Dostoevsky in Love

by Alex Christofi

  Worrying came naturally to Fyodor, and he was constantly asking Anna whether Sonya was all right, whether she had slept well and eaten well. Having just lost all their money again on another gambling trip to Saxon-les-Bains, he wanted to write to Katkov to ask for a further advance so they could move to Vevey at the other end of Lake Geneva. There, both he and the baby would be safe from the bises. Perhaps they could even ask Anna’s mother to join them. I’m now so cheered, so certain that we’ll move to Vevey. Honest to God, that’s better than winning money!340 While they waited for the funds to come through, Fyodor would sit by Sonya’s crib for hours at a time, talking to her or singing her songs (in my funny voice),341 and by her third month he could swear that she already recognised him. She always smiled and stopped crying when he came over to her. The weather began to improve over the course of that spring and, on the advice of the doctor, they put her in the pram every day and took her for a turn in the Jardin des Anglais.

  It was on one of these days that they were caught out by the bise, the icy wind that Fyodor most wanted to escape, which froze poor Sonya stiff before they could get her inside. That night she ran a temperature and started coughing. They had the doctor visit every day, and he was still reassuring them that Sonya would recover the day she stopped breathing, on 24 May. The baby’s little tongue and lips and whole mouth were covered with a minute white rash, and towards evening she died, gazing at me with her big black eyes as though she understood already.342 It was so sudden as to be nonsensical. Sonya had just begun to live; Sonya was dead.

  Fyodor was desolate. He stood in front of his beautiful daughter sobbing, covering her little hands and face in tears and kisses, as she grew cold, as the body grew cold. I howled as I have never let myself do before.343 It did not seem possible that they would survive this.

  They went together to the government office to register the death. They dressed her in a white satin dress. They put her in the smallest coffin with its white satin lining. I bought flowers and strewed them on the baby.344 They cried uncontrollably. They sat in the Russian church while the rites were spoken and stood, hollow-cheeked, while the coffin was lowered into the grave. And now people tell me by way of consolation that I’ll have more children. But where is Sonya? Where is that little person for whom I would accept crucifixion if only she could live?345

  Every day they went back to lay flowers on the white marble cross. Sunk in their bottomless grief, after a few days they received a visit from the neighbour’s servant, who had come to ask them to stop crying so loudly.

  Geneva had become unimaginably bitter to the Dostoevskys, who were now joined by Anna’s mother, and they moved as far away as they could afford, which was to the other side of the lake. On the steamer, Fyodor retold Anna the whole story of his life, this time as a succession of curses: a dismal, lonely youth after his beloved mother died; the cruel mockery of the literary circle, who he had thought were his friends; hard labour in Siberia; an unhappy, childless marriage with Maria; and now, he said, fate had taken away ‘this great, this only human happiness – having a child of your own’.346

  Vevey was one of the most picturesque places in the world, and it was cheap. It was a small town and there was nothing to do there but grieve for the duration of that miserable, haunted summer. Every conversation led back to Sonya. Fyodor did not raise a single smile for the duration of their stay. Despite his grief, the only way that he and Anna would get the funds to leave Switzerland would be to deliver more of the book. Maikov had written to him that he had found the world of Part One fantastical and didn’t believe in the characters, but Fyodor was so far in debt now that he had to plough on. In any case, he’d had several other letters of admiration, and perhaps it would work out.

  He and Anna would go on walks to get out of the house. On one sunny day, Fyodor went up into the mountainside alone. Below him was the lake, and all around him the horizon, bright and boundless. My mind was possessed with an agonising but unformulated idea.347 He stretched his hands out into the cold, infinite blue. He stood taking in the sun, the rainbow in the waterfall, the snow glowing on the tip of the mountain, and felt outside all of it, utterly separate. Everything had its place, down to the last blade of grass. Everything except for him. A terrible longing came upon me to leave everything here and go away at once without even saying goodbye to anyone. I had a foreboding that if I remained here even a few days longer I would be drawn into this world irrevocably and that my life would be bound up with it for ever. But I did not consider it for ten minutes; I decided at once that it would be impossible to run away, that it would be cowardice. Absorbed in such thoughts, I returned home after a walk of less than a quarter of an hour. I was utterly unhappy at that moment.348

  Part of the difficulty with Fyodor’s finances was the ongoing effort of supporting his extended family. Everywhere he went, it was as if he were dragging Emilia, Pasha and the others behind him on a sled. On the advice of Anna, Anna’s mother, and by this point even the normally discreet Maikov, he decided that he could not keep giving away his last copeck to others. Pasha was twenty-one now and would have to give up on his notion of being completely idle as if it was a point of honour.349 First he’d worked at the Address Bureau, then at the Archive of the Kingdom of Poland, but he never lasted in any of these jobs. And neither he nor Emilia had even written to congratulate Fyodor on Sonya’s birth while she was alive. I think that not only will none of them feel bad about my child, but perhaps even the contrary, and just the thought of that enrages me. What harm had that poor creature done them? Let them hate me, let them laugh at me and at my love – I don’t care.350 With death never far from his thoughts, he drew up a will granting the copyright in all his works unequivocally to Anna. But he wouldn’t completely abandon his dead wife’s son, nor his brother’s widow. I sometimes dream of Misha; he takes part in my affairs, and yet all through my dream I quite know and remember that my brother is dead and buried.351

  In the day, Fyodor and Anna distracted themselves with work as best they could, she taking down his dictation. In the evenings, Anna would cry to herself, and the sadness was stripping the flesh off her bones. For Fyodor, too, the grief seemed to be intensifying. There are moments that are unbearable. On the day of her death, I left the house to read the papers, having no idea she would die in two hours. She knew me already. She followed me with her eyes, looked at me in such a way that I can still remember it, more and more vividly in fact. I’ll never forget her and never stop grieving! Even if there’s another child, I don’t understand how I’ll love it, where I’ll find the love; I need Sonya.352

  The novel stuttered along, and the odd letter came in, though Fyodor believed that the secret police were intercepting his correspondence, as some of it was going missing. It seemed a cruel irony, when he had betrayed his former convictions in order to come out firmly as a tsarist, and when he was simultaneously accused of being too conservative by the liberals. He had half a mind to make an official complaint, but instead he allowed himself to call these nameless officials scoundrels in his next letter to Maikov, which inevitably they read.

  Come autumn, escaping Switzerland became a matter of survival. They travelled to Milan, taking a mountain pass by foot, gathering Alpine wildflowers as they went and admiring their hardy beauty. The world will be saved by beauty.353 They stopped in Milan for only a couple of months, staying down an alleyway so narrow that the neighbours would chat through the open windows. I am growing dull and limited; I’m not keeping up with Russia. There’s no Russian air and Russian people here. I really don’t understand Russian émigrés at all. They’re all mad!354 It was too cold and rainy to go walking for any length of time, and despite the change of scenery, and the hodgepodge beauty of the Duomo, Fyodor decided to push on to Florence, which he remembered fondly from his trip with Strakhov in 1862. They moved around between apartments, one of which they rented from Napoleon’s nephew, Antonio Bonaparte.355 The weather was better there, and they would go for walks in the G
iardino di Boboli, where the roses bloomed in winter, or stroll through the galleries of the Uffizi, the walls covered with endless interpretations of the Madonna e Bambino. Everywhere they looked, they saw mother and baby, mother and baby.

  It was there, in Florence, that beauty saved them. Anna began to swell with new life. The two of them talked about having a new daughter – they were certain it would be a daughter – and they would name her Lyubov, meaning Beloved. Little Lyuba, darling Lyubochka. If Fyodor had been nervous about his firstborn, he was positively paranoid about this second pregnancy. Then more good news: after a long silence, Strakhov resumed his correspondence with Fyodor, who prevailed upon him to send over the new complete edition of War and Peace. Fyodor devoured it, passing each volume on to Anna as he finished it. When he reached the book where Prince Andrei Bolkonsky’s wife dies in childbirth, he decided to hide it. Anna looked everywhere for it and told him off for losing it. Fyodor apologised for his absent-mindedness. She could have it back once the baby was born. I wait with excitement, and with fear, and with hope, and meekness.356

  Fyodor had finished writing The Idiot now, and its final scene was published, ending in the image of Rogozhin and Myshkin, standing together over the body of the murdered Nastasya. So much of the novel was written with that scene in mind: Rogozhin the passionate, jealous lover, about to enter the penal colony; Myshkin, whose compassionate love did nothing to save Nastasya, bound for the madhouse; and the heroine herself, perhaps his greatest heroine, a noble soul who refused to acknowledge the role imposed upon her by society. He wasn’t entirely happy with the novel as a whole. A lot was written in haste, much is meandering and unsuccessful, but there are some successful things too. I’m not defending my novel, but my idea.357 He had poured a part of himself into the book, narrating the experience of epilepsy, as well as the horrifying last moments before his mock execution. He had created some of the defining set pieces of his fiction, too; and yet the numerous minor characters and tangential plots made it hard, at times, to follow. I sense that, compared to Crime and Punishment, the effect of The Idiot on the public is weaker. And therefore all my vanity is now roused: I want to make an impression again. Immediately upon finishing he began sketching out ideas for another, better book, which would properly develop this idea of a hero on a metaphysical journey. He’d call it Atheism, or The Life of a Great Sinner. He wanted to model it after George Sand’s Spiridion, which follows the life of a young monk, Alexis, torn between faith and spiritual doubt. It would be an epic, composed of five books, and it would take him the rest of his life, six or seven years, he thought. I cannot, must not tackle it, because I’m not yet ready for it: I haven’t thought it out and I need material.358

  They travelled on, first to Bologna and Venice, then Prague, and back to Dresden so that they might be somewhere familiar in time for the birth. This time, Anna’s mother was with them, and labour went easier. On 26 September 1869 their second child was born, a daughter, Lyuba, just as they had hoped. The baby is big, healthy, a beauty.3 That winter, after many long months of grief and anticipation, their happiness returned to them. Fyodor dashed off a novella, The Eternal Husband, which almost served as a mature, realistic development of the idea he had been pursuing in The Double – the two men whose destinies are intertwined, two men with a shared fascination for the same woman, the peaceful man and the predator.359 He published that one in Dawn, a new journal which Strakhov was working on. Despite Fyodor hating the novella and having written it purely to keep the three of them alive – by the time he finished writing it he couldn’t afford the postage to send it – The Eternal Husband actually got very good reviews, and even went some way to repairing the damage that The Idiot had done to his reputation. But it was a distraction from the real prize, the big novel that was gestating.

  As Fyodor waited for his epic to take shape, an entirely different story materialised in whole before him, ready to be written: while investigating a murder, Russian authorities had uncovered a conspiracy of Nihilists, and with it a secret terrorist cell of an organisation known as the People’s Vengeance. It’s one of those ideas that have an undeniable resonance among the public. Like Crime and Punishment, but even closer to reality, more vital. I hope to make at least as much money as for Crime and Punishment, put all my affairs in order and return to Russia by the end of the year.360

  Desperate for news of what was going on in Russia, Fyodor had been reading three newspapers a day – St Petersburg News, The Voice, The Moscow News – as well as reading the two thick monthly journals, Strakhov’s Dawn and Katkov’s Russian Herald. It was during this daily ritual that Fyodor came across the story of a young student, Ivan Ivanov, whose body had been recovered from a pond in the Petrovsky Park in Moscow. It was easy to see how Ivanov had died, since the body was frozen in a block of transparent ice: his feet were tied down with bricks, and he had been shot at point-blank range in the back of the head, making an exit wound of his eye. This is a sort of sequel to Nihilism, not in a direct line, but obliquely, and they don’t express themselves in newspaper articles, but directly in action.361

  The victim had been a student at the same agricultural college that Anna’s brother attended. It transpired that his only transgression had been to get on the wrong side of the secret terrorist cell he was a part of – some said that he was planning to denounce them, others that he only objected to the dictatorial approach of their leader, Sergei Nechaev.4 A rumour went around that Nechaev had been the first prisoner ever to escape Peter and Paul Fortress some years earlier, and it was now known that he had been plotting revolution from Bakunin’s spare room in Geneva.5 How strange, to think that Fyodor had been bored stiff in Geneva with all this going on under his nose. But the idea of the conspiracy of five young men burgeoning into a popular movement was, finally, laughable. Why don’t people of consequence join their ranks? Why are they all students and half-baked boys of twenty-two? And not many of those.362

  Still, the logic of liberalism led to Nihilism, and Nihilism could only end in violence. That was what all of the so-called realists didn’t understand: one only had to open a newspaper to see that these were extraordinary times. What the majority calls fantastical and exceptional sometimes constitutes the very essence of the real. Taking a banal view of ordinary phenomena is not realism, in my opinion, but rather the opposite.363 So many novelists wrote the same old thing, over and over. Only in realism is there no truth.364

  In this new novel, Fyodor would trace the evolution of beliefs from his generation of 1840s socialists to the generation of Nechaev – he would show how such utopianism ended in bloodshed. Nechaev would be the basis for Peter Verkhovensky, the ringleader of his young revolutionaries. He would write of the ageing forties generation without mercy, leaning on literary recollections, Belinsky, Herzen, Turgenev and the others.365 The young generation of revolutionaries, for their part, were not tortured and poetic souls, they were devils that had possessed the Russian people. It was like the Gospel of Luke: when the demons had been exorcised, cast into the swine and run off a cliff into the sea, the possessed man would wake up and sit at Jesus’ feet in wonder. And if you want to know, that’s exactly what the theme of my novel is:366 Devils.

  His routine was the same every day: sleep until one in the afternoon; work from three until five; go to the post office in case some letter brought news from Russia; take the same route home through the Royal Gardens; dinner at home; walk at seven; tea, then work from 10.30 p.m. to 5 a.m. His epileptic fits came infrequently in the winter and the spring. Still, he would feel the blood rushing in his head and heart. The work on Devils stuttered and he could sense there was a flaw in it, but he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. The murder plot was ultimately a risible intrigue, and Verkhovensky was turning into a half-comic figure. The book needed ballast. The whole problem is that I keep taking up topics that are beyond me. The poet in me always usurps the artist.367

  In the middle of July 1870, he suffered a series of epileptic fits, o
ne after another. In the aftermath, he was nervous, his memory weak and his thoughts abstracted, and a peculiar sadness came over him. It used to take him three days to recover from a severe attack; now it took six. When he began to piece his head together and return to work in August, he read through the 240 pages he had written and saw that he would have to throw a lot of it out. He had come up with a completely new plan for the novel, a better one. There would be a second hero named Stavrogin, drawing a little from the Great Sinner of his unwritten novel, this one more mysterious and withholding, a fallen Lucifer – or a Mephistopheles. Fyodor remembered Speshnev, how he had led the others in the Petrashevsky circle astray without even seeming to participate. I’ve wanted to portray him for a very long time.368 Stavrogin would be a tragic figure, a true Russian but also representative of a trend that was spreading across Europe. And he would meet his match in Bishop Tikhon, a radiant Orthodox elder who would light the path to deliverance. This added great depth to the plot, but it also meant not delivering the first section for another few months, which meant no windfall, which meant they could not afford to return to Russia until the following spring. He wasn’t prepared to publish weak material again, even if it meant putting the rest of their life on hold. If you only knew how onerous it is to be a writer. If I had two or three years of support for the novel, the way Turgenev, Goncharov or Tolstoy do, I would write the sort of thing that people would still be talking about in a hundred years!369