Sensing danger, the government began to clamp down. They started in the universities, which had become much more relaxed in recent years, permitting anyone to attend lectures and even allowing students to set up libraries or publish their own newspapers. The government reimposed fees and imposed other restrictions on the students’ activities that would come into effect in the autumn term. The students were furious at this curtailment of their freedoms. They organised a protest march through the streets, which drew a huge crowd of onlookers, as well as police and soldiers. Although the march remained peaceful, a number of students were arrested and taken to Peter and Paul Fortress. The university, in the meantime, was shut down for a year. As a sign of their good faith, the Dostoevskys cooked up a generous side of beef at Mikhail’s apartment and sent it to the imprisoned students, along with bottles of cognac and red wine, compliments of the editorial board of Time.
Fyodor was becoming quite a hero to the now idle students, male and female, who had devoured his memoirs of prison life and revered him as a symbol of authentic socialist resistance. Fyodor, for his part, wanted to keep them on the straight and narrow. If I can attract them all and group them round myself I shall be saving them from perdition by guiding them into a new outlet for their ambitions.197 One of the students who had made use of her clear schedule to submit to Time was a twenty-one-year-old student called Apollinaria Prokofievna Suslova. Her story, ‘For the Time Being’, was about a young woman who escapes a loveless marriage and gets by on tutoring work. It was a perfect expression of the nascent women’s movement, which fitted nicely into the tenth issue in October 1861. She was very, very good looking, with that Russian beauty so passionately loved by men. She had a full figure, with soft, as it were noiseless movements, softened to a peculiar over-sweetness, like her voice. She was very white in the face, with a pale pink tint on her cheeks. The modelling of her face might be said to be too broad, and the lower jaw was set a trifle forward. But her magnificent, abundant hair and charming grey-blue eyes with their long lashes would have made the most indifferent person, seeing her in the street, stop at the sight of her face and remember it long after.198 Fyodor found himself rather taken with her, particularly as he was trapped in an unfulfilling marriage, which he delicately referred to as ‘my domestic circumstances’. Proud and ambitious, she cultivated the friendship of the great novelist, and before long Fyodor was calling her Polina.
Fyodor gave readings whenever he was invited by various student groups, the largest of which was a fundraiser organised by the Literary Fund. This particular ‘literary-musical evening’ managed to attract some big names: the pianist Anton Rubinstein was going to play Beethoven’s The Ruins of Athens in honour of the Greek revolt against the Turks, and there would be readings by the usual suspects, Nekrasov and Chernyshevsky, as well as an eccentric professor called Pavel Pavlov. On stage, Fyodor recounted the death of a soldier in the prison hospital, revelling in the gory detail. But to the surprise of all present, the unmistakable star of the evening was Professor Pavlov. His lecture, ‘A Thousand Years of Russian History’, had passed the censorship, as it was ostensibly a celebration of the millennium of the Russian nation, but it was not what the professor said so much as the way he said it: trembling and shrieking like the prophet Jeremiah, the history lesson was transformed into a condemnation. I must confess I could not believe my ears.199 As Pavlov worked himself up to fever pitch, the audience rattled their chairs and banged their feet on the floor. The last words could not be heard in the roar of the crowd. One could only see him raise his arm and bring it down again triumphantly.200 He climaxed to uproarious applause and a spontaneous outbreak of the ‘Marseillaise’. (And he was taken away to prison the next day.)
Not long after the fundraiser, Fyodor and Strakhov decided to take advantage of the hot, dry weather to take a steamer out along the Neva into the surrounding countryside for the day. Looking back at St Petersburg receding in their wake, however, they noticed huge clouds of black smoke rising into the air in three or four different places. They soon arrived at a park, where a group of gypsies were singing and playing music, but the fire in the city was clearly catastrophic and any thought of lazing about on the grass seemed absurd in the circumstances, so they got back on the boat. Over the next week, the fire spread across a large part of the city, turning houses and shops into smoke.
A great fire at night is always thrilling. That is what explains the attraction of fireworks. But with those, the artistic regularity and the complete lack of danger give them the playful fizz of champagne. A real conflagration is something else. The horror and the sense of personal danger, together with the exhilaration of the fire, produce in the spectator (though of course not in the person whose things are being burnt) a certain disturbance of the brain and, as it were, a challenge to those destructive instincts which, alas, lie hidden in every heart, even that of the tamest little clerk . . . Of course, the very man who enjoys the spectacle will rush into the fire to save a child or an old woman; but that is another matter.201
There was a grand tradition of arson in Russia. Peasants called it the Red Rooster, and it had always been one of the few effective weapons they had against landowners.5 But this was an indiscriminate fire in the middle of the city, burning down second-hand markets and the housing of the poor. People began blaming it on ‘the professors’. This was not helping to restore the connection between Russia’s intelligentsia and the people – it was turning them against each other.
To make matters worse, Fyodor then discovered an offensive leaflet attached to his doorknob titled Young Russia. The author called for a march on the Winter Palace, for revolution, for the founding of a federated and democratic republic, political franchise for women, the sacking of monasteries and the abolition of marriage. Invoking the ‘great terrorists’ of the French Revolution, the leaflet proclaimed that anyone who was not with them was against them. One line in particular must have struck Fyodor: ‘We shall give one call – “take up axes” – and then we will kill the imperial party without mercy.’ Its contents were quite outrageous, and it was couched in the most ridiculous terms. Their level of education, their mentality, and their utter lack of understanding of reality oppressed me terribly.202
Furious, Fyodor decided to pay his first ever visit to Chernyshevsky’s house that afternoon and to beg him, if necessary, to make the young generation see reason. When Fyodor knocked on the door, it was opened not by the servant but by Chernyshevsky himself, who welcomed him cordially and showed him into his study. Fyodor came straight to the point.
‘Nikolai Gavrilovich, what on earth is this?’203 He handed the proclamation to Chernyshevsky, who read it through, reacting as if he had never seen it before. When he had finished, Chernyshevsky replied with a faint smile, ‘Well, what about it?’
‘Are they really so stupid and ridiculous? Is there really no way of stopping them and putting an end to this abomination?’
‘Do you really think I support them? Or that I could have had a part in writing this wretched leaflet?’
‘Of course not. And I hardly think it necessary to assure you of it. But in any case they must be stopped somehow. Your word means something to them, and of course they’re afraid of what you might say.’
‘But I don’t know any of them,’ Chernyshevsky protested.
‘I’m sure you don’t. But you certainly don’t need to know them or speak to them personally. You only have to declare your condemnation somewhere and they’ll hear about it.’
Chernyshevsky wavered. ‘It may not have any effect. Besides, irrelevancies like this are unavoidable.’
‘But they do harm to everybody and everything.’
Just then, the doorbell rang. Fyodor had said his piece and took this as his cue to leave.6
It had begun to seem as if a gulf had opened up between the socialists of Fyodor’s generation and the youth of the time. The socialists of the 1840s had been idealists and reformers, some of them champagne socialists, it was
true, but also sensible, progressive men. Polina’s generation were of a different sort. Perhaps the only writer who really understood what was going on was Turgenev, whose novel Fathers and Sons had been published in the same month as the fundraiser.7 The novel staged the new generational conflict that had opened up between an older generation of sophisticated but essentially hand-wringing liberal intellectuals whose activism extended to a barbed remark – already immortalised as ‘superfluous men’ – and a young generation who claimed to recognise only science, action, material good. The novel’s hero, if there is one, is really a tragic figure: Bazarov is desperate to believe only in social utility, to be an unfeeling rationalist who discards art and feeling as pointless – a Nihilist, in a word. But he feels deeply in spite of himself. And although Bazarov has lofty thoughts about the Russian people in the abstract, he actively dislikes the actual peasants he meets. This emerging conflict between the rational and the humane, between abstract ideas and lived experience, was to cast a long shadow.
Turgenev certainly got into trouble over his Bazarov, who was restless and troubled (the sign of a great heart) despite all his nihilism.204 Predictably, The Contemporary leapt to the young generation’s defence and tore the book to pieces in their review, claiming that Bazarov was a monstrous caricature and Turgenev no true liberal. Perhaps more worryingly, The Russian Word’s radical chief critic, Dmitri Pisarev, thought Bazarov was an excellent role model, a Satanic anti-hero who was separated from the dumb masses by his ability to step outside the law: ‘Nothing except personal taste prevents him from murdering and robbing’,205 the reviewer wrote with disconcerting relish. Worst of all, the book was taken up enthusiastically by the fusty old reactionaries, who were pleased to see Turgenev complaining about the youth of today. Only Time understood the significance of what Turgenev was trying to say. Fyodor read the book as soon as it came out in Katkov’s Russian Herald and assigned Strakhov to write a glowing review about it. It was a beautiful review – perhaps the only one that really penetrated to the heart of the matter – and when it came out, Turgenev took Strakhov and the brothers Dostoevsky out for dinner at the Hotel Clea to thank them. (On the way there, they bumped into an acquaintance of Turgenev’s, who shouted at him, ‘See what your Nihilists are doing! They’re burning down Petersburg’, as if naming them had suddenly made him responsible for their behaviour.)206 Charting a path between the radical left and the reactionary right was not going to be easy, and Turgenev was grateful to have at least a handful of fellow travellers.
That said, the Time editors were struggling themselves to steer clear of censorship without being derided as weak or even conservative. They wrote an editorial about the fires, pointing out that there was no actual evidence to link them to the Young Russia leaflet, which they dismissed as a schoolboy prank. The censors rejected it. The editors submitted a second article on the topic, which was also rejected. Mikhail, as the editor-in-chief, was then called in for questioning, though it turned out the authorities only wanted to know the names of these schoolboys who had written the leaflet, and Mikhail had to explain that the part about the schoolboys had unfortunately been poetic licence. But the authorities were on the defensive now. On 15 June they suspended publication of The Contemporary and Russian Word until the following spring. Three weeks later, they arrested Chernyshevsky. It’s a foul time now, a time of wearisome and melancholy waiting. But after all, a journal is a terribly important thing; one must not risk losing it, because no matter what happens, journals expressing all shades of contemporary opinion must remain.207
By this time, though, Fyodor’s mind was drifting to thoughts of Europe. St Petersburg’s climate wasn’t good for Maria, so he had shipped her off to an aunt in Vladimir, 180 versts east of Moscow. Now that the journal was beginning to gain a little momentum, Fyodor was determined to go and see a doctor in Paris, Trousseau, who might be able to shed some light on his epilepsy. While he was there, he might as well travel around – he had, after all, never been to Europe. It was only a short journey from Paris to London, and he’d always wanted to see Italy. I’ve dreamed since I was a child of going to Italy!208 Perhaps Strakhov could come too. We’ll see Naples, stroll around Rome, for all I know, caress a young Venetian woman in a gondola.8
However, Fyodor was not nearly as impressed by Europe as he had hoped to be. Paris is an exceedingly boring city, and if it didn’t have a number of quite remarkable things, one could really die from boredom. The French, honest to God, are the kind of people who make one sick. The Frenchman is quiet, honest, polite, but insincere, and money for him is everything. He has no ideals. Don’t ask him for his thoughts, let alone his convictions.209 He went on to London, where he visited the exiled socialist Alexander Herzen, a short, rather stocky man with an enviably thick beard. (At forty, Fyodor’s was only just beginning to grow out.) He was a marvellous conversationalist but although they found common ground they arrived at it from completely different outlooks. Herzen was a born emigré, a gentleman who had no roots in Russian soil, a consummate European, a citizen of the world, you could say, who nevertheless lay claim to patriotic feeling when the mood was right. The conversation was cordial but they were not destined to become close friends.9
It was interesting to see the city of Charles Dickens, but not exactly relaxing.48 On Saturday nights, men, women and children would go out until five in the morning, with the gas jets of the street lamps casting an infernal glow over proceedings. Everyone is in a hurry to get blind drunk.210 He wandered among the prostitutes and the drunks around Haymarket and poked his nose into a casino, where there was music and dancing, but the English never shake off the gloom even in the midst of gaiety; even when they dance they look sullen.211 Back out in the cold, he gave sixpence to a little girl covered in bruises. She could only have been six, perhaps younger. What struck me most was the look of distress, such hopeless despair on her face . . . She kept shaking her tousled head as if arguing about something, gesticulated and spread her little hands and then suddenly clasped them together and then pressed them to her little bare breast.212
Strakhov joined him in Geneva and they travelled down through Turin and Livorno, talking day and night. On one of their walks through Florence, they had their first major falling out over whether two plus two always equals four. Strakhov was an insightful critic and understood literature, but his scientific training sometimes made him infuriatingly logical. While talking about the problem of the radicals, Strakhov insisted that people must be responsible for the consequences of their ideas. It didn’t matter whether they understood the implications or not – if you insist on adding two to two, you get four. But for Dostoevsky, intention mattered greatly. These radicals did not want everything to end badly, they wanted to do good, even if there were mistakes in their working, or some hidden motivation prevented them from coming to the logical conclusion. Fyodor believed as a Christian that even the gravest sinner knew goodness and might be redeemed; Strakhov claimed to believe as a Christian that people on earth were, in some essential way, rotten to the core. Fyodor explained that this was a tendency in Strakhov’s thought that he truly despised and would persecute until his dying day. There wasn’t much left to say after that, so they shook hands and went their separate ways for the remainder of their travels.
On his return to St Petersburg, Fyodor started seeing the student Polina regularly. It turned out that she was the daughter of a serf who had bought his freedom before becoming a merchant, making Polina a living link between the intelligentsia and the soil. It must have seemed an extraordinary stroke of luck that the living embodiment of Fyodor’s ideals happened to be a beautiful and impetuous twenty-two-year-old woman. They started an affair, and before long Polina was working on a new story, ‘Before the Wedding’. She asked Fyodor to divorce Maria, but that was out of the question. He might be desperately unhappy in the relationship, but he would not give up his obligations to her, or to her stepson. The weather was better in Vladimir, but the fact of the matter was that M
aria was dying of consumption, and might not even live out the next year. Fyodor was falling in love with Polina, but he could not abandon his wife in such circumstances.
Fyodor published an account of his travels through Europe under the title Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, and the lovers talked about going there together. Polina had always wanted to see Paris. Perhaps they could go to Baden-Baden and have a flutter at roulette. And Italy, too – how nice it would be to wander around the old piazze hand in hand with a lover rather than bickering with a friend. He would send on money for Maria’s doctor and Pasha’s tutor, whenever another payment came through from sales of Time. Polina went ahead to Paris in late spring and Fyodor began to tie up a few loose ends that were keeping him in St Petersburg. But just as he was preparing to leave, on 24 May 1863, the dreadful news came through that Time had been suppressed by the censors.
Notes
1 None of the civic buildings were allowed to be taller than the cornice of the Winter Palace (30 metres), meaning that, at over 100 metres, the cathedral was over three times as tall as any of the surrounding buildings.
2 The word in Russian is Pochvennichestvo (Почвенничество).
3 A remarkably insightful critic, Strakhov would be the first to understand the huge significance of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
4 At one meeting, Yanovsky had to turn her portrait around to stop his patient staring at her. Dostoevsky found the gesture so amusing that he wrote to tell her about it and later fictionalised it in The Idiot.
5 We have to take Andrei Dostoevsky’s word for it that the fire at Darovoe in their childhood was the result of a hog roast on a windy day.
6 Chernyshevsky recalled the same meeting differently, claiming that Dostoevsky asked him to do something about the fires, and that he had agreed so as not to upset a man who was mentally deranged. See ‘My meetings with Dostoevsky’ by N. G. Chernyshevsky, quoted in Sekirin, pp. 161–2.
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