Dostoevsky in Love

by Alex Christofi

  I want to get married. It doesn’t do me much credit, though – rushing off to get married with a wife barely in the grave. What’s more, I’m bound to make the wrong choice – we’ll both be miserable and only make good people laugh.253 It was true that he would be married again soon, but he was wrong about one thing: his new wife, a twenty-year-old named Anna, would make him happier than he’d ever been before.

  As the anniversary of Maria’s death came around in the spring of 1865, Fyodor found himself intervening in a rather sordid relationship between one of the contributors to Epoch, Peter Gorsky, and a fallen woman called Martha Brown, whom Fyodor had offered some translating work when it turned out she was destitute. Gorsky had been abusive towards her and, following a particularly bad row, Martha ended up staying in Peter and Paul Hospital rather than going back to him. Fyodor provided a shoulder to cry on and listened to her, assuring her that he didn’t judge her, and they even found a private arrangement between the two of them for a month or two.254 But it was clear it couldn’t last. What Fyodor needed was to meet an eligible young woman without complications.

  The magazine struggled on, Fyodor sifting the chaff of the submissions pile. He was sent one particularly good story by a young woman named Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, and wrote to her to say that he would be delighted to publish it. She followed up immediately with a second story, better than the first, about a young man named Mikhail, brought up in a monastery by his uncle, who was a monk. Fyodor was quite taken with the setting – it was exactly the sort of character he might have written himself. Anna was the unmarried daughter of an elderly general, and had smuggled the stories out without her family’s knowledge. She lived in the middle of nowhere, near the border with Poland, but Fyodor soon got a note inviting him to visit the family next time they were in St Petersburg.

  On his first visit, Anna barely said a word, flanked as she was by her mother, her sister and two elderly Russo-German aunts for the excruciating half an hour that Fyodor spent there before making his excuses. Have you noticed that, whenever two intelligent people who don’t yet know each other all that well but, as it were, respect one another, come together, they are quite incapable, for at least half an hour, of finding a single topic of conversation?255 His mistake had been to give the matriarch advance notice to encamp the troops. Five days later, he sprang an ambush, turning up at the house without warning. To his great delight, only the two daughters were home. He and Anna quickly fell to chatting with the intimacy of old friends, which, in a certain sense, they were – for what else is a story but an invitation into the private rooms of a person’s mind? By the time Madame Korvin-Krukovskaya came home, the two were getting on so well that it seemed only fair to ask him to stay for dinner.

  Fyodor began an informal courtship, stopping to visit two or three times a week and chatting with the women of the household over tea. He was so immersed in these conversations that he fell into his old trap of forgetting his audience. It is not enough to grow fond of people, came the painful rebuke from his youth, one must possess the art of making people fond of you. On one visit, he revealed to them an idea he had once had for the perfect plot twist. Picture a man who, at the age of forty, has everything. A family man, a landlord, a collector of fine art. He wakes up in his beautiful house, the sunlight beaming in to wake him from peaceful rest. As he casts a contented eye over his furnishings, he has a vivid, jarring flashback: one evening after a party twenty years ago, egged on by his friends, he had raped a ten-year-old girl. Needless to say, Madame Korvin-Krukovskaya was deeply shocked and began to reconsider the influence that this forty-three-year-old man might be having on her daughters.

  The courtship was becoming more serious even as it was going awry. Invited to a party which turned out to be full of stuck-up Russo-Germans, Fyodor conceived a furious jealousy for one of the young officers, convincing himself that Anna would be married off against her will and causing a scene. Anna stopped treating him as an inviolable authority and began to voice her dissent, particularly when he railed against the Nihilism of young people.

  ‘The whole generation is stupid and backward,’256 he said to her seriously during one argument. ‘They would rather have shiny boots than Pushkin!’

  Anna’s response was perfectly calculated to wind him up.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Pushkin is outdated.’

  Anna was not nearly as pliant as Fyodor had assumed, but this only made his courting more fervent. He was attracted to people instinctually, almost magnetically, long before he knew whether they might be good for him, or even whether they would be able to remain civil with one another, and he reacted to any sign that the object of his affections was slipping away by making increasingly wild and grand gestures to recapture the tantalising prospect of intimacy.5

  Matters came to a head one evening as Anna’s sister Sofia was nearly finished butchering Dostoevsky’s favourite sonata, Beethoven’s Pathétique. The two slipped off alone to a small dining room curtained off from the lobby. They sat together on a love seat, with only the light of a small shaded lamp to bring their faces aglow. Even in the lamplight, Fyodor looked pale, but he was double her age, after all. He held her hands in his and whispered to her passionately.

  ‘My darling Anna Vasilievna, please understand me. I fell in love with you from the moment I saw you. I even had this feeling before we met, from your letters. I do not treat you as a friend, but I love you with all my heart, with passion.’257 He was building up to a proposal.

  Just then, there was the clatter of a chair in the next room, and they looked up to see the curtain swinging. Sofia had been listening to everything.

  April 1865 was a cruel month. Anna turned down his proposal and left St Petersburg. Then he received a letter from Polina’s sister accusing him of ‘treating himself to other people’s sufferings and tears’, which was a bit rich coming from her. She is a sick egoist. I love her even now, very much, but I already wish I didn’t. I feel sorry for her because I can see that she will always be unhappy. A person who demands everything but won’t take any responsibility will never find happiness.258 She had been offended that he had dared to express his unhappiness and now she wanted to punish him further. Fine, don’t love me, but don’t torture me either. Worse still, despite his best efforts, the number of subscribers to Epoch had been falling steadily and the only option was to close the magazine. It was madness to think he might pay off all his debt, but if perhaps he could get a book advance, he might pay off his most aggressive creditors and stay just shy of bankruptcy. I must obtain at least three thousand roubles – though I don’t know how. All I know is that if I do not get them I shall be ruined. Yet still I cannot help thinking that great things in life await me. Isn’t that curious? I must have the resilience of a cat!259

  He decided to make a start on his new novel idea, a psychological account of a crime.260 The protagonist would be a student who couldn’t afford his university fees, but who believed himself truly great. This figure, Raskolnikov, believed like Napoleon that laws and morals were for other people. Turgenev’s Bazarov had been praised as an authentic new Russian archetype, but Bazarov was only a wannabe Nihilist, an intellectual who was really all talk. Fyodor’s main character, Raskolnikov, would make the perilous leap from words to deeds. The crime would come early, and the punishment late;6 the real subject was the battle for Raskolnikov’s soul, and by extension the soul of the young generation. Kicked out of university, living in a garret, behind on his rent and half-starved, Raskolnikov would see an opportunity: an old hag who hoarded money. To kill her and redistribute the wealth would be morally permissible, if you followed the cold moral calculus of the rational egoists and the revolutionaries, with their calls to ‘take up axes’. A fantastical, dark deed, a modern deed, a deed of our time, when the heart of man has clouded over; when there’s talk of renewal through bloodshed.261 Did any of them really understand what they were arguing for? Did they know what it was like to take an axe and to swing it down into a
person’s skull?

  On the night of 29 June 1865 the Neva rose so high that it threatened to drown the inhabitants of basements across the city. The rats would swim up to street level as people’s worthless possessions floated around in the wind and the rain. The government fired shots from its cannon at the Admiralty and Peter and Paul Fortress as a warning to the residents: something was about to burst, to overflow. Perhaps Fyodor heard them, or perhaps they merely disturbed his dreams.

  My dreams are always so strange, no two the same – I can’t begin to describe them.262 But how is it that you can always reason away the obvious absurdities and impossibilities overflowing in every dream? And why, too, when you wake up and return to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something unexplained behind? You laugh at the absurdities of your dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven with those absurdities some thought lies hidden, a real thought, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart.263

  Opening the notebook where he had been jotting down ideas for the new novel, he wrote, ‘My first personal insult: the horse, the courier.’264

  Stranded without an income while he began Crime and Punishment, Fyodor wanted to borrow more money from the Literary Fund, but there had been some slight unpleasantness about the fact that he was also on the executive committee and therefore pretty much granting himself loans. Someone had recently made an official complaint at a meeting, and faced with this attack on his character, Fyodor had done the dignified thing and handed in his resignation on 9 May 1865.

  Less than a month later, he applied to the Literary Fund for a loan to pay off one of his other loans. He had sunk the 10,000 roubles from his aunt, which was effectively his inheritance, into the journal before it folded, and he was now being sued for the debts owing to two creditors – Demis the paper supplier and Gavrilov the printer – who were threatening to have him put in a debtors’ prison. They even sent round a police officer to bully him (though they had a friendly exchange, and Fyodor ended up quizzing him about police procedures for the new novel). Whatever money he could get would have to go straight to the creditors, leaving him nothing to live on. With few alternatives available, Fyodor committed himself to the worst publishing deal of all time.

  About a year before, he had been approached by a publisher, Fyodor Timofeevich Stellovsky, a rather nasty man and a thoroughly incompetent publisher.265 Stellovsky would stalk impecunious writers like an endurance hunter running down a wounded beast. In 1861, for instance, he had bought the right to publish the complete works of the composer Glinka for just 25 roubles, an eye-wateringly bad deal.

  Stellovsky had initially offered a flat fee of 2,000 roubles for a collected edition of Dostoevsky’s existing works, which Fyodor had declined. But Fyodor had since become desperate. Now, when he came crawling back, Stellovsky made him a new offer: in return for 3,000 roubles, Stellovsky would have the right to publish the collected edition of Dostoevsky’s existing work, and Fyodor also had to deliver him a full-length work of fiction by 1 November 1866, giving him just over a year to write it. If he missed the deadline, Stellovsky would gain the right to publish all his future work for the next nine years without payment. It was a clause so ridiculous that it didn’t occur to Fyodor it would ever be enforced.

  He divided the 3,000 roubles up among his creditors, keeping 175 roubles back to pay for a ticket out of town so that he might write in peace. He opted to go to Wiesbaden, where he had won money at roulette using his system, the idea being that he could win perhaps 1,000 roubles to get him through the next three months. I’ve got into debt like a fool, and I want to win simply to pay it off.266 Five days after his arrival, he had lost everything. I can win – until now I’ve been playing at random, for the fun of the thing, like a fool, but now I’ll tremble over every rouble.267 He pawned his watch, took the money to the table, and lost it. (Perhaps the protagonist for his new character should kill a pawnbroker. In the cold calculus of the Nihilists, that should count as a net gain – all they did was prey on others.)

  He wrote to Turgenev to beg 100 thalers, promising to repay him as soon as possible, and after a few days Turgenev sent him 50 thalers.7 A week later, Fyodor had run out of money to pay his hotel bills and, when he went into the restaurant, was told that orders had been given not to serve him dinner until he paid up. He called the manager, who explained that he did not ‘deserve’ dinner. Fyodor managed to persuade them to serve him tea, but tensions increased over the next couple of days. The staff stopped cleaning his clothes, or even answering his calls. In desperation, Fyodor wrote to his acquaintance Alexander Herzen asking for money, and didn’t receive a reply. Now lacking even the money for postage, he wrote an unfranked begging letter to Polina, but she didn’t have any to lend. She was in Paris, and he had originally thought of going to visit her, but now he was effectively imprisoned by his lack of funds. I am still going without dinner and have been living on morning and evening tea for three days now – and it’s strange: I’m not at all hungry. What’s vile is that they deny me a candle in the evening if I have even a tiny little stump left from the day before. I leave the hotel at three o’clock every day, however, and come back at six so as not to let on that I haven’t eaten.268

  He tried to write through the hunger, working on Crime and Punishment. He grew terribly thin and fell into a fever, shivering as he wrote and burning up at night. He finally got a reply from Herzen saying that he couldn’t send the requested 400 gulden but that he could scrape together 150, though he pointedly didn’t include the money itself, and even in his desperation Fyodor couldn’t get over the embarrassment of writing back another time. He wrote to his old friend Wrangel, whom he hadn’t seen in years, and also to Katkov asking for an advance on the new novel idea. Katkov was a vain, conceited, and vengeful person,269 and not at all well liked in liberal circles, but The Russian Herald was second only to The Contemporary in subscribers and, as a consequence, they paid good money.

  Fyodor was eventually released from weeks of hunger and misery when, after a second letter, Wrangel came through for him, sending a little money and inviting him to visit his family in Copenhagen on the way home. Sick of Wiesbaden, Fyodor went off to Pskov to pick up Pasha from his sister-in-law on the way to see Wrangel. His friend from Semipalatinsk was a different man now, no longer a youth, with a wife and children. That was what life was supposed to look like in your forties, though it was further out of reach than ever for Fyodor, taking the steamer back to St Petersburg with no money and a lazy, uneducated stepson who seemed bound for a life of dissolution. He arrived home to find the Neva freezing over, and that week he had three attacks of epilepsy. The doctor ordered him not to work so hard, but he was in the teeth of the idea and it wouldn’t let him go.

  Fyodor worked all winter on the novel. He didn’t go out to see anyone, except for Polina, who was now in St Petersburg, but they only argued. He had actually proposed to her after the death of Maria, but she had only refused, and he had remarked bitterly that if she ever did get married, her husband would hate her within three days. By the end of November, he had already written most of a novel, but then he thought of a new plan that was even better, burned it all and started again. Katkov agreed to pay him a decent advance, so the novel would be serialised for a year starting in January 1866. Subscribers to The Russian Herald that year were either the luckiest or the most discerning in the history of literary journals, as they were now reading what would become two of the great works of world literature serially, one by Tolstoy, and the other by Dostoevsky. Both books pitted Napoleonic hubris and violence against Christlike redemption. Tolstoy’s canvas for War and Peace was society;8 Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment depicted the war for a single soul. Arguably, Fyodor’s book was the one that better captured the spirit of the times: on 12 January, the same month that serialisation began, there was a news report of a student named Danilov who had ki
lled a moneylender in order to loot his apartment.

  Fyodor wanted to try and write a hundred pages a month if possible, though he lost weeks at a time to illness. For fifteen days in February his haemorrhoids were so bad that he could neither sit nor stand, but had to lie motionless on his divan. Worse, if he was put in prison for his debts, he wouldn’t be able to finish the serialisation, and he would lose his readers. Worse still, on 4 April 1866 someone made an attempt on the life of the Tsar himself, shooting at him while he was out walking his dog, Milord, in the Summer Gardens. The would-be assassin was an impoverished student, Dmitri Karakozov, who had been expelled from the university for failing to pay his fees. It was as if Fyodor’s fictional protagonist had leapt the bounds of the book and was stalking the streets. As soon as he heard, he ran to his friend Maikov’s house, trembling and pale, and burst in shrieking to deliver the news. This was the exact situation that his novel had been intended to pre-empt. He was well aware that he was still under surveillance, and now it was very likely that there would be a tightening of censorship. But how can you fight nihilism without freedom of speech? If even the Nihilists were given freedom of speech, they would amuse everyone explaining their teachings. But at the moment people think of them as sphinxes, enigmas, wisdom, mystery, which entices the inexperienced.270