Dostoevsky in Love

by Alex Christofi

  When a girl’s heart is moved to pity, we all know what comes next: she’ll want to ‘save’ him and restore him to new life and activity – the usual fantasies. I twigged that the bird was flying into the net all by herself and prepared myself accordingly.287

  It was bright and frosty on 8 November, but Fyodor could not enjoy it. Anna was half an hour late to his house, and by the time she arrived he was already worked up.

  ‘I have been planning a new love story,’288 he confided to her as soon as she was in the door.

  ‘A new one? Is it interesting?’ she asked.

  ‘To me it is very interesting, but I don’t know the ending. It is the psychology of the young girl that I’m finding difficult. I need your help.’

  She seemed pleased that he thought it worth consulting her.

  ‘Who is the hero of your novel?’ she asked.

  ‘An artist, not a young one; well, briefly, a man about my own age.’

  The hero of this love story had a gloomy childhood, and lost his beloved father at a young age. He had a grave illness which had torn him away from his art for ten whole years. On his recovery, he had fallen in love with a woman, but the relationship had tormented him, and then both his wife and his beloved sister had died, leaving him burdened with terrible debts. The hero had grown old before his time, suffering with a paralysed arm. He was gloomy and distrustful; deep down he had a tender heart, but he was incapable of showing it. It was true that he had talent, but he had never succeeded in articulating his ideas.

  ‘But why,’ Anna asked, ‘did you wrong the hero of your love story so much?’

  ‘You don’t find him sympathetic?’

  ‘On the contrary, he’s very sympathetic. He has a good heart. Surely any other man who had gone through so much would be embittered, but your hero still loves people. As a matter of fact, you are not being fair to him!’

  ‘Yes, he has a kind, loving heart,’ Fyodor agreed. ‘And how glad I am that you understood him. It is at this decisive point in his life that the artist meets a young girl of your age – perhaps a year or two older. Let’s call her Anna . . .’

  ‘Is your heroine good looking?’ she asked.

  ‘She is not a beauty, of course, but she is not at all bad looking.’ Anna could be forgiven if she looked a little put out at this. ‘I love her face,’ Fyodor added. Perhaps sensing that her patience was running out, Fyodor quickly outlined the conflict: the more the hero saw of Anna, the stronger was his conviction that he might finally find happiness with her. And yet, what could an old, sick man, burdened with debts, give her, a young, healthy, joyous girl? Wouldn’t it be a terrible sacrifice for her, and wouldn’t she regret it afterwards? Wouldn’t it ring false for her to love him?

  Anna spoke with conviction. ‘If your Anna is not a shallow flirt, but has a kind, responsive heart, why shouldn’t she fall in love with your artist? What does it matter that he is ill and poor? Does anyone love a person for looks or riches? And where is the sacrifice on her part? If she loves him, she will be happy and will never regret it.’

  ‘And do you seriously believe that she could love him sincerely, for life?’ he asked.

  She hesitated.

  Nothing in the world is harder than candour.289

  ‘Put yourself in her place for a minute,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘Imagine that the artist is myself, that I have declared my love to you and asked you to be my wife. Tell me, what would you say?’

  Anna looked up at him.

  ‘I should answer that I love you and shall love you all my life.’

  Fyodor tried to keep the engagement quiet, as it would come as grim news to his growing number of dependants: not just the twenty-one-year-old Pasha, who showed no signs of getting a job; but Mikhail’s widow Emilia and their four children; Mikhail’s mistress and their son, who had come out of the woodwork; and Fyodor’s alcoholic, infirm brother Nikolai. But despite knowing that his relatives would disapprove, this was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and he had to tell someone. Thus he found a time-honoured confidant in his cab driver, who told the maid, who told everyone she knew. The demands for money increased in pitch.

  Anna had agreed to help him finish Crime and Punishment, and now that they were engaged Fyodor visited the Snitkin family home by the Smolny Monastery on the outskirts of the city. Fyodor got on well enough with Anna’s mother and the engagement was not likely to last longer than the winter, when he hoped to receive an advance for a new book from Katkov. Unfortunately, in the meantime he no longer had a winter coat, having been forced by Pasha and Emilia to pawn it for money. So as it reached the end of November, he gritted his teeth and put on his thin autumn coat for the four-verst walk to Anna’s house.

  By the time he arrived, he was shaking with cold. Not normally given to drinking bouts, he downed three or four glasses of sherry in quick succession and asked for hot tea.

  ‘Why didn’t you wear your winter coat?’ asked Anna anxiously.290

  ‘Someone told me it was thawing today.’

  ‘I’ll send a servant at once to fetch it. He can take this one home for you.’

  ‘No, please don’t do that, please!’ Fyodor cried desperately.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘It will get even colder by nightfall.’

  ‘I don’t have a winter coat,’ he admitted.

  ‘What do you mean? Has it been stolen?’

  ‘No, it hasn’t been stolen. I had to pawn it.’

  When she heard what had happened, Anna flew into a violent rage, sobbing hysterically. She screamed that his relatives were heartless, that Fyodor had obligations towards her, that she wouldn’t survive his death. Fyodor held her, kissed her hands, and begged her to calm down.

  ‘I am so used to pawning things that I didn’t attach any importance to it. If I had known how you would take it I would never have let Pasha do it.’

  Fyodor had tried to be honest that he was beset by debts and dependants. Showing an unwarranted degree of trust in Fyodor, Anna’s mother suggested that he take over Anna’s property as her guardian. She owned the house and its contents, after all. Fyodor was too honourable to accept, but the contrast with his engagement to Maria was striking.

  The wedding date was set for Sunday 12 February at Izmailovsky Cathedral. In the meantime, Fyodor went to Moscow to see his relatives there and to get an advance from Katkov. He returned with 1,000 roubles, of which he gave Anna 500 for the wedding before relatives or creditors could make their own claims. He sent invitations out to his closest friends, not least Miliukov, who had set the whole train in motion. He also invited Strakhov, whom he hadn’t seen in well over a year. Their friendship had never quite been the same after Time had been banned, but Fyodor asked Strakhov to be his witness in the hope that they might reconcile.

  Fyodor had developed a toothache in Moscow, which had developed into a swollen cheek, and they had to put the wedding off for a few days. It did nothing to dampen his mood. You can find enjoyment even in toothache. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in moaning; if he didn’t enjoy it, he wouldn’t moan. Those moans express all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you feel pain; the consciousness that in spite of modern dentistry you are a slave to your teeth.291

  When the wedding day finally came, it went perfectly. It was 7 p.m. on Wednesday 15 February 1867 when Anna processed up the aisle in a white watered silk dress, bathed in candlelight and the voices of the choir. Fyodor Mikhailovich and Anna Grigorievna were married with Strakhov as their witness and Maikov, Miliukov and the others in attendance. That night, they toasted their family and friends with champagne. Fyodor couldn’t stop looking at her. The difference in our ages is horrible, but I am becoming more and more convinced that she will be happy. She has a heart, and she knows how to love.292

  Reality soon began to catch up with the newlyweds. He didn’t have a fit on the night of his wedding
but, as with Maria, he had not been entirely open with Anna about the severity of his illness. Two weeks later, while they spent the last evening of Shrovetide eating and drinking champagne at Anna’s sister’s house, Fyodor was telling a story when he paused mid-sentence. He turned pale and tried to stand, but began to subside towards Anna, and then howled in pain as he fell forwards. Anna caught him by the shoulders and got him back on the sofa, but he slipped off again and she didn’t have the strength to lift him, so instead she pushed away the table and let him land gently on the floor and lay his head in her lap, cradling Fyodor as her sister sobbed, paralysed with fear. The convulsions gradually ebbed away and Fyodor began to come around. He didn’t know where he was and his speech was mangled. They laid him on the sofa where, after an hour, the seizure returned. It was so forceful that, on waking, Fyodor screamed in pain for the next two hours.

  He had now paid off 12,000 roubles of his brother’s debt, but that only served to provoke those who hadn’t yet been repaid – particularly two creditors whose rhyming names, Latkin and Pechatkin, call to mind a menacing pair of goons. On top of which, Fyodor was now financially supporting seemingly anyone with the surname Dostoevsky. His relatives had almost literally taken the shirt off his back, and Anna appeared determined that their life together wouldn’t be sunk by Fyodor’s generosity. She pawned all her furniture, including her piano, in order to buy them a trip to Europe. The trip would give them three months’ respite from creditors and relatives, in which Fyodor could write, and pay off the remainder of his debts, and then their new life could begin.

  It all made sense in a practical way, but Fyodor worried about leaving Russia, which was now the greatest source of inspiration to him. In Europe, he would be a fish on land, and he was sure his naive wife would be bored and tormented by his company. On top of which he had not wholly exorcised his passion for roulette. Still, it was Europe or debtors’ prison. I set off with death in my heart.3

  Before a Russian travels, they ‘sit on their suitcases’, observing two minutes of calm and contemplation. Perhaps Fyodor and Anna didn’t bother this time – after all, they were not intending to go away for long. Emilia would take the apartment on Stoliarny Lane, which Fyodor would continue to pay for. Before leaving, Fyodor called on Bazunov, the bookseller who handled Fyodor’s publishing concerns. There, Bazunov handed him a letter from Polina. They hadn’t spoken in over a year. She wrote of the great sadness of her life. She wasn’t asking much about Fyodor; it was more that she was demanding to be understood. There wasn’t time to answer the letter before leaving the city on 14 April 1867, when he and Anna bought their train tickets and climbed into their carriage.

  Their first stop after Berlin was Dresden, where Fyodor wrote a long reply to Polina, my precious friend.293 First he told her the whole story of the past year and a half, his debts, Stellovsky, publishing Crime and Punishment, his young and attractive stenographer and their subsequent marriage. By way of advice, he told Polina that it would be hard for her to be happy since she was so demanding and divided everyone into angels and scoundrels. He followed it up by noting that he would be in Dresden until 8 May if she wanted to reply. Little remained unsaid between them, but sometimes the urge to communicate outlives the exhaustion of the subject.

  Now that they were here, Fyodor soon began to feel restless. Why was I in Dresden, specifically in Dresden, and not somewhere else?294 Other cities in Germany had soft green baize tables, on which notes and coins bred in piles or were decimated. He had seen people lose everything at those tables. He had himself lost everything more than once. In terms of poetic justice, therefore, the casino really owed him money. A thought experiment: try not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the damned thing is constantly in your thoughts.295

  Fyodor decided to go to cold, damp Homburg for a long weekend to gamble without his new bride, who was now, though they did not know it, in the early stages of pregnancy.4 As the warning bell sounded on the train platform, Fyodor leapt up onto the train. Through the window he put one hand on his heart, and with the other he held up four fingers. Four days and he would be back. Tears came to Anna’s eyes and he shook his finger – don’t cry. The train began to leave, and Anna ran alongside it, crying, until she could no longer keep up.

  Fyodor had promised to write to her each day, and was as good as his word. On Friday, he wrote that he couldn’t stop thinking of her. On Saturday, he wrote that he dreamed of Anna all night, and admitted that he was also excited about his roulette system. On Sunday, he wrote that his nerves were worn out and he was taking too many risks. On Monday, he had pawned his watch, won his money back, and redeemed the watch. On Tuesday, he had lost the watch and couldn’t pay his hotel bill. He asked Anna to send him money so he could buy a train ticket home.

  The week dragged interminably on, each letter more painful than the last. On Wednesday, he staked the last of his money and built it up to 300 gulden, which made him so happy he bet big and lost it all. On Thursday, he sat at home with earache and toothache. Anna sent him the money he had asked for that afternoon, enough to buy his way out of this self-inflicted nightmare. All he had to do was pay his hotel bill and catch the train to Dresden, back to his young, loyal, pregnant wife.5

  On Friday, he wrote her a miserable, whimpering letter. ‘Anya, dear, my friend, my wife, forgive me, don’t call me a scoundrel! I have committed a crime: I have lost everything that you sent . . . I received it yesterday, and yesterday I lost it. Anya, how am I going to look at you now, what will you say about me now . . . Your judgement alone is terrifying to me! Can you, will you now respect me? And what is love without respect? . . . O my friend, don’t blame me for ever! Gambling is hateful to me; not just now, but yesterday too, and the day before yesterday.’296 He begged her to send more money for the journey home.

  In Saturday’s letter he spoke of a new work, one that would be magnificent, better even than Crime and Punishment, that would captivate the reading public and the booksellers. Katkov would give him more money and he would finally dig his way out of the pit of debt. He wondered idly whether Anna’s mother might send some money over. In any case, soon they would go to Switzerland, where Fyodor would settle down to write.6 Perhaps he had remembered the old proverb that what is good for the German is death for the Russian.

  When the new money arrived, Fyodor quit Homburg without incurring further debts. Anna was waiting at the station, as she had been off and on for six hours, when he arrived. She looked at him with a fixed expression, almost unwilling to trust the evidence of her own eyes. Then she rushed up to him, brimming with happiness. Could it be that she hadn’t judged him for going away, or for losing all that money?

  At home, Fyodor enquired as casually as possible whether any letters had arrived from him. Anna passed him a letter from Polina, which he opened in front of her. He read the first page, silently, and then re-read it, blushing furiously. Anna appeared to think that the letter was from his niece, Sonya, and asked what she was writing about.7 Fyodor smiled bitterly.

  ‘It’s not from Sonya,’ he replied.

  He and Anna kept talking but Fyodor couldn’t concentrate. It really was the end for him and Polina. It is strange to think about love in this way. The person who will make you happy is sitting across from you with a cup of tea. She will forgive you everything; you can see that already. As well as offering an understanding and respect that you know you haven’t earned, she has youth, grace, beauty. Her belly is beginning to swell with a pledge: I want half of me to be you. At the same time, you are holding a letter full of abuse from someone who gave you nothing and demanded everything, before whom you were abject. You are not angry, of course. You know she was bad for you. But we don’t only want what we know is good for us; people are too complicated for that.

  Notes

  1 The Russian cigarette of the time was a papirosa, an unfiltered tube of cardboard and paper with tobacco stuffed in the paper end. Dostoevsky’s box of papirosi is on display in the drawin
g room of the Dostoevsky Museum in St Petersburg.

  2 That wasn’t true – she ended up taking a cab home.

  3 Letter to Maikov, 16 (28) August 1867. The word used in Russian is toska (тоска). Vladimir Nabokov writes that ‘no single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning.’ (Eugene Onegin, a Novel in Verse, Volume 2, Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 141).

  4 Anna wrote in her diary, ‘If I am reconciled to his going there, it is not at all for the chance of his winning money at roulette, which, to tell the truth, I believe in very little; but I see that he is beginning to fret here, to become irritable.’ (Anna Dostoevsky, p. 51)

  5 Anna confided to her diary: ‘If only he could get out of his head that unlucky idea that he is going to win. I was very sad.’ (Anna Dostoevsky, p. 52)

  6 As he wrote this, Anna was on the way to the train station. ‘Today I really thought he would come.’ (Anna Dostoevsky, p. 53)

  7 Anna had already read all his letters including this one, which she had wept over and resealed.

  NINE

  The Idiot

  1867

  The rest of their time in Dresden was spent listlessly. Fyodor and Anna would wake up late, not simply because they were newlyweds but because they no longer had any way of telling the time; Fyodor’s watch was in the pawnshop in Homburg. Anna wrote pages of obscure squiggles in a notebook, and wouldn’t tell him what it said no matter how many times he asked. Some days, Fyodor would go out to the Café Français alone to read the newspaper. The only serious news came on 26 May, when they learned that another attempt had been made on the life of Tsar Alexander II, this time in Paris. Thankfully, the Tsar was only slightly wounded and the assassin’s name was not Polina.