7 Literally translated, the original title is Fathers and Children, but the novel contains no significant daughters and Fathers and Sons has a better cadence. You could not have the same semantic mirroring in Russian without unbalancing the sound – it would be Otsy y synovya instead of Otsy y deti – and Turgenev is too elegant for that.
8 Letter to Strakhov, 26 June (8 July) 1862. Strakhov, a confirmed bachelor, later recalled the Dostoevsky brothers’ attitudes to flings with a little less fondness: they ‘regarded with utter calm all irregularities of that sort, spoke of them as of amusing trivialities, to yield to which at a leisure moment was fully permissible. Physical indecency was considered nothing at all. This strange emancipation of the flesh acted as a temptation and in certain cases led to consequences it is painful to recall.’ (Slonim, p. 114)
9 If Fyodor noticed the officers of the Third Section watching him as he left, he never told anyone.
10 Incidentally, a recent suggestion that Dostoevsky and Dickens met during this week turned out to be a hoax by Arnold Harvey (aka Stephanie Harvey aka Graham Headley aka Trevor McGovern aka John Schellenberger aka Leo Bellingham aka Michael Lindsay aka Ludovico Parra), a melancholy independent historian who had never secured academic tenure. (‘When Dickens Met Dostoevsky’, TLS, 10 April 2013; cf. ‘The Man behind the Great Dickens and Dostoevsky Hoax’, Guardian, 10 July 2013)
SIX
Polina 1863
It was August by the time Fyodor left for Paris, two months later than he had intended. The train station in St Petersburg was pandemonium: apart from the usual customs officers, police, hotel touts and cab men, there were soldiers everywhere, and even some of the travellers were carrying pistols in case things got out of hand. As he settled into his cabin and the train passed through Poland on the way to the border with Germany, everything appeared calm, though soldiers were on duty at every station. There were insurgents at large, hiding in the villages and woodlands.
The recent nationalist uprising in Poland had been the very subject of Strakhov’s article, ‘The Fateful Question’, which had been intended as a patriotic defence of Russian interests but which was written in such a roundabout way that he’d got the journal banned.1 Mikhail was now on the brink of ruin. Having taken on debts in order to put out advertisements and build a subscriber base, the brothers were now unable to print the magazine that would earn their money back. Fyodor had already written to Turgenev to politely beg that he hold off publishing a new story until they could sort everything out with the authorities. In the meantime, he had set about rustling up the money to make the trip to join Polina in Paris. Eventually he obtained a loan of 1,500 roubles from the Society for Aid to Needy Writers and Scholars, possibly helped along by the fact that he was on its Executive Committee, with a gentleman’s agreement to hand over his copyrights if he hadn’t repaid the loan by the following February (but of course no one ever enforced those sorts of terms).
Fyodor mislaid another 12 days on the train between St Petersburg and Wiesbaden, since the rest of Europe had now adopted the Gregorian calendar.2 Stopping at Wiesbaden for the night, he went out to the casino for a flutter. Amazingly, he made good money, and kept going, and held his nerve, and by the end of the night he had won 10,400 francs. He took them back to the hotel, locked them in his suitcase and decided to leave the next morning. But on further consideration, it did seem a peculiar idea to stop while he was doing so well. If he could win 100,000 roubles, he would cure his money troubles for ever. He quietly believed that he had worked out a foolproof system for winning, and this success seemed to have borne it out. (I really do know the secret: it is terribly silly and simple and consists of restraining oneself at every moment, at every phase of the game, and of not losing one’s head.)3 The real issue, as he saw it, was that everyone lost control and abandoned the system – watching the little white ball race around the wheel and begin to lose pace and veer off its course, over and over, even a cold fish like Strakhov would crack eventually.
Four days later, Fyodor was still in Wiesbaden. He had lost half his money, but he was still up by 5,000 francs. He sent money home, some for his brother, and some for Maria for her doctor’s bills. After that, he really did have to leave: Polina was waiting for him and he was now months late for their rendezvous. He packed his things and took the next train bound for Paris. What a marvellous thing, to be on the way to see one’s lover with a suitcase full of money. And he really did feel that the doctors were better in Europe.
He arrived in a warm, rainy city on Tuesday 26 August. I like Paris this time because of its exterior, that is, its architecture. The Louvre is a superb thing, and all that embankment, right up to Notre Dame, is amazing.213 There was a coffee house he liked where they had Russian newspapers, but first he wanted to see Polina.
She had told him to write to her before visiting – an oddly formal request considering that they were lovers – so he dashed off a quick message to her. But he was too impatient to wait for the reply, so he set off on the heels of the courier.
When he arrived at her lodgings, he was shown into the reception room. She took a long time coming down, and Fyodor’s excitement gave way to tension. When Polina did finally appear, she looked pale and anxious.4
‘How are you?’ she asked nervously.214
This was not quite the hero’s welcome Fyodor had anticipated.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked uneasily.
‘I thought you weren’t going to come. I wrote you a letter.’
‘What letter?’ he asked.
‘To stop you coming here.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is too late.’
Fyodor hung his head. Too late. Everything always goes right for some people, while with others nothing ever comes off.215
‘I must know everything,’ he began after a long, heavy silence. She suggested they go to his lodgings, where they might speak in private. She took up her hat and mantilla, and they got into the carriage that was waiting for Fyodor outside. They sat in silence as the carriage rattled through the streets. Neither of them looked at the other.
‘Vite, vite!’ Fyodor shouted at the driver, who appeared puzzled by the request.
Fyodor held her hand and pressed it hard, his body convulsing with sudden and unexpected grief.
‘Calm down – I am with you,’ she said.
Coming into the hotel, Fyodor gave her his arm. The doorman started to grin when he saw Polina, but quickly changed his mind when he saw their faces.
In the room, Fyodor fell at her feet crying, clasping her knees.
‘I have lost you. I knew it!’
She managed to coax him onto the sofa, where she explained that, while she had been waiting for him, she had met a Spanish medical student named Salvador, and had fallen in love. Fyodor really did want to know everything: when they had met, whether she had slept with him yet, whether she was happy. As he had learned, intelligence gathering was the first step towards shifting the power dynamic in a love triangle. It sounded like it could be worse: this Salvador didn’t seem like a serious person, though he couldn’t possibly be as wet as Nikolai Vergunov. Not only that, but Salvador did not reciprocate her love, so in a way, she and Fyodor were in the same boat, siblings in misery.
The thought came to him now, as it always did when he was on the verge of despair, that an experience like this would make wonderful material for a story. Ever since he had been sent to Siberia, storytelling had been his last refuge, the skin that kept distance between his tender heart and the cruelties of the world. He urged Polina to write him letters, particularly when she was especially happy or unhappy, and suggested that they might still go to Italy together, not as lovers but as brother and sister. Before she left, she promised to see him again the next day. Polina had presented him with the end of a story, but Fyodor could see that only a few judicious edits were required to turn it into the beginning of another.
After she had left, he picked up the reply
she had sent him, which had crossed paths with him earlier that day. It began abruptly, even flippantly: ‘You are coming a little too late.’216 That stung, of course. But the important thing was to get her away from Paris. Once they were travelling together, the way would become clear.
The next time Polina visited Fyodor, they stayed up late talking. She was completely infatuated with Salvador, and could barely be induced to talk about anything else. When he was not seeing Polina, Fyodor wandered the streets. I don’t like Paris, although it’s all terribly magnificent. There are a lot of things to see in it; but after you’ve looked around, an awful boredom sets in. Actually, the best things here are the fruit and the wine: one doesn’t tire of them.217 Knowing no one else in the city, he dined alone, wrote a letter to his sister-in-law, and went to bed.
He was awoken at 7 a. m. by a banging at his door. Getting up blearily from bed, he opened the door to find Polina standing there distraught. She hadn’t slept all night.5 They went inside and he got back in bed, wrapping himself up in the blanket.
She told him everything and asked for his advice. Salvador’s friend had written to Polina to say that Salvador couldn’t see her because he had typhus. She had written to Salvador immediately, and then again the next day. She invited the friend to visit her, but he didn’t reply either. Sick of waiting around in case he should write or call on her, she decided to go for a walk along the rue de la Sorbonne at about 6 p.m. It was there that she bumped into Salvador, who looked perfectly healthy if a little embarrassed. Back in her room, she screamed that she was going to kill him and then set about burning any of her letters and notebooks that might compromise her reputation. Even now she appeared capable of violence, and Fyodor warned her not to do anything stupid.
‘I would not like to kill him,’ she conceded, ‘but I would like to torture him for a very long time.’218
‘Enough,’ he said. ‘He isn’t worth it. Really he ought to be exterminated with insect powder, but you would be foolish to ruin your life over him.’
Polina enjoyed saying such things for effect, but at the same time she sometimes expressed herself with such darkness and violence that he began to wonder what she was capable of. One day, as they were looking up together at the chapel of Saint-Étienne du Mont, behind the Panthéon, she told him that she had been to confession there – that she had confessed to a truly evil desire. The revelation was particularly disturbing to Fyodor, for whom Catholicism represented a kind of Antichrist, a worldly simulacrum of the true Church, leading its sheep astray.
‘What is it? To kill Salvador?’219 he asked.
‘No, not him.’
‘Who then? Me?’
‘Oh no, not you,’ she said indifferently. ‘I tell you it is a grand and extraordinary plan.’
He pushed her to tell him more and her eyes burned with hatred.
‘What difference does it make which man pays for the outrage that has been perpetrated against me? You are all guilty. All of you have betrayal and carnality on your consciences.6 So if vengeance is to be wreaked, let the whole world hear of it. Let the revenge be without precedent!’
‘Do you really think you could kill a man?’ he asked her.
‘Without a qualm.’
‘Whom?’
She looked at him almost with contempt.
‘Haven’t you guessed? The Tsar.’
This was Fyodor’s worst nightmare. Could Polina, who represented a living link between the peasantry and the intelligentsia, really have succumbed to the Nihilists? How could a true Russian such as her want to destroy the Russian state? Did she not understand anything he had told her?
‘Promise me you will never again even harbour such a thought,’ he said to her.
She seemed suddenly very tired.
‘No, I have already given up the idea.’
They talked more and he kept probing, asking questions, teasing out her thoughts and the way she thought. When he was sure that she really had given up the idea, he asked how she had conceived of such a thing.
‘It is a fascinating thought,’ she said dreamily. ‘Such an enormous step, but so simple. Imagine, one gesture, one movement, and you are among the celebrities, the geniuses, the great, the saviours of mankind.’
‘Fame is won by hard work,’ he assured her glumly.
‘Or by unprecedented daring,’ she shot back.
It seemed that neither of them much wanted to stay in Paris anymore. Polina insisted on writing to Salvador again to send payment for a medical consultation he had given her when they had first met, but inevitably she didn’t receive a reply, and so she resolved to go abroad with Fyodor.7
Fyodor suggested they stop off quickly in Baden-Baden for a few spins of roulette, before travelling on to Italy via Geneva. The two of them went along to the Holy Father’s embassy to get their visas for the trip, where they were met by a sour-faced little abbot who told them to wait. As they sat reading magazines, someone else swept straight through into the monsignor’s office and the abbot didn’t stop him – in fact, he bowed.
‘We need to obtain our visa,’ repeated Fyodor.220
‘Wait please,’ said the abbot in an icy tone.
They waited. A little while later, an Austrian chap came in and was led straight upstairs. Polina looked ironically at Fyodor. Fyodor got up and went over to the abbot.
‘Look, since the monsignor is taking callers, he might as well take care of my visa.’
The abbot was taken aback. Measuring Fyodor from head to toe, he bellowed: ‘Do you really expect the monsignor to abandon his coffee for you?’
Fyodor bellowed even louder: ‘I spit in your monsignor’s coffee! If you don’t get our visa this minute I’m going in there myself.’
‘What! With the cardinal in the room?’ cried the little abbot, rushing to the door and spreading his arms like a martyr to bar the way.
‘I am a heretic! A barbarian!’ Fyodor declared. ‘I don’t care if he is the cardinal.’
The abbot glared at Fyodor with infinite malice, strode over and snatched up the passports, disappearing upstairs. A minute later and, voila – they had their visas.
He had, of course, made a scene for the benefit of Polina, to amuse her. Perhaps there wouldn’t have been any schoolboy pranks if it hadn’t been for her. I don’t understand – I simply don’t understand – what I find in her. All right: she is beautiful, or she seems beautiful. She drives men out of their minds. She is tall and slender. In fact, very slim; she looks as though you could tie her in a knot or fold her in half. Her foot is long and narrow. Tormenting. Exactly so: tormenting.221 Sitting together on the train, he came clean and told her that he still harboured some hope for their relationship. She smiled but said nothing.
At Baden-Baden they had a little trouble finding a hotel with two adjoining rooms, but Fyodor was in a buoyant mood. He had been talking in verse the whole way there, and when they asked him to sign the guest register he put himself down as Officer. The town itself was an absurd place, really. There was a pavilion where an orchestra played a jumble of European and Russian songs. First it would be a medley from La Traviata, then a waltz by Strauss, then an instrumental version of the Russian song ‘Tell her’. There was a particular tree where all the Russians had a habit of gathering – it was known locally as ‘the Russian tree’. Opposite was Weber’s coffee house, and then, of course, the casino, where Fyodor played a little roulette, trying to hold to his system, waiting for his luck to return.
They sat together in her room, that evening, talking on the bed. They had tea brought in around ten, and she asked him to sit close to her, and held his hand. Fyodor told her that he felt good, sitting with her like this. She apologised for her behaviour in Paris, and explained that it wasn’t because she hadn’t been thinking of him. He was almost overcome.
On impulse, he shot to his feet but immediately tripped over her shoe, which was lying on the floor, and sat down again, embarrassed.
‘Going somewhere?’ she asked.222
‘I was just going to shut the window.’
‘You can shut it if you want to.’
‘No . . . You don’t know what just happened to me.’
‘What do you mean?’
How could he explain?
‘Well, I was going to kiss your foot.’
‘Ah – why that?’ she replied, tucking her feet up beneath her.
‘I had a sudden urge, and thought I would kiss it.’
They kept talking after that, but the atmosphere had curdled. She asked whether the maid might be coming in soon to clear up the tea; he said that the maid would leave them alone now until the morning. He looked at her; she hid her face in her pillow.
‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Go back to your room – I want to sleep.’
‘Right away,’ he said. He stood there for some moments, watching her, then went over and kissed her. He suggested that she should undress before her candle ran down; she said she had a spare. Eventually he got tired of playing cat and mouse and went to his room, leaving the door open in case she should change her mind. He lay listening to her getting comfortable among the bedsheets. He went in one last time – to close the window.
‘You should get undressed,’ he said.
‘I will,’ she said.
He left again, and came back again, and she sent him out again. This time, he closed the door on his way out.
The next day, Fyodor apologised for his behaviour and explained that he had been drunk.8 He said she must find it unpleasant, the way he was badgering her. Polina smiled knowingly and said she didn’t mind. She doesn’t bother to hide her aversion from me, but she also doesn’t conceal from me either the fact that she is saving me for some future use. She knows that I am madly in love with her and actually allows me to speak of my passion; surely there is no better way to show her contempt for me than to allow me to speak freely of my love?223
At first, the luck appeared to have followed Fyodor from Wiesbaden. On his arrival, he had walked straight up to the roulette table and won 600 francs in a quarter of an hour. That fired me up.224 He started to believe that his system might solve all of his money troubles, even Mikhail’s too. But then it went the other way: Suddenly I started losing and could no longer restrain myself and lost my shirt. Chasing the losses, he stacked up and staked and lost 3,000 francs.9 All he had left in his pocket now was about 250 francs. As if this was not humiliating enough, it meant that he now had to write to his sister-in-law and ask her to return some of the money that he had sent on for Maria. He wrote to Mikhail, too, begging for 100 roubles to tide him over.
Dostoevsky in Love Page 11