Following the assassination attempt, a commission of inquiry was set up, and literary figures started to disappear in the night. The Contemporary, which had done so much to encourage radical ideas and had published half the revolutionaries in St Petersburg, was shut down for good. Through his new novel, Fyodor now appeared to be aligned with the reactionary Katkov, keeping him relatively safe, though he had so far only published the crime and not yet the punishment. The authorities refused to grant him permission to go abroad that summer to write as he had intended. It was probably for the best, since there weren’t any casinos in Russia. True – sad, vile, and stinking Petersburg, in the summer, suits my mood and might even give me a certain false inspiration for my novel; but really that’s too depressing.271
In the end, begging another 1,000 roubles from Katkov to pay off two different lawsuits by creditors and variously robbing Peter to pay Paul, he ended up going to write in peace in Liublino, just outside Moscow, where his relatives the Ivanovs were staying. The main house was noisy with a dozen young people coming home late from parties or getting up early to go fishing, so he rented his own little dacha nearby. The Ivanovs sent a servant to watch him in case of fits, though Fyodor inadvertently scared the life out of him by pacing back and forth throughout the night talking loudly of murder. He also drank vodka, as a traditional remedy for the cholera that had been sweeping St Petersburg. I haven’t yet got down to work on the novel for Stellovsky, but I will. I have worked out a plan – a quite satisfactory little novel.272 He was going to repurpose his idea for the short story about the gambling addict, though it would mean spreading the plot horribly thin.
Overall, he had a wonderful holiday. Fyodor so enjoyed having children around him – it brought out his mischievous side. Once, as they sat to lunch at a long table that easily fit the whole party, Fyodor, who was sitting at one end, accused a young girl at the other end of kicking him under the table. He kept an utterly straight face as she replied indignantly that her leg was not several metres long. He would join in all their games, though he would sometimes abandon them halfway through to go and write down an idea. He teased them mercilessly and they, in turn, teased him about his wispy beard, about which he was actually quite sensitive, though he tried his best not to show it.273 One of the party was a rather beautiful twenty-year-old, whom he proposed to quite spontaneously one Sunday while everyone was out at church, but who put him down with a couplet from Pushkin and then burst out laughing. He also proposed to his sister Vera’s sister-in-law, Elena Pavlovna Ivanova, whose husband was on his deathbed, but she put him off, too, given the circumstances.
Fyodor returned to St Petersburg to find that the serialisation of Crime and Punishment had the whole city in suspense. And people had the nerve to think you’d gone crazy. The pathetic worms – who are they to understand what real intelligence is?274 But he had to put it on hold soon, because Stellovsky’s deadline was looming and, amid all the excitement, he hadn’t actually started yet. Deciding to settle the matter like a gentleman, Fyodor went to see the publisher and asked if he might buy his way out of the contract by paying a forfeit. Stellovsky refused. He asked for a three-month extension, but Stellovsky refused again. He even had the gall to tell Fyodor to his face that he was banking on Fyodor missing the deadline. To rub salt into the wound, Fyodor now discovered that it was Stellovsky who had bought the debts from Demis and Gavrilov and sued him for the money, which had forced Fyodor to agree to Stellovsky’s contract in the first place. Stellovsky had effectively paid himself the 3,000 roubles; he now moved to his endgame and declared checkmate. Any sane human being would have admitted defeat.
So I have decided to perform an unprecedented and eccentric feat: to write 480 pages of two different novels within four months.9 I am not like other mortals. None of our writers, living or dead, has ever written under such conditions. The very thought of it would kill Turgenev.275
Notes
1 The Underground Man speaks to us with nadriv (надрыв), a sort of herniated fervour, a raw, piercing, tearing voice, though the word is often said to be untranslatable because it is partly dependent on context. It amounts to an almost hysterical inner torsion. Constance Garnett translates the word, as the title of Part II, Book IV of The Brothers Karamazov, as ‘Lacerations’, which is quite a figurative, religious interpretation; Pevear and Volokhonsky translate it as ‘Strains’, which makes it sound as if Alyosha hasn’t had enough fibre in his diet. Cf. Reading Dostoevsky, p. 155.
2 Dostoevsky originally wanted to call it Pravda (The Truth), but this was rejected by the censors. The title was later used by the Bolsheviks for their own daily newspaper, though the notion of truth was a little stretchier by that time.
3 Usually sexually transmitted, in men.
4 A single rouble contained 4 zolotnik 21 dolya (i.e. 18 grams) of silver; at today’s silver prices, he would have owed over £150,000, not accounting for differences in purchasing power.
5 Modern psychology might call his attachment style ‘anxious-preoccupied’.
6 A full 80 per cent of the novel recounts events after the crime, but before the punishment.
7 At this time, Germany was a mess of competing currencies, with individual cities minting their own coins. In the simplest terms: the thaler was worth almost a rouble; one thaler would get you 1¾ gulden; after unification in 1871, a thaler was worth three of the new silver Marks. Incidentally, Turgenev didn’t get his money back until 1876, by which time thalers had become obsolete.
8 At the time Tolstoy’s novel was being published as 1805 – perhaps he liked the dialectical force of a title like Crime and Punishment.
9 A printer’s sheet or ‘signature’ is 16 pages according to The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia, making up about 5,000 words (cf. Figes, The Europeans, p. 147). Fyodor was aiming to write 30 signatures, and reckoned afterwards that he had written 47, which would be about 235,000 words or 752 pages – see his letter to Polina, 23 April 1867.
EIGHT
The Gambler
1866–1867
I’m exceedingly anxious about Stellovsky, and I even see him in my dreams.276 It was now the end of September and Fyodor still had not begun work on the new novel, which meant that he had just one month to write the whole thing, or his past and future works would be forfeit.
On 1 October, Fyodor wrote to his friend Miliukov asking him to visit after 9 p.m., when he might sneak home without fear of being hounded by creditors. He found Fyodor pacing the room, distraught.
‘Why so dejected?’ asked Miliukov.277
‘You’d be dejected if you were on the brink of ruin,’ Fyodor replied. He took the contract with Stellovsky out of his desk drawer and handed it to Miliukov, who read it while Fyodor paced up and down.
‘Have you written much of the new novel?’ Miliukov asked.
Fyodor stopped pacing and spread his arms wide.
‘Not a line.’
Miliukov was shocked.
‘But what is to be done? Something must be done!’
‘What can I do when I have only a month until the deadline? It is already too late. It is impossible to write two hundred pages in four weeks!’
Miliukov sat down at the desk while Fyodor resumed his pacing, and the two fell into silent rumination.
‘Listen,’ Miliukov said eventually, ‘You can’t enslave yourself for all time. We must find a way out.’
‘What way out? I don’t see any way out.’
‘You know what? You wrote to me, from Moscow I think, that you already had a finished plan for the novel, didn’t you?’
‘I have, but I’m telling you I haven’t written a single line.’
‘Let’s get a few friends together. You tell us the plot of the novel. We’ll outline the sections, divide it into chapters and write it up. Then you go over it and smooth out the rough spots and inconsistencies. Working together we can get it done on time.’
‘No,’ Fyodor said emphatically. ‘I will never sign my name to someone els
e’s work.’
Then Miliukov suggested an entirely different idea: a stenography school had started recently in St Petersburg, and they were training secretaries that could transcribe at the pace of normal speech. Perhaps instead of writing the novel, he could dictate it?
So it was that on 4 October 1866, at 11.28 a. m. (Fyodor had specified ‘neither earlier nor later’ than 11.30), the twenty-year-old stenographer Anna Grigorievna Snitkina rang the bell of Flat 13 of Alonkin’s House on Stoliarny Lane. When the maid answered the door, Fyodor was wandering through the apartment in an unbuttoned shirt and slippers. As he locked eyes with the graduate standing there in her headscarf, holding sharpened pencils and a smart little portfolio, he cried out in embarrassment and flung himself behind a door.
He buttoned his shirt and threw on an old blue jacket, combed his hair, and asked for strong black tea to be brought into his study. (The world can go to hell as long as I get my tea.)278 It was deeply unusual to have a young woman in his study alone with him. She sat on the old brown sofa, looking at a couple of large Chinese vases he’d brought from Siberia. He offered her a cigarette and she refused. He reassured her she needn’t stand on ceremony, and she replied that she didn’t smoke. He looked into her clear, grey, expectant eyes; she looked into his brown left eye and his black right eye. He had injured the latter in one of his epileptic fits, and the doctor had prescribed atropine, an extract of deadly nightshade, which dilated the pupil so much that the iris had disappeared entirely. Fyodor explained about his epilepsy. He wasn’t sure this idea of stenography would really work. He had always worked alone, late at night, his hand scratching out lines upon lines of Cyrillic spiders.
‘Well, let’s try,’ she said, ‘and if it isn’t working, I won’t be upset – just tell me honestly.’279
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Anna.’
He forgot it the moment she had said it. Unsure quite where to begin, he picked up a copy of The Russian Herald and dictated a passage aloud to test her mettle. As she laboriously copied out her shorthand into longhand, he saw that she had missed an accent and a full stop. He prowled up and down the room for a long time, deciding what to do, while she sat there frozen like a rabbit. Finally, he announced that he couldn’t possibly work now, and asked her to come back at 8 p.m.
When she came back that evening, he sat her down at his own desk, which seemed to please her, and asked her name again. She told him about her family: her father was a civil servant who had died in the spring; she lived with her mother; her sister was married to a censor; her brother was studying at agricultural college. Anna herself had started off studying science, but her flasks and retorts had a habit of bursting while she had her nose in a novel, so she’d decided to seek her independence through stenography instead.
‘You must be very talented, considering that they recommended you out of your whole class,’ he said.280
‘It’s not a question of ability,’ she replied.
She had promised her father that she would persevere with it before he had died in April. As the original 150 students began to realise how difficult stenography was, and her peers flaked away, Anna did extra homework, determined to keep her promise. She was a serious, formal young woman. He liked that. She was so different from Polina, with her capriciousness and vanity – and what do we seek in a partner but the antithesis of the last? I don’t care half so much for good looks as for innocence.281
Still, there was work to be done. He offered her a cigarette, forgetting that she didn’t smoke; she respectfully declined. He picked up a paper bag with two pears in it, and offered her one; she took it. He chatted with her about the Petrashevsky days, told her about the mock execution. She started to get restless, and he assured her that he was about to begin dictation. He paced to the door, to the fireplace, and knocked on the fireplace twice with his knuckles, then again, to the door, to the fireplace, a lit cigarette in his hand.1 He dictated a bit of the story that had been gestating, accidentally calling the city where it took place ‘Roulettenberg’, but deciding to leave it in. By the time they had finished it was late and Stoliarny Lane was full of drunken rabble, but Anna politely insisted that she didn’t need to be accompanied by the maid, as she was staying with relatives nearby.2
The next morning, at the appointed time, Anna didn’t appear, and Fyodor began to worry that he had scared her off, taking the first part of the novel with her. But she arrived half an hour later, having just finished writing up yesterday’s work in longhand. They went to the study, tea was brought in, and he dictated for an hour, before declaring that he was tired of it and veering off into idle conversation. He asked her to remind him of her name, which she did. He offered her a cigarette again absent-mindedly. They talked a bit about the great writers of the day. Turgenev was talented but he had lived abroad so long that he’d forgotten his homeland. Nekrasov was no longer a close friend, but had been in his youth. Maikov he considered one of the wisest men in Russia. They did a bit more work but he couldn’t settle down to it, and they gave up in the late afternoon.
As he was seeing her out, Fyodor couldn’t help commenting, ‘What large chignon you’re wearing. Aren’t you ashamed to have fake hair?’282
‘I don’t have false hair – this is my own,’ she replied.
It wasn’t a particularly auspicious start, either for their relationship or for the novel. It was already the fifth of the month and he had barely a few pages. But they began to fall into a rhythm: she would arrive at midday and stay until four in the afternoon; each evening, he would begin making notes in preparation for the next day, so that his dictations became more fluent as they went. As the stack of pages grew, Fyodor would ask her excitedly each day, ‘How many pages did we do yesterday?’283 They were barely interrupted, except occasionally by Pasha, who claimed to be interested in taking up shorthand, presumably in much the way he had taken up and abandoned everything else he had ever done, and Maikov, who wandered in through the open front door one day and seemed quite gratified to find Fyodor and Anna working together in the study.
Each day, when they took a break from dictation, they would talk about their lives. He talked to her about his courtship of Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, and even told her about Polina, showing her a portrait.
‘She is a remarkable beauty,’ Anna said.284
‘She has changed a lot in the last six years,’ he replied.
Anna asked him questions and he told her about everything, about prison, the death of his wife, his debts (an unavoidable topic since the Chinese vases were now with the pawnbroker and they were eating with wooden spoons). Although he tried to conceal the stress he was under, he sometimes lost his temper with the maid. But Anna listened to him attentively, sympathetically. He began to call her ‘my little dove’.
‘Why do you only speak about your misfortunes?’ she asked him. ‘Why never mention the times you have been happy?’285
‘But I have never experienced happiness,’ he replied, ‘I have always been waiting for it.’
The way he saw it, he stood at a crossroads: one path led to the holy land, Constantinople or Jerusalem, and devotion to a religious life; a second led to Europe and gambling; the third, to marriage. He asked Anna what she thought. Anna considered that it would be best to marry. She thought he should marry someone intelligent; Fyodor thought he should marry someone kind. He asked Anna why she had not yet married, and she responded that two men were courting her but, though she respected them, she didn’t love either of them. Fyodor strongly agreed that she should marry for love.
The book was taking shape. Fyodor’s protagonist was sometimes winning but mainly gambling away all the money he could get his hands on, all the while chasing a coquette called Polina who was stringing him along. It wasn’t the most original story he’d ever written, but Stellovsky didn’t deserve his best. Fyodor and Anna would argue good-naturedly about the characters, chatting happily between dictation. It began to seem as if they would actually
make the deadline. But just as Fyodor had begun to understand how much he was enjoying Anna’s company, the month was over.
Anna arrived to hand over the final pages for revision on 30 October, Fyodor’s birthday. She normally wore black, but today she wore a lilac silk dress, and Fyodor found himself blushing as he fumbled around for 50 roubles to give her. He told her that lilac suited her very well, that she looked tall and graceful, and he shook her hand several times as he thanked her for all her work. But then Mikhail’s widow Emilia turned up, and Maikov came to congratulate him, and the moment had passed. Fyodor asked when he might see Anna next (and suggested lightly that they might run off to Europe together). Anna suggested he visit her family in four days’ time.
‘Thursday?’ he said. ‘What a long time to wait. I shall miss you.’286
He finished his last revisions with just hours to go until the deadline and took the pages round to Stellovsky’s house nearby, only to find that he wasn’t in. He went to the publishing house, but the manager there refused to take delivery of the manuscript on the grounds that he had not been authorised to do so. By now, it was already evening and none of the notaries’ offices were open. Not to be denied, Fyodor dashed to the nearest police station and, waiting for the district chief to return at 10 p.m., finally got a valid receipt for his new novel, The Gambler, with two hours to spare.
With Anna’s help, he had achieved an almost impossible feat. Now all he had to do was finish Crime and Punishment.
Dostoevsky in Love Page 14