return to St Petersburg, and Fyodor wasn’t permitted to follow him there.
Now free to roam anywhere in the Russian Empire except where he wanted to go, Fyodor decided to take matters into his own hands and write to the Tsar himself:
Your Majesty,
Please allow me to come to St Petersburg to consult with doctors who live in the capital. Please, resurrect me, allow me the possibility of improving my health, so that I can be useful to my family and maybe, to some extent, to my fatherland.185
Ironically, this delayed his permission. The Third Section had already made the internal decision to grant permission for Dostoevsky to live in the capital, but when he wrote to the Tsar, the bureaucracy waited to make their decision official in case it was countermanded by the Tsar himself. Still, in November 1859, the former convict and retired officer Fyodor Dostoevsky finally received permission to return to St Petersburg and to resume his literary career in earnest.
One life is over and another is begun, then that one is over – and another begins, and so on, endlessly. All the ends are snipped off as if with scissors.186
Notes
1 Letter to Mikhail, 22 February 1854. Perhaps the most representative thing you can say about modern-day Omsk is that it has a metro system with only one station.
2 Now Semey in Kazakhstan, it was founded as a fort town near a ruined Buddhist monastery. The surrounding steppe is so remote and featureless that it was used as a nuclear testing ground by the Soviets.
3 My translation from the French: ‘J’ai le cœur tout plein d’amour; quand l’aurais-vous à votre tour?’
4 Now Novokuznetsk.
5 Letter to Maikov, 18 January 1856. Unusually, the name Lev (meaning Lion) was localised by Tolstoy’s authorised translators, first in French as Léon, and then in English as Leo by Constance Garnett, with whom the writer was friendly. Why Tolstoy should have been dubbed Leo when Dostoevsky was never Theodore may be a historical accident, but it seems telling that Fyodor remained stubbornly Russian.
6 Crime and Punishment, p. 21. Maria was actually in contact with her father, who had sent her 300 roubles from Astrakhan.
7 The Insulted and Injured, pp. 39–40, 95. In general, Fyodor believed that a good heart was all that anyone needed – ‘one may err in ideas, but the heart cannot err’ (Letter to Maikov, 16 January 1856) – but he was willing to make an exception for his rival.
8 The Insulted and Injured, p. 184. Or to put it more cynically: such a wild, outrageous love is like a fit, like a deadly noose, like an illness, and as soon as it is gratified, the scales fall from the eyes, and the opposite feeling comes – loathing and hatred, the desire to strangle, to crush. (The Adolescent, p. 336)
9 When Nekrasov read The Village of Stepanchikovo, his response was that ‘Dostoevsky is finished. He will no longer write anything important.’
10 Vremya (Вре́мя) in Russian. They beat the American Time magazine to the punch by sixty-three years. Vremya is now the name of the main evening newscast in Russia.
11 Slonim, p. 162. Fyodor’s daughter Lyubov wrote about Maria in her memoirs, but with such extraneous and easily disproven detail that the account is considered unreliable. Lyubov suggests that Maria never gave up Vergunov but spent the night before the wedding with him, and that he followed them to Europe, holding midnight trysts with Maria along the way.
FIVE
Young Russia
1860–1862
St Petersburg had changed since Fyodor had last seen it. Down at the bottom of Nevsky Prospect was the new Nevsky Bridge – the first proper bridge to span the Neva, which also made it the longest bridge in Europe. Near the other end of Nevsky Prospect
was the largest cathedral that Fyodor had ever seen. They had been building St Isaac’s Cathedral since before he was born, and now that it was finally complete, it towered over the city.1 Facing it, only a hundred paces from the apartment where he had been arrested, stood a newly erected bronze statue of Tsar Nicholas I, his tormentor, who had personally orchestrated his mock execution.
Fyodor walked on to the river. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the water was almost blue, a great rarity on the normally black Neva. The cathedral’s dome stood out better here, on the bridge, than in any other spot. Through the pure air, its every decoration was discernible.187 This was the precise spot where he had once stood, looking out at the magnificent panorama, and his life as an artist had begun. It seemed outlandish and bizarre, as if I really imagined that now I might think the same old thoughts as before, take an interest in the same old subjects. It was almost funny, yet my chest felt so tight it hurt.188
It was imperative that he re-establish himself on the literary scene. Since censorship had eased up, there had been a great flowering of political writing. At the reactionary end, there was Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov’s Russian Herald, which was conservative and Slavophile – that is, it rejected the idea that Russia had anything much to learn from Europeans. At the radical, Westernising end was Nekrasov’s journal The Contemporary, the chief critic of which, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, had recently emerged as the de facto leader of a new generation of socialists, publishing earnest articles on such burning questions as ‘Are Women Human?’ Chernyshevsky and his band of so-called ‘rational egoists’ were emerging as the most popular new intellectual movement of the decade, particularly among the youth. Fyodor was happy to argue with all of them at length. I’m extremely ill-tempered, but not always, just at times. That’s what consoles me.189
The brothers Dostoevsky staked out their own place amid the cacophony by plotting a middle way, as they saw it, between the radicals and the reactionaries – progressive, but also proudly Russian. They called their new movement ‘back to the soil’,2 and their journal, Time, was to be its lodestar. In one of the first editorials, Fyodor wrote about the importance of bridging the gulf between the common people and the educated classes. ‘We foresee the Russian idea perhaps becoming the synthesis of all those ideas which Europe is developing with such persistence and such courage within its separate nationalities, and everything that is hostile to those ideas, perhaps, becoming reconciled and receiving further development in the Russian national spirit.’190
Guided by his brother’s connections, Fyodor began to go to the poet Alexander Miliukov’s house on Tuesday evenings, where they scouted for sympathetic collaborators. The first of their editorial staff, Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev, had unkempt hair and a fluffy goatee. He was handsome but unusual looking, too, his grey eyes set unusually far apart like a prey animal. At social occasions, he might sometimes be found in a red silk peasant’s smock, strumming a guitar. He had a Romantic disposition, which gave him the sort of intense grandeur that Fyodor never quite pulled off. A sympathetic sort of Slavophile, he had already written about the importance of the soil in the decade that Fyodor had been in exile, converging out of conviction on the same conclusions Fyodor had only formed in uncomfortably intimate contact with the Russian people.
The second major contributor to Time was more head than heart. Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov was a philosopher and scientist, a teacher of mathematics, physics and natural history, who would go on to defend a thesis ‘on the bones of the wrist of mammals’ (though a professorship would elude him). A little younger than Grigoriev, he had recently been arguing against the ethical dangers of materialism.3 He and Fyodor held a magnetic intellectual rapport – Strakhov’s political views were already very similar to Fyodor’s, and the two of them could talk for hours. They would sit next to each other to work, go on excursions, and made plans to travel abroad together. Fyodor did not even mind seeing Strakhov in the immediate aftermath of a seizure, when he usually refused all company.
Time’s offices were at Mikhail’s apartment on the Ekaterininsky Canal (known to locals as The Ditch), where washerwomen would do their best to scrub clothes in the fetid water. It was a poor, dilapidated area of the city close to Haymarket Square. Gloomy, three-storey houses had squatted there since the eighteenth century with thick walls and gratings on the little ground-floor windows. Inside and out, the houses are somehow inhospitable and frigid – they seem to be keeping something dark and hidden – and why it seems so merely from the look would be hard to explain.191 In Fyodor’s own little hovel nearby, he established an anti-social routine, calculated to avoid interruptions from Maria or his stepson Pasha. I don’t yet know what will come of it, but I’m determined to work ceaselessly without taking time out to look up from my work.192 It would begin at midnight, when the rest of the city had gone to bed. Fyodor would sit up with his samovar, drinking tea and writing through the night. Then he would sleep through the morning and wake up in time for the magazine’s editorial meeting at three in the afternoon. After business was concluded, the brothers Dostoevsky might have dinner or go along for tea with Strakhov and his friends. When he saw Maria at all, it was to discuss practical matters; she kept up no pretence of being in love. I reckon there’s no love in the world in which two people love each other as equals.193
Having published the first part of his prison memoir, Notes from the House of the Dead, in Russian World to immediate acclaim, he brought the remainder of the book over to Time with the aim of luring the many readers who were waiting for the next exclusive instalment. There simply wasn’t anything like it in Russian literature, and Time needed the subscribers. Simultaneously, he finished The Insulted and Injured, which he knew would complete his rehabilitation as a great writer. I could barely stand upright, but my heart was filled with joy, infinite joy. My novel was finished. Freedom and money!194 But the stress of the work also made him ill, and he couldn’t keep up with the pace. In the spring he had a serious epileptic fit, after which he was unconscious for three days. As he recovered, Fyodor saw enemies everywhere he looked. He had alienated his old friend and doctor, Stepan Yanovsky, by writing long, intimate letters to his wife suggesting that they separate.4 Nekrasov was up to his old tricks, writing mocking couplets about him in The Whistle. When the printing press broke down as they were preparing to go to press with their next issue, Fyodor was sure it was an act of sabotage by Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky and the others. Such things happen, but not just as a new issue is about to be published! Just before we renew our annual subscriptions! This is somehow connected with The Contemporary – I am sure it is!195
Although they were making a loss for now, the brothers Dostoevsky were building subscribers. In 1861 the magazine published salacious stories of French murders, highlighting the dark side of the human soul, and three stories by a new American writer named Edgar Allen Poe: ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Devil in the Belfry’ and ‘The Black Cat’. (The slightly unhinged air of Poe’s narrators must have appealed to Fyodor.) The next year, the brothers would toe their way up to the line of censorship by publishing a work on minor social protest movements in Russia, as well as a translation of another American work called The White Slave by Richard Hildreth – but by that time, the Tsar had made his long-anticipated declaration that serfdom was to be abolished.
The Emancipation Manifesto was finalised and signed by the Tsar on 19 February 1861 but, sensing that it might go down better at a time when the supply of alcohol was restricted, the authorities put off the announcement until after Lent had begun – specifically 5 March, Forgiveness Sunday. Ironically, emancipation was the very issue over which Dostoevsky had spent a third of his life suffering. Almost immediately on his return from Siberia, it was being declared that agitating for the liberation of the serfs was not a crime, but simply good sense. Well then, the legislators of humanity were criminals to a man, if for no other reason than that, by introducing a new law, they violated the old one.196
Meanwhile, as intellectuals acclimatised to the young Tsar’s glasnost, seditious pamphlets began to circulate in St Petersburg. First there was The Great Russian, which argued for a national assembly to help bring the Tsar into contact with his people – an incremental change. But it was followed by a much angrier, more radical pamphlet, To the Young Generation, which had all the hallmarks of Chernyshevsky’s gang. The pamphlet argued that the Tsar had created a new order in which he was surplus to requirements, and demanded an elected, salaried leader! This added to a growing instinct at the Winter Palace that any further move towards liberalisation would be taken taken as a sign of weakness.
Dostoevsky in Love Page 9