Dostoevsky in Love

by Alex Christofi

  Fyodor returned to St Petersburg with the clarity he needed to begin work on The Brothers Karamazov, but he couldn’t work in their old apartment. The doors failed to burst open with the arrival of Alyosha; the floors refused to patter with his feet. Now a family of four, they moved into a set of six rooms at 5/2 Kuznechny Lane, the same building where he had lived when he was writing The Double back in 1846. Fyodor’s study was sparsely furnished as ever, containing a desk and a clock, an icon, a large cupboard, and a couch along the back wall opposite the windows, above which hung a reproduction of the Sistine Madonna.

  Freed in some measure from the immediacy of his grief, Fyodor threw himself into his work. By the end of 1878 he already had a full plan for the book and had written the first 160 pages, which he sent off to Katkov for the all-important January issue. At the end of each long night of work, his thoughts were now firmly on his legacy. I lie here and think constantly that I will die soon, in a year or two, perhaps, and what will become of my three precious little heads after I’m gone?415

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  Through the publication of A Writer’s Diary, Fyodor had become one of the pre-eminent names in Russian literature, and as he began to publish The Brothers Karamazov in Katkov’s Russian Herald, the name Dostoevsky took on an almost mystical significance. For the first time in his life, he was being taken seriously by everyone, from the students to the literati. The government even ended its decades-long surveillance of his letters and activities, which was just as well since he was now in the Tsar’s inner circle.

  In the spring of 1878, Fyodor had been invited to dine with the Tsar’s children, Grand Dukes Sergei and Paul, on whom their tutor believed he would have a beneficial influence. After being picked up in a royal carriage, Fyodor got on quite well with the young nobles, who kept up a good conversation, and he was soon being invited to the Winter Palace on a regular basis. He participated in one of the amateur plays put on in court, playing the part of a monk in a production of Boris Godunov. He was introduced to another of the Grand Dukes, Konstantin, who Fyodor felt was perhaps better suited to the creative arts than to his navy career. Finally, he got the chance to meet the Tsar Alexander II. Despite being a passionate monarchist, Fyodor didn’t remotely follow court etiquette: he would be the first to speak in front of the Tsar; he sat down without permission; he even turned his back to the royals when he left a room. He accidentally made one of the Tsarinas cry, and on another occasion he was so emphatic in making a point that he found he had been holding onto the button on her dress for the whole time they had been standing together.

  In any given week, there was barely an evening that wasn’t accounted for by a salon or a dinner: on Sundays he might have Strakhov or Maikov over; on Mondays there was Sofia Tolstoy’s salon; on Tuesdays it was Elena Stackenschneider’s; on Wednesdays everyone went to Prince Meshchersky’s; on Saturdays he would often pay a visit to Pobedonostsev; and once a month there was a dinner for the Society of Writers, where ideological enemies put aside their differences in the name of a hearty meal.

  It was at Sofia Tolstaya’s salon, one Monday night, where he met the Devil mingling among the other guests. He had come in the person of a pleasant, fashionable young man, smartly dressed like a French ambassador. Something told him that this young man was the Anti-Christ and, just as he had the thought, he saw a beautiful, furry tail snaking out from under his suit jacket. I didn’t trust my eyes and decided to rely on my sense of touch.416 As the young man gracefully approached Fyodor’s end of the room to kiss a woman’s hand, Fyodor reached out and grabbed the tail. And what do you know, it was definitely a real tail, almost like sable, living, warm and even containing some electricity. The Devil turned around and looked at Fyodor welcomingly, like an old friend, as if to say, ‘Did you recognise me?’ And then he was gone.

  That week, Fyodor bumped into Maikov at the offices of The Word, where he had been shaking down some overdue royalties, and told him the whole story.

  ‘How do you explain it?’ Maikov asked.417 ‘Was it a hallucination or real life?’

  ‘A hallucination? It was a fact!’ Fyodor replied. ‘Draw your own conclusions, but I have no doubt that he is coming and the Kingdom is at hand.’5

  As they were still standing in the middle of the editorial office, Maikov drew his friend aside and invited him for a cup of tea.

  ‘Tea? Why would I want tea? This is slander! I’m trying to share the news with you: the Anti-Christ is coming to this world. Who will chop away his tail?’

  Everyone had begun to look at me strangely. Everyone had begun to behave with me not as before – not as to a healthy man. This impression never left me even at the liveliest social functions. I was tormented by the idea that everyone suspected me of being mad.418

  But Fyodor knew he was not mad. The Anti-Christ was at large in Russia, and his servants were hard at work. In 1878 someone had shot the governor of St Petersburg in his office, though he thankfully survived; in the same year, the head of the Third Section had been stabbed to death in the street, and months later his replacement narrowly avoided being shot in his carriage. In February 1879 the governor of Kharkov was killed, and then, just after 8 a.m. on 2 April, while the Tsar was strolling back to the Winter Palace through the square, a terrorist by the name of Alexander Soloviev shot at him. The Tsar ran off in a zigzag as Soloviev shot four more times at him, swallowed poison, and was arrested. Alexander II had now survived his third assassination attempt, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  On 26 August 1879 a new terrorist organisation calling itself People’s Will published the Tsar’s death sentence. They attempted to carry it out on 19 November, when they detonated a mine underneath what they thought was the Tsar’s train outside Moscow; but he had taken a different train when the first had broken down. Meanwhile, a People’s Will operative was working as a carpenter inside the Winter Palace itself. Each night, he smuggled a little more nitroglycerine into the cellar, until he had amassed a potent stockpile of 300 pounds directly under the Yellow Room, the Tsar’s dining room. As the court settled down to dinner on 5 February 1880, a huge explosion lifted the floor and blew out the windows. Eleven were killed and over 50 wounded; the Tsar, however, had been running a little late for dinner, and was unhurt.

  Despite the strains of his illness, the last year of Fyodor’s life was undoubtedly his apotheosis, as The Brothers Karamazov unfolded in all its complexity and beauty before the reading public. The highlight of that year was a festival in Moscow to mark the unveiling of a new statue to Pushkin. The festival would gather together for the first time not only countless nobles and high officials, but all the literary luminaries in Russia, with the conspicuous exception of Tolstoy, who had been invited three times but replied only that he considered festivals to be a sin. Pyotr Tchaikovsky was there, as well as the mayor of Moscow and the president of the Moscow Commerce Bank. The Tsar himself might have been there if he weren’t mourning the death of his wife.

  On the eve of the festival, Fyodor checked into Room 33 of the Loskutnaya Hotel on Tverskaya Avenue. Turgenev was due to read on the first day, 7 June, though Fyodor didn’t go to hear him – he preferred to spend the time preparing for his own speech the next day. Besides, he couldn’t stand Turgenev’s style of oration: the gentleman read with a sort of melancholy condescension, as if it were a favour, so that it was almost insulting to the audience.419 From what others said, the speech went down well enough, though Turgenev stopped short of actually pronouncing Pushkin a national poet on the level of Shakespeare, Goethe or Homer.

  Reportedly a group of about a hundred students clapped Turgenev’s speech more enthusiastically than anyone else, and Fyodor suspected they were claqueurs, professional applauders hired to make him appear more popular than he really was.

  On 8 June it was Fyodor’s turn to give his speech. He got up, white tie askew, coat hanging off him, and limped up to the front. The auditorium was packed and, as he stepped onto the stage, the audience thundered with applause. He b
owed and gestured to the crowd to stop clapping, but the applause continued for some time before he had a chance to speak.

  Dostoevsky had mastered a certain way of speaking at readings: tersely, calmly, precisely, clearly, firmly.420 His voice was rasping, but the audience was rapt. He talked about Pushkin as a national prophet at a time when Russian civil society was just beginning to stir. If a lecturer keeps an audience for longer than twenty minutes, they won’t go on listening. Not even a celebrity can hold his own for half an hour.421 Fyodor spoke for over 40 minutes, first about Pushkin’s early poetry, then about the great genius of Eugene Onegin, the alienated hero and the selfless heroine, Tatiana. Although she loves Eugene, she will not abandon her marriage. ‘What kind of happiness can there be if it is founded on the unhappiness of another?’422 Fyodor asked the gathered audience. ‘And now imagine as well that it is essential and unavoidable to torture to death just one human creature; let that creature be not entirely worthy, even ridiculous – not some Shakespeare, but simply an honourable old man.’ Wouldn’t it be better to suffer yourself than to inflict suffering?

  It was this sort of insight that made Pushkin unique. Fyodor could see no one else who understood and embodied the spirit of the Russian people in a way that was truly universal. Here, Fyodor came around to the real thrust of his argument: that the Russian spirit was uniquely placed to fuse together the genius of all world cultures.423 Since the reforms of Peter the Great, which began to hybridise Russian culture, there had been a great, unconscious purpose: ‘It was then that we at once began to strive towards a truly vital reunification, towards the universal brotherhood of peoples!’ All these arguments over Westernisers and Slavophiles – it was all a misunderstanding.6 To be a Russian was to be a brother to all people, a pan-human. There was violent applause at this passage from many parts of the room, but I waved my hands as though imploring them to let me finish without interruption and the room relapsed into silence at once.424

  This was Russia’s destiny! To reconcile Europe’s conflicts, ‘to enfold its neighbours with brotherly love, and in the end, perhaps, to utter the great and final word of universal harmony, the brotherly, lasting accord of all tribes according to the Gospel!’ He pronounced the last words of the speech in an excited whisper and then stepped down from the podium, the whole auditorium around him perfectly silent. Then someone screamed from the back, ‘You have solved the mystery!’ And with that, the enthusiasm of the audience burst like an irresistible storm.425 There was an ovation, true, but it was not simply a matter of the audience standing and clapping. It was out of the question to stop it: the women wept, many of the men wept too. Fyodor’s speech had triggered a great outpouring of pent-up emotion in the room, a catharsis amounting almost to religious ecstasy. Strangers sobbed, embraced each other and swore to be better people, to love one another.426 He was mobbed by grand dames, students male and female, state officials, hugging and kissing him; one young man came up, shook Fyodor’s hand and promptly fainted. Two old men came up to him excitedly and told him, ‘For twenty years we’ve been enemies and refused to speak to each other, but we have just embraced and made up. It’s all down to you. You’re a saint, a prophet!’ Even Turgenev crossed the stage towards him, his arms wide, to congratulate him.

  When Fyodor tried to get away, the crowd forced its way backstage and wouldn’t let him alone for another hour while the chairman rang his bell in a futile attempt to call the meeting back to order. The next writer due to speak, Ivan Aksakov, declared that they hadn’t witnessed a speech so much as a moment in history. He didn’t want to read his own piece – Dostoevsky had pronounced the last word on Pushkin and there was nothing left to say. When the others eventually prevailed upon Aksakov to read, Fyodor attempted to slink off but was detained by fans. As soon as Aksakov had finished, the stage was stormed once again by a horde of women who had somehow procured a real laurel wreath one and a half metres wide, with which they now crowned Fyodor, while the mayor thanked him on behalf of the City of Moscow.

  Back at the hotel, he wrote to Anna to tell her everything, his head swimming, his hands and legs trembling with excitement. Nothing like this had happened to him since that first White Night in his youth, when Nekrasov and Grigorovich had burst in with tears in their eyes and proclaimed him a genius. It was a complete, total victory!427

  At breakfast the next day, Fyodor was seated next to a young woman. By way of small talk, he asked her whether she had ever read Dickens, and she admitted that she hadn’t. Fyodor raised his voice, addressing the whole table: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have the happiest person in the world among us!’428 The young woman looked quite flustered and the greybeards around the table confused, so Fyodor explained: ‘She hasn’t read Dickens and has it all to look forward to! How I would like to be in her place.’ When I am tired, or unwell, nothing calms me down better or gives me more joy than Dickens. He’s one of the best writers in the world.429

  Later that day, at the closing of the festival, Fyodor read out Pushkin’s poem, ‘The Prophet’. By this point the audience were perfectly clear that they considered Dostoevsky the true prophet, but much as the suggestion privately gave him pleasure, Fyodor publicly demurred.7 That evening, before returning to Anna and the children, he took a cab to Strastnaya Square, the horses clopping through the warm, quiet streets, and stood looking up at the Pushkin statue. He laid the comically large wreath he had been given at Pushkin’s feet, bowing deeply to his great teacher. It was a gesture of humility, but also of reassurance, perhaps the first of humanity’s great superstitions: if we take the trouble to honour the dead, perhaps one day someone will remember us.

  It is dark now, six in the morning, the city is awakening, and I have not yet gone to bed. My doctors tell me that I must not over-exert myself, that I ought to sleep at night and not sit for ten or twelve hours bent over my writing desk. Why am I writing at night? Because as soon as I get up at one o’clock the doorbell starts ringing: someone comes asking for a favour; another insists that I solve some insoluble problem for him or he’ll shoot himself; a delegation of female students arrives, followed by schoolboys and charitable societies. What time is there left for me to think, to read, to work, to live?430

  Dostoevsky’s emphysema was getting worse. Damn these papirosi! They do nothing but harm, but I just can’t stop. I’m always coughing and now I’ve got a tickle in my throat and I’m short of breath. But how am I to give up?431 He wanted to work but he needed to rest. For some years now, he had lived only in apartments that overlooked a church, and he would sometimes take breaks in the gardens at Vladimirskaya Church to watch the children play. I always was attracted by children. I had a sort of intense happy sensation at every meeting with them. I stood still and laughed with happiness, looking at their little legs flying along, at the boys and girls running together, at their laughter and tears, and then I forgot all my mournful thoughts.432 But even the short walk to the church was difficult these days, dragging his carcass along in exhaustion past the stalls selling fragrant firewood, leaning on an umbrella.

  The important thing was to complete The Brothers Karamazov. He had ideas for a sequel called The Children and he was also planning to pick up A Writer’s Diary in 1881, but first he had to finish Karamazov, even if it meant writing by night and sacrificing the last vestiges of his health. Fyodor had buried his heart in its pages, and those of The Idiot, Crime and Punishment and Devils, and even if he never got around to writing his memoirs, those who knew him could unearth him there.8

  He still socialised that autumn, though even at other people’s houses he was often to be found sitting silently on a chair in the corner. He reprised his reading of Pushkin’s poem ‘The Prophet’ at a couple of soirées and, at the start of November, caught up with Strakhov, who passed on some praise that cheered him up greatly. Tolstoy had just re-read The House of the Dead and had written to Strakhov: ‘I don’t know a better book in all our new literature, including Pushkin . . . If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that
I love him.’433 Fyodor was over the moon when Strakhov showed him the page, and asked if he could keep it. Moments later, however, Fyodor was affronted: what did Tolstoy mean by ‘including Pushkin’? Strakhov diplomatically responded that the Count was a hardened freethinker. In any case, Fyodor kept the letter.

  A few days later, on 7 November, Fyodor sent off the last chapters of The Brothers Karamazov. Over the three years of his work on the novel, he had secured his legacy, and he knew it. This is a significant moment for me. But allow me not to say farewell. After all, I intend to live and write for another twenty years.434 He was dreadfully sick and worn out, but there had hardly been a time in his life when this wasn’t true. Life, for Fyodor, had been a constant negotiation with myopia, haemorrhoids, bladder infections, seizures, the limp he had developed in Siberia, and the hoarseness exacerbated by his emphysema. The only thing holding him together for most of his adult life was determination. As the year reached its darkest days, Fyodor worked on a new issue of A Writer’s Diary for publication at the start of 1881. He published the first complete edition of The Brothers Karamazov in December to mixed reviews, but was cheered by a letter from Pobedonostsev suggesting that he present a copy of the book to the Tsar and his family. The work of little Fedya Dostoevsky, born in a hospital for the poor and sent to Siberia for sedition, sitting on a shelf in the Tsar’s study! In a literary milieu filled with the concerns of the gentry he stood alone as a voice of conscience for the weak, the poor, the sick, the abused. His whole life, he had leant into the prevailing wind. He was so very tired.