Fyodor made good progress on Devils, the first part of which he reworked twenty times before it was published in The Russian Herald in January. The timing could not have been better, at least when it came to proving the book’s relevance: the Franco-Prussian War was just that month concluding after the capture of Napoleon III, and was swiftly followed by the Paris Commune, a socialist government run on revolutionary principles, which was put down after three months by the national army.6 Can you really say that it failed again for a lack of the right people, the right circumstances, and so on? For the whole nineteenth century the movement has either been dreaming of paradise on earth or, when it comes close to action, it demonstrates a humiliating impotence. Wanting something is not the same thing as achieving it.370
In the spring of 1871, Anna was so homesick and drained from nursing Lyuba that she barely got out of bed, and she was now pregnant for a third time, so they would need to travel before she gave birth. Meanwhile, Stellovsky was up to his old tricks and had been selling a new edition of Crime and Punishment while refusing to pay anything to the author. With that money, they could have afforded to return to Russia straight away, but Maikov’s polite visits to enquire about payment were no match for an artful weasel such as Stellovsky.
I resolved to try my luck for the last time. Apart from my need to win, I had an intense longing to play.371 Fyodor would take one last trip to Wiesbaden, all or nothing. They told Anna’s mother, who disapproved of gambling, that he was travelling to Frankfurt on business. If Fyodor lost everything, as seemed inevitable, their code for his asking for the train fare home would be: write to me. Needless to say that he immediately lost 100 thalers he’d brought, and the next day lost the 30 thalers she sent him for the train fare. Falling asleep, he had a nightmare involving his father, which seemed to augur a terrible disaster. Would Anna die of grief when she heard what he had done to her and Lyuba? Fyodor ran off in the middle of the night to find a priest, but got lost in town and instead went home and wrote a long letter to Anna:
I know that you have every right to despise me and to think: ‘He’s going to gamble again.’ . . . I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, and I’ll come straight home! Believe me. Believe me one last time and you won’t regret it. Now I’ll work for you and for Lyubochka, without sparing my health, you’ll see, you’ll see, you’ll see, my whole life, AND I’LL ACHIEVE MY GOAL! . . . It’s as though I’ve been reborn morally (I’m saying this to you before God) . . . You mustn’t think I’m insane, Anya, my guardian angel! A great thing has happened to me, I’ve rid myself of the vile fantasy that has tormented me for almost ten years. For ten years (or, rather, since my brother’s death, when I was suddenly crushed by debts) I kept dreaming about winning money. I dreamed seriously, passionately. Now that’s all finished with! This was QUITE the last time!372
It was a promise he had made before, but it was different this time: it was not that he wanted to quit, but that he had lost his compulsion.7
On his return, he settled down to work on the next part of Devils, and in June 1871 a chunk of money came through from Katkov. They now had the funds to return to Russia. Their three-month honeymoon, which had been prolonged in a sickening limbo of debt and itinerancy, was finally coming to an end after four years.
They went to retrieve their things from pawn. It was a near-certainty that Fyodor would be searched at the border and that they would confiscate his papers, so Fyodor gave Anna all of his draft material from the past four years to burn in the fireplace – for The Idiot, The Eternal Husband, the first part of Devils. But Anna couldn’t bear to burn the notebooks, so she gave them to her mother to carry across the border that autumn. They prepared to reclaim their missing days from the Julian calendar. At the start of July in Europe, Anna was burning manuscripts; at the start of July, she would already be back in Russia.
The journey from Dresden took 68 hours in total. Fyodor entertained Lyuba the whole way, playing games with her, taking her out to stretch her legs on the platform at each stop, and keeping her amply supplied with milk and snacks. As expected, they were the only people stopped at the border, where customs officers rifled through all their bags and suitcases, peering at their books and manuscripts. They were only saved from missing their St Petersburg connection by Lyuba’s screaming, which eventually annoyed the officers enough that they were waved through – and stepped 12 days into the past, back to 7 July 1871.
They spent a full 24 hours rolling through the Russian countryside. After hundreds of versts of identical swamp and forest, dotted at long intervals with isolated peasant huts, they emerged suddenly and without warning into the heart of the imperial city, with its horse-drawn tramcars, uneven pavements, broad roads with lumbering carts, peasants in their red shirts and sheepskins, bearded coachmen, and the golden dome of St Isaac’s looming over it all. The train slowed to a halt, and they set foot in St Petersburg for the first time that decade. I’ve lived through a lot in these four years. I’ve lived intensely, though in isolation. Whatever God sends from here on in I’ll accept without a murmur.373
They found two rooms on the third floor of 3 Ekaterinhof Prospect, near the Yusupov Gardens. They were reunited with Mikhail’s family, who seemed to have found their feet, and Pasha, who had just married a short, pretty young woman called Nadezhda that April. The bad news was that he had sold off all of Fyodor’s rare and signed books, which was quite upsetting, though not entirely out of character. Still, overall it was a happy time. Eight days after they arrived, Anna gave birth to their first son, Fyodor, whom they called by his diminutive, Fedya. In spite of everything I have lost, I love life ardently, I love life for life’s sake. I will be fifty soon, yet I cannot make out whether I am ending my life or only beginning it.374
Notes
1 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences (1975), pp. 140–1. She had been having labour pains since 8 p.m. but was determined not to wake him until she absolutely had to.
2 Anna noted that he returned from his European exile ‘so much milder, kinder, and more tolerant to others’ (Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, p. 169). In his biography, Strakhov credited fatherhood, as well as the couple’s relative solitude, for what he considered a marked spiritual maturation.
3 Letter to Maikov, 17 (29) September 1869. Anna was more circumspect about the latter assessment: ‘Only an infatuated and ecstatic father’s eyes, of course, could see “a beauty” in that tiny pink morsel of flesh.’
4 Dostoevsky must have started when he saw who was responsible: Nechaeva was his mother’s maiden name.
5 The theme of this new novel must have pleased Katkov, who had fallen out with Bakunin back in 1840, when Bakunin had (correctly) accused Katkov of having an affair with Ogarov’s wife and, at Belinsky’s salon, Katkov had (more or less correctly) called Bakunin ‘a eunuch’. After much spitting, slapping and whacking of canes, they agreed to fight a duel, though it never took place.
6 The Commune counted among its prominent feminist members Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, who was now calling herself Anne Jacquard. After helping to run the Montmartre Committee of Vigilance and writing for La Sociale, she escaped the so-called ‘Bloody Week’ of suppression and crossed over to England, where she hid out in the home of Karl Marx.
7 In a second letter the next morning, Fyodor suggested that, if Anna’s mother asked why she was pawning off her possessions for money, she should say he’d had an epileptic fit and soiled his hotel mattress.
ELEVEN
The Citizen
1872–1877
One thing I do know: the second half of the novel will be incomparably easier than that first.375 Fyodor had returned to a St Petersburg gripped by the trial of 84 of Nechaev’s followers in open court from 1 July to 1 September 1871.1 During the trial, a manual for revolution, Catechism of a Revolutionary, was presented as evidence. The scale of ambition on display was breathtaking: Efforts to injure the prestige of local authority, to reduce the villages to confusion, to spread cynicism and scandals, together
with complete disbelief in everything and an eagerness for something better, and finally, by means of fires, a pre-eminently Russian method, to reduce the country to desperation.376 Fyodor was midway through publishing Devils, and the high-profile trial of what now appeared to be a widespread conspiracy ensured a huge and committed readership for the rest of the book. Sending off the pivotal chapter, in which the nihilistic Stavrogin makes confession to Bishop Tikhon, he was dismayed to find that Katkov wouldn’t print it. Stavrogin confesses to terrible crimes, including the rape of an eleven-year-old girl who subsequently committed suicide. Like the rumoured crimes of Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, but still more intense, Stavrogin has bowed to the power of the intellect and ideas, untethered from God and morality, which has turned all of life into a sort of game in which everything is permissible. It is at this crucial moment that Fyodor explicitly wanted to offer Orthodoxy as a counterpoint and even a solution to Nihilism. This was the beating heart of the book – without it there was only immorality with no hope of redemption. Fyodor explained all this, but still Katkov refused to print it.
The public didn’t miss what they hadn’t seen, and its anti-revolutionary message burnished his reputation in conservative circles, where he was beginning to be regarded as one of the foremost writers living in Russia. Maikov introduced him to a new literary circle that had formed on Wednesday evenings around the flamboyant reactionary Prince Vladimir Meshchersky and his new journal, The Citizen.2 Strakhov was already in its orbit, as well as Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a balding, clean-shaven man with beady little spectacles and a fondness for bow ties, who served as tutor to the Tsarevich Alexander.3 Through Meshchersky and Pobedonostsev, Fyodor managed to obtain a sum of money directly from the Tsarevich to pay off the worst of his remaining debts, relieving him of a huge burden. Around this time, Fyodor was also invited, along with Turgenev, the playwright Ostrovsky and a few others, to have his portrait painted by the celebrated Vasily Perov for a series on Russia’s leading writers.4 Before he even lifted his brush, Perov spent hours with Fyodor, chatting to him and observing him, and the portrait captured him faithfully. Fyodor looked serious, lost in thought, clasping his knee, his thinning hair raked across his head, his cheeks lined and sagging. But what a job he did on my warts in the portrait – they’re as good as life! That’s what they call realism.377 A mean-spirited article in The Voice called it ‘a portrait of a man exhausted by a serious ailment’. My face may well be like that, but do they have to say it in print? He could at least have said it indirectly – that’s the whole point of style.378
That spring, the family decided to go on holiday to Staraya Russa, a spa town in Novgorod province, 300 versts south of St Petersburg, near Lake Ilmen.5 When they arrived to catch their steamer, there were so many mosquitoes by the river that the other travellers’ children looked like they had smallpox. Lyuba had also hurt her wrist and it looked so disconcertingly lumpy that they had to go back to St Petersburg to have it set by a proper doctor. When, finally, they were all settled in Staraya Russa, Anna caught a chill and developed an abscess in her throat. Confined to bed, her temperature kept rising and the doctor refused to say definitively that she would survive. Soon she was unable to speak; when she needed something, Anna passed Fyodor little handwritten notes. They were visited by the local priest and his wife.
‘What will I do without her?’379 Fyodor sobbed. ‘How can I live without her? She is everything to me.’
‘Don’t cry,’ said the priest’s wife, putting an arm around him. ‘God is merciful. He won’t leave you and the children orphans.’
Very weak now, Anna beckoned over Fyodor and the children to give her blessing, kissed them, and wrote down instructions for what Fyodor should do when she passed away. That night, the abscess burst, the pus draining into her throat. Slowly but surely, she began to recover, and a few weeks later, the family was well enough to return from their thwarted summer holiday, hardly relaxed but grateful to be alive.
In the autumn of 1872, Fyodor got up each day at 2 p.m., washed his face, combed his hair and sat at his writing desk in an old coat. He would roll a cigarette and then smoke it leisurely, accompanied by two hot cups of coffee or, if not, the strongest possible tea. The samovar is the most essential thing in Russia.380 The majority of his writing was done late at night, once the children and Anna were in bed – he would often stay up until seven in the morning. His task now was to write around the unpublished confession as he tied up Devils, a task made all the harder by his ongoing battle with his own memory. Every time he had a fit, Fyodor found himself re-reading the published sections of his own book for clues to how it would end and even to remind himself of the main characters’ names. He had always struggled to create a sense of unity in his books – many separate novels and stories get squashed into a single one, so that there’s neither proportion nor harmony381 – but now he had begun to fight against the unravelling of his mind.
Yesterday a friend came to see me. ‘Your style is changing,’ he said; ‘it is choppy: you chop and chop – and then a parenthesis, then a parenthesis in the parenthesis, then you stick in something else in brackets, then you begin chopping and chopping again.’
The friend is right. Something strange is happening to me. My character is changing and my head aches. I am beginning to see and hear strange things.382
Fyodor had been toying with the idea of starting a new journal, and it made perfect sense: you could speak directly to the people without getting caught up in literary cliques. In the short term, however, there was the practical matter of setting up an income. He didn’t like the idea of Anna taking up stenography again – after all, look where the first job had got her – but he didn’t have another novel idea ready to start so soon. Anna had originally hoped to take over the house of her mother, who had died not long after they returned to St Petersburg, but unfortunately Fyodor had absent-mindedly signed over management of the house to a friend, who had allowed tax arrears to build up on the property, waited until it went to public auction, and then paid off the taxes in order to take ownership of the house.
Thankfully, Anna was far more shrewd than her husband, and she now took over all management of their finances. Having already successfully threatened Fyodor’s remaining creditors, she conducted a campaign of minor industrial espionage, casually enquiring about paper costs and commissions until she had everything she needed to cut out the publishers and produce the first complete edition of Devils herself. They decided to print 3,500, a significant outlay but with much better gains to be made than handing over the rights – Bazunov the publisher had only offered them 500 roubles.
Another opportunity for income came when the editor of The Citizen was fired by Prince Meshchersky in late 1872, apparently over creative differences. Fyodor took the opportunity to ask whether he might act as editor and Meshchersky was keen, so Fyodor suggested he take a modest salary of, say, 3,000 roubles, plus payment for any articles he wrote. The deal was done there and then, and The Citizen had a new editor for the 1873 subscription in the person of F. M. Dostoevsky.
Fyodor was always excited when it came to Christmas, and this year he insisted they get a tall, bushy tree, which he lovingly decorated, climbing up on a stool to attach the last candles and a star to the top. There were ever so many lights, gold papers and apples and little dolls and horses.383 On the day, he gleefully handed out the presents. Lyuba got a doll and a little tea set; Fedya got a trumpet and a drum. And then the pièce de résistance: toy horses and a sleigh. The two delighted children sat inside while Fyodor shook it for realism. Little Fedya grabbed the reins and urged the horses on, and then began whipping the horses with the reins as he had seen peasants do. That evening, as Anna was dropping off and Fyodor was reading in bed, they heard Fedya screaming and Fyodor ran through to find the little boy wide awake. He was obsessed with the sleigh and distraught that he had been snatched so cruelly from his adventure. And so, while the rest of the family went back to sleep, Fyodor watched ov
er his son in the nursery, cackling away even as the tears dried on his cheeks, driving like the wind down the frozen river of his imagination until, around 5 a.m., he started listing to the side and could finally be gathered up for bed. Fyodor was worn out, but he didn’t mind; the great promise of children is that your suffering will be mirrored in their happiness.
o
On 22 January 1873, the Dostoevskys announced the first complete edition of Devils in the newspaper. Soon couriers began arriving from various bookshops to buy 10 copies, 20 or more from the stacks that were piled up in the apartment. Some of them tried to haggle, seeing that they were dealing with a diminutive housewife still in her twenties. But Anna stood firm and, if necessary, closed the door on them. Others tried to get hold of Fyodor, hoping to negotiate with a softer touch, only to be told that he was asleep and they would have to deal with Anna. Soon, someone turned up asking for 300 copies.
Reviews began to appear, too. The liberal consensus was that Dostoevsky had used his narrative powers to bolster the cause of the reactionaries, making a wholesale mockery of students who mostly wanted to change Russia for the better. The radicals responded with predictable horror to the idea that Fyodor was now working for the arch-conservative Citizen. At the same time as Fyodor was being vilified as a powerful enemy, he was being written off in the same journals as a sick man who had lost his mind. Among it all, one critic stood out: Nikolai Mikhailovsky, the new chief critic of Notes of the Fatherland. His criticisms of Devils were well aimed – how, for instance, could you talk about the problems bedevilling society without mentioning capitalism, industrialism, factories, banks? – but tempered by genuine admiration for its literary achievement. Mikhailovsky represented the views of the Populists, a new movement that was just beginning to coalesce around a belief in the Russian ‘People’, not dissimilar to some of Fyodor’s own arguments, a decade earlier, that the elites should get ‘back to the soil’.6
Dostoevsky in Love Page 19