Mikhail had been keen that Fyodor visit Turgenev while he was in town to rustle up the manuscript of ‘Phantoms’, which would draw new subscribers, so Fyodor dutifully went over to visit. He didn’t, of course, introduce Turgenev to Polina – though even if the two had met, Turgenev could hardly have judged, since he was in a ménage à trois with the French opera singer Pauline Viardot and her husband, an arrangement that had produced four children of uncertain provenance. Turgenev was still grieving over the reception of Fathers and Sons, though he handed over ‘Phantoms’. Fyodor spent the rest of his time in Baden gambling and chasing Polina, which left very little time for reading. When he saw Turgenev again, Fyodor returned the manuscript to him unread. Offended, Turgenev said that he had written it for the Dostoevskys’ journal, and offered to send it on to him in Rome. Fyodor demurred.
Before leaving Baden-Baden, he was determined to redeem himself at the roulette table. He made steady, serious gains, and within half an hour of play he had turned 80 francs into 700. It was such luck, such extraordinary luck, and it carried him away: he went all in. He lost everything he had brought with him, and everything he had won. After paying their bills, he and Polina had just 120 francs left for the road. Blessed are they who do not gamble and who abhor the roulette table as a monumental folly.225
In Geneva, Fyodor pawned his watch with an unusually honest pawnbroker who even refused to charge interest, though he gave them a pittance. Polina pawned her ring, too. In Turin, they checked into a hotel without knowing how they would pay the bill. With almost no money physically in hand, they opted to eat at the hotel restaurant and charge it to their room, but Polina attracted unwanted attention everywhere. Fyodor began to dread that the manager would bring the hotel bill while the two of them didn’t have a copeck to their name. There would be a scandal, the police would be called – that was how things were done here.
Polina had been in a foul mood since the incident in Baden-Baden, but she seemed to soften towards him now. A woman is capable of torturing a man with her cruelty and mockery without the faintest twinge of conscience, because she’ll think every time she looks at you: ‘I’m tormenting him to death now, but I’ll make up for it with my love, later.’226 They sat together talking intimately, and his joy only seemed to make her more tender. She gazed up into his eyes.
‘There is that familiar look,’ Fyodor said. ‘It’s a long time since I saw it last.’227
She laid her head on his chest, and began to cry.
They waited three days in Turin for some word from Mikhail or his sister-in-law or indeed anyone else who might feel like bailing them out. When the reply came from Mikhail, he had sent enough money, but he was furious that Fyodor had been so rude to the one writer who was offering to help save their journal. ‘Do you know what Turgenev means for us now?’228 Mikhail wrote.
They arrived in Rome late on the night of 28 September. Polina was still stringing him along, but Fyodor was beginning to lose his patience. If she found my love offensive, why didn’t she simply forbid me to mention it? I was not forbidden; in fact, there were times when she prompted me to talk. She liked to listen to me and work me up until I was so excited it actually hurt – then send me reeling with a display of utter contempt.229
‘You know,’ he said, ‘if you torture a man this long, he will eventually stop trying.’230
She only smiled. Fyodor had had enough. He told her that he knew exactly what was happening, that she still held out hope for Salvador. At this, her whole demeanour changed. He probed at her weak spot.
‘You are not objecting.’
After a sullen silence, she replied, ‘I have no reason for hope.’
‘That doesn’t matter. You may know it rationally, but it won’t stop you trying.’
She had nothing to say to that, so Fyodor left her there and went to his own bed for a while. There were moments (especially at the end of our conversations) when I would have given my life to strangle her! If I’d had the chance to bury a sharp knife slowly in her breast, I probably would have reached for it with relish. And yet, if she had told me to throw myself off a cliff, I would have done it at once, and with pleasure.10 When he went back to her room, he found her lying in bed, undressed. He tried his best to put on a brave face, but this only seemed to annoy her.
‘I don’t like you like this,’ she said to him.231
‘What have I done?’ he asked.
‘I liked you much better in Paris and Turin. Why are you so cheerful?’
‘It’s a cheerfulness born of disappointment,’ he said. The time for playing games was over. ‘I am unhappy,’ he told her seriously. ‘I look at everything as though it were my duty, as though I were learning a lesson. I had thought at least that I would manage to distract you.’
She embraced him, then, and told him he had done a lot for her. But she still didn’t invite him to stay with her, even though they were alone together on her bed at one in the morning. Like that empress of antiquity who would undress before her slave because she did not consider him a man.232 It was time for him to go.
‘It’s humiliating for me to leave you like this,’ he said, ‘for the Russians never retreat.’
The next day, they went to see the Vatican, the great enemy of Orthodoxy, as Fyodor saw it, and it sent a shiver down his spine. The day after that, they looked around the Colosseum and the great fallen stones of the Forum. Fyodor still didn’t write to Turgenev for the manuscript. In the giddy rush of unsatisfied lust and gambling, it had been impossible either to read or to write, though he did have a story idea brewing about a young Russian at large in Europe. The main point is that all his lifeblood, energies, violence, boldness have been squandered on roulette.233 There was probably enough for thirty pages, maybe more.
They took the boat for the last leg of their journey together, where they bumped into Alexander Herzen and his family. It was all perfectly amicable. Fyodor introduced Polina as a distant relative. Any lingering intimacy had already begun to fade. You look at the sunrise, the Gulf of Naples, the sea, and you can’t help feeling sad. No, you’re better off in the motherland.234
They bickered a bit, but parted ways on good terms. And that was it. Fyodor was going home to Russia, travelling back into a long October. He said goodbye to Polina in Berlin and set off towards Vladimir to see Maria. Somewhere in between, he tried to cheer himself up by playing roulette. He lost everything, so Polina pawned her watch and sent him enough money to get back to his dying wife.
Notes
1 One of the prominent Polish nationalists was Apollo Korzeniowski, a magazine publisher, campaigner against serfdom, and translator of both Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, who had just been sentenced to exile in Vologda, northeast of Moscow. He brought with him his wife and their five-year-old son, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who would later write in English as Joseph Conrad.
2 Passengers had to change at some point anyway, because Russian trains ran on a wider gauge of track than German trains. Apocryphally this was either intended to forestall an invasion, or because the Tsar simply wanted his trains to be bigger.
3 Letter to Varvara Constant, 20 August (1 September) 1863. There actually exists a strategy, known as ‘martingale’, which is mathematically infallible but requires high stakes for low wins. The method consists of betting the table minimum on either red or black; if you lose, you double your bet, which will cover the previous loss, and so on until you regain your initial loss(es). You stand a 48.65 per cent chance of winning the table minimum at European roulette, but the cost of covering consecutive losses mounts exponentially, so a prudent casino will take the low probability of your catastrophic loss (when you run out of money) over the high probability of your making meagre gains. In this light, even writing begins to look like a reliable way to earn a living.
4 Later, Polina would write a highly autobiographical and self-regarding story about their meetings, ‘The Stranger and her Lover’. Before she opens her mouth at this first meeting,
the heroine exudes beauty, anxiety, mental suffering, embarrassment, shyness, unconquerable strength and passion, gentleness and kindness, giving ‘an impression of fanaticism which distinguishes the faces of madonnas and Christian martyrs’.
5 According to Polina’s story, ‘She removed her veil, and he shuddered at the sight of her face. It was deathly pale and severe, the lips pressed together, the eyes looking straight ahead, but with an expression of horror and madness.’
6 Fyodor had once quoted Balzac at Polina to the effect that even a philosopher must go on a wild orgy once a month; perhaps not the right tone to strike with a young idealist.
7 ‘Her eyelashes were closed, her arms firmly crossed upon her breast, her black hair sprayed across her pillow in long tangled strands. Her face bore a strange expression: that of calm acquired at the price of long suffering; an expression of the infinite.’
8 This is the only time Dostoevsky ever claimed to have been drunk.
9 A twenty-franc gold ‘Napoleon’ in 1863 contained 5.806 grams of gold, equivalent to about £183 today. So 3,000 francs would have represented about £27,500, not accounting for differences in purchasing power.
10 The Gambler, Terras, p. 14, Garnett, p. 319. The qualities of limerence that Dostoevsky expresses in The Gambler are textbook: obsession and intrusive thoughts; loneliness and fear of rejection; hypervigilance; dramatic surges between joy and despair.
SEVEN
Epoch’s End 1864–1866
Stuck in Moscow, Fyodor worked furiously on a new novella to help resurrect the journal. Notes from the Underground was a howl of spite in response to a novel that Chernyshevsky had published from prison, What Is to Be Done?, which, despite being utterly turgid, had made a great impression on the young radicals. It was almost incredible that the censors had allowed the book to be published – raising the interesting question of whether any of them had actually managed to wade through it. The novel was premised entirely on the idea that, if people truly understood what was in their self-interest, everyone would behave themselves and this would quickly fix the whole world. Fyodor heaped scorn upon the idea. Have man’s advantages been reckoned up with complete certainty?235 And how do these sages know that man wants a rationally advantageous choice?236 Shower upon him every earthly blessing, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cake and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play some nasty trick on you.237
Chernyshevsky understood nothing about the perversity of the human soul. But Fyodor knew what lengths a person would go to in order to prove they were free to make their own choices. Chernyshevsky believed that rational egoism would save people, when the precise opposite was true: the pursuit of rational self-interest was the very thing holding society back from salvation. The goal of life was to escape the ego and to love others as oneself, even if Christ was the only one who had ever achieved that on earth. In Notes from the Underground, Fyodor conceived a pure ego, a basement dweller, an underground man, to show the rational egoists what they were really working towards.
‘I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an ugly man,’ he spat onto the page.1 Further down: ‘To live longer than forty years is bad manners.’ The manuscript was littered with these aphorisms. ‘I am told the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and that with my small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg . . . But I am not going away!’ ‘To be too conscious is an illness.’ ‘I have always considered myself cleverer than everyone around me, and sometimes I have been positively ashamed of it.’ ‘Another time, twice, in fact, I tried hard to be in love.’ ‘All my life I have not been able to begin or to finish anything. What is to be done if the sole vocation of every intelligent man is to babble, to pour water through a sieve?’238 What is to be done, indeed?
With Time suppressed, Mikhail and Fyodor applied for a licence to publish under a new title, Epoch.2 Katkov, who was an influential conservative as editor-in-chief of The Russian Herald, put in a good word for them with a sympathetic editorial about Strakhov’s banned article. They had a good piece lined up about the slums of St Petersburg, and Turgenev’s story ‘Phantoms’, which he had ended up sending straight to St Petersburg, was guaranteed to draw an audience (though in my opinion it’s full of rubbish; there’s something morbid and senile about it).239 Polina had sent in a good story, too. But when the first issues of Epoch were published containing Notes from the Underground, the critical silence was deafening.
Maria was growing weaker by the day. Her face was skeletal, and the sweat stood out on her brow and temples.240 They were alone together now; Maria had sent Pasha back to St Petersburg and didn’t want to see him until she was ready to bless him on her deathbed. It was just as well – the boy was useless – but every time Fyodor brought up the possibility of sending for Pasha, she took it as a statement that she was about to die and wept uncontrollably. Why should I torment her in what may well be her final hours?241
It is horrible to watch a person die of tuberculosis – the blood gushes up and chokes you, about a pint of it242 – but it must have been particularly nightmarish for Fyodor, as if he were being forced to watch his mother die all over again, this time from the body of the husband. The only saving grace was that he wasn’t a drunk like his father, like Isaev, though he was hardly a picture of health; he had a terrible bladder infection3 and his fits weren’t going away. We sat side by side, sad and broken, as if we’d been washed up after a storm, alone on a lonely shore. How strange: I suddenly found it hard and painful to be loved so much.243
It became clear that Maria was in her final hours. Her breathing was hoarse and laboured; a kind of gurgle seemed to come from her throat.244 In the end, she managed to say goodbye and even asked to make peace with Mikhail, whom she had been convinced for some time was plotting against her. Fyodor sent a letter to Mikhail to ask him to get Pasha dark mourning clothes. At seven o’clock on the evening of 15 April 1864 she died.
In spite of the fact that we were so unhappy together (because of her strange, suspicious character and morbid imagination) we could not stop loving one another; the more unhappy we were, the more we clung to one another. Strange as it may seem, that’s how it was. She was the most honest, noble and generous woman I have ever known. When she died, although I had suffered a whole year watching her die, I never realised the pain and emptiness I would feel when they covered her over with earth.245
As soon as Maria was buried, Fyodor rushed to St Petersburg to see Mikhail, who was suffering with some sort of liver infection. He’d had it for about two years, but it had grown worse since Time was censored and, with all the added stress of the new journal, he was struggling. Soon after Fyodor arrived, they heard that another article had been blocked by the censors. Mikhail collapsed. His body began to reject anything new; he was vomiting and also had diarrhoea. He tried to keep working, but the doctor told him in no uncertain terms that he was not to exert himself or leave the house. He started to feel better, but only for a day: the doctor explained that he had blood poisoning. He fell into a gentle sleep on the evening of Thursday 9 July, and never woke up.
I won’t try to tell you how much I have lost with him. That man loved me more than anyone in the world, more even than his wife and children. My life has been shattered in a single year. These two were everything to me.246 Fyodor found himself alone in the world, again.
My entire life broken in two. In the half I have left behind is everything I lived for, and in the other, still-unknown half, everything is strange and new, and there is not a single heart that could replace those two . . . Literally, I have nothing left to live for.247
When I have money, I shall become a highly original man. What’s most debased and hateful about money is that even talent can be bought with it, and will be, till the end of the world.248 Mikhail had died with only 300 roubles to his name, which barely covered the funeral, and in fact the situation was far
worse than that, because he had accrued a staggering 25,000 roubles in debt.4 Mikhail’s wife and children were destitute and in danger of ending up on the street. I was the widow’s only hope; she clung to me with her children and begged me to save her. I had loved my brother passionately. How could I abandon them?249
Fyodor came up with a plan: he would take on the entirety of Mikhail’s debt himself. He wrote to his wealthy aunt asking to borrow 10,000 roubles to keep the hungriest wolves at bay. Epoch was his only hope of making back the rest of the money, but working alone, it took him until August to produce the June issue. The subscribers began to complain. He worked twenty hours a day to keep Epoch afloat. All he did was edit, read the proofs, negotiate with the contributors, deal with the finances and logistics, sometimes until six o’clock in the morning. He had a new novel idea tapping away in his head, like a chick in its egg, but no one could produce their best work against the clock, purely to service debts. Something demanded to be resolved at once, but it could neither be grasped nor put into words. As if everything were being wound into a ball.250
He walked the streets alone, past people eating fine meals at Dussots, shopping at Gostiny Dvor, or taking hot-air balloon rides in the Yusupov Gardens. He ventured further into the stinking intestine of the city where he lived: the Ekaterininsky Canal, clogged with coal dust and building works; the stale waft of basement drinking dens; Finnish pedlars and decrepit cabs; Haymarket Square, with its flea market ringed by tables of young radicals, plotting to set up utopian communes over their sixth or seventh vodka. It was as if I somehow felt better there, more isolated.251 On the corner of Konnyi Lane, there was Malinnik, an establishment set up over three floors and dedicated to worldly pleasures, starting tame and working towards depravity as you went further up, like a mockery of Dante’s Paradiso. The first two floors were a bar and restaurant, but the third was a warren of thirteen rooms, separated by wooden partitions, each occupied by five or six young women who charged no more than 50 copecks for their services. I suddenly and vividly realised the idea – revolting as a spider – of vice, which, without love, grossly and shamelessly begins where true love is consummated.252 It was impossible not to feel sorry for them, sitting around in such squalor, with only a dirty towel around their hips.
Dostoevsky in Love Page 12