Dostoevsky in Love

by Alex Christofi

  ‘Let – me – see – that locket!’ he roared, ripping the chain off her and cutting her neck. It was a locket he had bought her in Venice, after Sonya had died. His hands trembled and the locket almost slipped from his grasp as he opened the catch. The portraits inside were of Lyuba and, on the other side, himself.

  The letter, it turned out, had been written by Anna. She had copied it word for word from a fictional letter in the latest Notes of the Fatherland, which Fyodor had read the previous day but hadn’t recognised. It was a practical joke – that was all it was. She tried to make light of it, dabbing at the blood on her neck, but Fyodor was in no mood to join in.

  ‘Just think what might have happened! I might have strangled you in a rage!’

  After nine years of marriage, they still desired each other very much and were sometimes overcome with the need to possess one another. When he went to Bad Ems for his summer treatments, the two wrote passionate and, in Fyodor’s case, detailed letters about the contents of their dreams. He apologised for grumbling and being impatient after their quarrel, and wondered at the fact that, over the course of their marriage, he had fallen in love with her four or five times over. He promised to kiss her all over, her lips and then her toes. Fyodor couldn’t stand the thought of Anna talking to another man and was beside himself when she wrote teasingly that she had bumped into her former fiancé. He was also upset to learn that three nannies had quit in the space of one month, having been successively terrorised by the unruly Dostoevsky children. By August, Fyodor was desperate to get back – Anna wrote to him about a certain special purchase she had made in preparation for his return, and he wrote back, ‘My treasure, my angel, I kiss your little feet, which I fantasise about passionately.’401

  A Writer’s Diary was gathering a following greater than anything Fyodor had written up to this point. Pobedonostsev asked Fyodor to add the Tsarevich Alexander to his subscription list, so it could hardly have been any more influential. And yet, all of this sifting of life’s specificities, following trials, participating in the chaos of national life, putting out a new issue every month, meant that there wasn’t time to develop fiction longer than a story. For the next year or so he worked hard, seeing little of his family, back in miserable St Petersburg, where he would pour whole bottles of cockroach powder around the apartment to try to rid himself of an infestation. Once, he woke from a seizure to find Anna gone and couldn’t shake the feeling that something had happened to her, despite assurances from the maid that she hadn’t been there in the first place. A telegram reassured him she was well, but the episode cast a pall over his work. The novel that he had developed and abandoned a long time ago began to come back to him now, and he felt by instinct that the only way to ground himself and bring out the novel was to go back to his family’s old estate, where his father had died, to retrace his footsteps, so that he could tell his last big story. The damned trip to Darovoe! How I would like not to go! But I can’t: if I deny myself those impressions, how can I be a writer after that, and what is the writer to write about?402 And so he travelled to Moscow and took the rickety train out to the countryside, trundling along at 15 versts an hour.

  Arriving at Darovoe, Fyodor was astonished to discover that Agrafena Lavrentieva, the village idiot, was still alive and approaching her seventies. He remembered her as a young woman. Incapable of speech, she would wander the fields all year round except on the very coldest nights, when the villagers would forcibly bundle her into a hut. Even in winter, she could often be found standing barefoot in the cemetery where her only child was buried, her grey hair covered in frost, talking indistinctly.403 Many of the peasants remembered him, too, and invited him in for tea – helpful little Fedya, who had once run two versts back to the house just to get a glass of water for a peasant mother working in the fields, who had helped gather firewood when one of the others was injured. Although he only spent a few days there before returning to St Petersburg, he shored up so many memories, scribbling them down whilst seated a tree stump.

  On 28 December 1877, Fyodor learned that Nekrasov had died. He had last seen him a month before. At that time he already looked almost like a corpse, so that it even seemed odd to see him move his lips and speak.404 When he went to view the body, it was gnarled by suffering. Returning home, he could not settle down to work. Instead, he took all three volumes of Nekrasov’s poetry off the shelf, and began reading at the first page. The first four poems had appeared alongside Fyodor’s own first published piece. As I went on reading – I read one poem after another – it seemed as if my whole life were passing before me. He read through the night, volume after volume, remembering the way they talked through the White Nights as young men. A memory rose from the deep: Nekrasov had opened up to him about his father’s violence, the way he would steal a hug from his mother when they had the chance. Nekrasov had been one of the few who understood as well as Fyodor the way violence was inherited, and had refused this inheritance; instead, his poetry had been a crucible which transmuted its fierceness into love.

  There were several thousand people at the funeral, many of them students. The procession of the coffin began at 9 a.m. and there were still people there when it got dark at around 4 p.m. Walking beside Anna in the cemetery, Fyodor said, ‘When I die, Anya, bury me here or wherever you want, but don’t bury me in the writers’ section of Volkov Cemetery. I don’t want to lie among my enemies – I suffered enough from them while I was alive!’405

  Anna promised him a huge funeral, a procession of tens of thousands, a burial at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, rites by a bishop, but only if he promised to live for many more years to come. Fyodor smiled. ‘All right, I’ll try to live a while longer.’

  At the open grave, Fyodor said a few words about Nekrasov. I began by saying that his was a wounded heart, wounded once for his whole life, and that this unhealed wound was at the same time the source of all his poetry, all this man’s love for everyone who suffers from violence, from the cruelty of the unbridled will, from all that oppresses Russian women and children.406 In a spirit of generosity, he spoke of Nekrasov’s greatness as a poet – that he stood second only to Pushkin and Lermontov. A voice from the crowd shouted out that Nekrasov was greater than either of them. Well, it was his graveside; Fyodor let that go.

  His contemporaries were dying and Fyodor was frail. He had been predicting that his health would fail him even in his early twenties; now he was beset by haemorrhoids and by epilepsy, his voice hoarse, his lungs eaten up with emphysema. Other men, healthier men than him, had been broken by the hardships of Siberia. But for all the work he’d produced since returning, he had yet to write his magnum opus, the book that had been gestating in the back of his mind since the late 1860s. The novel now filled his head and his heart; it’s begging to be written.407 It would mean putting A Writer’s Diary on hold for the time being. Might he really live long enough to produce a truly great work at his own pace, a work that would place him unquestionably in the pantheon of Russian writers? Sometimes he felt that death was stalking him through the misty streets, and yet perversely he sometimes felt he was only just getting started. In the prime of life, fifty-six, not more, and we know that is the very flower of manhood; the age at which real life begins.408

  Notes

  1 When he was eventually extradited from Switzerland, Nechaev was publicly ­sentenced to 20 years’ hard labour in Siberia, but he was never sent. Instead, he was secretly held in solitary confinement under a life sentence in Peter and Paul Fortress where, in 1882, he died of scurvy.

  2 Both unscrupulous and intelligent, Meshchersky was funding the journal with 80,000 roubles that he had inveigled from the Tsarevich Alexander. He would soon fall out of favour after embezzling funds that the Tsarevich had allocated for a school.

  3 Imagine Philip Larkin transposed to tsarist Russia, with bigger ears, and you will find yourself startlingly close to Pobedonostsev’s portrait.

  4 They also included Maikov on Fyodor’s suggestion.
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  5 The town was founded over a thousand years ago, originally to harvest salt. Recently archaeologists discovered a trove of birch-bark letters from as early as the twelfth ­century – an almost unique opportunity to gain insight into life in medieval Rus’. When translated, Letter 35 read, ‘Yakove, brother, lie down when you fuck’, the earliest known example of a Russian obscenity.

  6 Much ink has been spilled over the true meaning of the powerfully evocative ­Russian word народ (narod), but depending on context, in English we would say ‘a people’, ‘the people’, or perhaps ‘the common people’, ‘the masses’ if there weren’t an implied pejorative. This is a different word from the bog-standard люди (lyudi), which is generally just a collection of persons, as in Poor Folk.

  7 After this, the radicals nicknamed him Prince Full Stop – at the time it was rather droll but perhaps you had to be there.

  8 Later, after reconciling, Turgenev visited Tolstoy on his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where he ingratiated himself with the family, entertaining the growing horde of ­Tolstoy children with charades and gamely undertaking forfeits. Tolstoy’s diary entry that evening read: ‘Turgenev. Can-can. Sad.’

  9 He was still writing to ask her to bathe ‘at least a little’ four years later (Letter to Anna, 25 July [6 August] 1879).

  10 The Adolescent, pp. 307–8. In 1880, Guseva wrote to him asking for a favour and explaining that in Ems she had ‘heroically concealed’ her feelings (history does not record how successful she was in the attempt). He shot back: ‘I remember you too well . . . But don’t write to me about that in your letters. I shake your hand firmly, like a friend.’ (Letter to Pelageya Guseva, 15 October 1880) NB For a wife it is important only that her husband remain true to her in fact; his fantasies of other women must not disturb her at all. (The Unpublished Dostoevsky, Volume 2, p. 150)

  11 The best a modern biographer might say about some of these interventions is that they were of their time. Like his beloved Dickens, he was a champion of many social ills, but too ready to found his edifices on stereotypes. His ideal of an explicitly Orthodox Russian nation left no room for what he perceived as non-Orthodox, internationalist (or indeed stateless) people, and he was deeply suspicious of what he called ‘yids’. We must remember that, for many years, anti-Semitism was official policy in Russia.

  12

  The Prophet

  1878–1881

  Fyodor’s greatest pleasure was spending time with his young family. The soul is healed by being with children.409 He would call them in as he had his first coffee of the day, and sit happily listening to them as they related their morning adventures. The family always ate dinner together. Sometimes the children would knock on their father’s study door while he was working and he would offer them a sweet. Once, he dressed as a white polar bear and the children sat on stools as if stuck on ice floes. Fyodor crawled around the floor on all fours, hunting for tasty children, who squealed in glee as he rushed to them and hugged them. If he had a favourite, it was little Alyosha, their youngest. He was a happy child, always babbling away, and Fyodor felt somehow sure that Alyosha was special, perhaps even like his father.

  The spring of 1878 had begun with the exciting news that Fyodor had been invited to attend the International Literary Congress in Paris by none other than Victor Hugo. But he never got the chance to attend. On 30 April, Alyosha had a fit. Although the boy convulsed, he didn’t cry out; the fit lasted only four minutes. Fyodor was struck with foreboding. Had the boy inherited epilepsy from him? Two weeks later, on 16 May, Alyosha was laughing with his nurse when his face began to twitch. At first the nurse thought it was because his molars were coming through, but the boy soon began to convulse. After a lifetime of having fits, this was the first time Fyodor had been made to witness one as an observer. A terrible scream that is unlike anything else breaks from the sufferer. In that scream everything human seems obliterated and it is impossible, or very difficult, for an observer to admit that it is the sufferer himself that is screaming. It seems as though it were someone else screaming from within the sufferer.410 Alyosha’s face was horribly distorted, especially the eyes, jerking and contorting. It was uncanny, horrifying, almost unbearable. The fit lasted 12 hours and, at the end of it, Alyosha never woke up. Fyodor kissed him, made the sign of the cross over him three times, and broke down in tears. He spent the whole night kneeling beside the body.

  Yesterday he was still having fun, running around and singing; today he’s laid out on the table.411 The weeks after Alyosha’s death were desolate. I look at his little clothes, his little shirt, his little boots, and I wail. I lay out all that is left of him, all his little things.412 If only I could look upon him one last time, without going up to him, without speaking, if I could be hidden in a corner and only see him for one little minute. If only I could hear him pattering about the room with his little feet just once, only once. But he’s gone, and I shall never hear him again. If grief is unspent love, it is hard to imagine how much it hurts to lose the second of your children.

  Fyodor had always intended to visit the holy monastery at Optina Pustyn as part of the research for his new novel, and the notion of unburdening his grief on the famous elder there, Father Ambrose, finally gave him a reason to go. After the funeral, he set off for Moscow, and then travelled on with Vsevolod Soloviev’s brother, Vladimir, towards the monastery about 200 versts away.1 It meant taking a train to Sergievo and then a series of bumpy country roads for two long days.

  Cut off from the advances of the nineteenth century, the monastery appeared just as it might have done when it had been founded hundreds of years earlier, its white towers topped by blue cupolas with golden crosses, sparkling brightly against the thick forest.2 It was this monastery, more than any other, that had come to represent the true heart of Russian Orthodoxy, and Fyodor was travelling in the footsteps of Gogol and Tolstoy, who had already made their own pilgrimages before him.

  Many of those who had travelled to the monastery were there to see the famous elder. Born Alexander, he had first entered Optina in 1839, taking the name Ambrose, and having become the principal elder of the monastery in 1860 was now considered one of the holiest men in all Russia. Not only erudite, but emanating great spiritual calm, mildness and humour, he made a great impression on everyone he met.3

  Fyodor met with Father Ambrose three times. Only once did they meet alone. Fyodor explained his grief over Alyosha, and Father Ambrose offered his condolences.

  ‘Be not comforted. Consolation is not what you need. Weep and be not consoled, but weep. Only every time that you weep be sure to remember that your son is one of the angels of God, that he looks down from there at you and sees you, and rejoices at your tears, and points at them to the Lord God; and a long while yet will you keep that great parent’s grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin. And I shall pray for the peace of your child’s soul. What was his name?’413

  ‘Alexei, Father.’

  ‘A sweet name. After Alexei, the man of God?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘What a saint he was!’

  But Fyodor couldn’t maintain this deferential tone for long. He rarely met his intellectual equal even in literary circles, and probing Father Ambrose on matters of faith made him so excitable that he began to interrupt the elder, disputing with him on certain points, then raising heated objections, even beginning to explain his own religious ideas to the elder. While there, he also browsed the monastery library, taking down a number of passages from The Life of the Elder Leonid by Father Zedergolm for use in his novel.

  This trip, and the death of Alyosha, were the catalyst for one of Fyodor’s most important ideas, which would be, as he saw it, the simplest, most persuasive argument for atheism that there could be: if God exists, why does he permit the suffering of innocent children? Why would he create a world in which blameless horses were lashed across the
eyes, in which invading armies sometimes threw babies in the air and caught them on the tips of their bayonets? He had read a case of a young girl whose parents punished her by smearing excrement on her face and in her mouth, and another child torn apart by a pack of dogs for sport. Imagine that you are creating the fabric of human destiny with the aim of making humankind happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it is necessary to torture to death only one tiny creature, and to found your edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect under those conditions?414

  The shape of the book was coming into focus now. It would be the greatest novel he had written yet, perhaps the greatest novel in the Russian language. It would contain every theme, every conflict, every archetype and new idea that Fyodor had gathered over the decades: Fyodor Karamazov, the alcoholic father cooped up in a crumbling estate in the countryside, who raped a local girl, and who was murdered in an intrigue involving 3,000 roubles. There would be four sons of Fyodor, each of them four compass points on the two thematic axes of Dostoevskian fiction: Dmitri would represent the life of the body, and Ivan the life of the brain; the bastard Smerdyakov would represent nihilism and the fourth brother, faith. That last brother would be a pure young monk, a beautiful soul, whom he would call Alyosha. A naif, almost too good for this world, and yet that was what protected him: his incorruptibility. In the monastery where he lived would be a wise elder who would reveal profound truths about God and Russia. Poor Dmitri would be carried away by his passion for women, money would pour through his hands like water, and he would desperately need 3,000 roubles from his father to pay a debt. He had an honest heart, but that might not be enough to save him from prison. Ivan would be led by the force of his own intellect to doubt his faith – he would imagine outlandish scenarios and thought experiments. What if Jesus returned to earth during the time of the Inquisition? Would the Catholics not suppress him as a radical? As he retreated further into his own mind, Ivan would even hallucinate the Devil himself, one dark night, and the two of them would exchange truly dangerous ideas. Lurking in the background, Smerdyakov, the perverse soul, the half-brother, the one who eluded rational explanation, the fifth member of a four-person family, the five in the two plus two.4