The day of Sunday 25 January 1881 was typical. Fyodor accepted an invitation to the Winter Palace, caught up with Strakhov and Maikov, and went to the printers to hand over the final pages of his new issue of A Writer’s Diary. In the evening, he went for a brief stroll before setting to work. That night, Fyodor had a nosebleed, the first sign of a tear in his pulmonary artery. At the exact same time, the apartment next door was being raided by the police. They were looking for any evidence that might help them identify the inhabitant as Alexander Barannikov who, as one of the leaders of People’s Will, was one of the most wanted terrorists in the country.9 Fyodor was no longer the young revolutionary being arrested in the night, but the old man who lived next door.
o
The last twenty-four hours of my story have come and I am at the end.435
Awareness of death and its presence has always contained for me something oppressive, some mystical dread, ever since childhood.436 He had always been afraid he might die in the night, or sleep so deeply that he would be buried alive, and would leave out notes asking not to be buried for three days just in case. He worried, too, about leaving his body in a presentable condition. The healthy man didn’t think about death, nor what might be lurking on the other side of it. But at the first sign of sickness, the possibility of another world instantly comes to the fore, and the sicker he becomes, the greater his contact with this other world.437 Most people imagined eternity as something vast, something entirely beyond our understanding, but what if it was just a little room, with spiders in the corners?
He knew he was leaving behind a humanity forever caught between two imperatives: what had to happen, and what ought to be. All those not belonging to the ruling class suffer.438 They are given equal rights to prevent their suffering. It’s an excellent thing, but there follows a weakening of the sense of honour and duty. Egoism replaces the old consolidating principle and the whole system is shattered on the rock of personal freedom. The emancipated masses, left with no sustaining principle, end up losing all sense of cohesion, till they give up defending the liberties they have gained. The future of Russia unfurled before him. Communism will triumph (whether the communists are right or wrong).439 But their triumph will be the farthest point of removal from the kingdom of heaven. One must expect this triumph, yet none of those who rule the destinies of this world is expecting it.
If pressed to say whether he had achieved what he wanted with his life, Fyodor might easily have pointed to the raptures of the crowd following his Pushkin speech, when the audience had cried that he was a prophet, crowning him with laurel. But what was he next to Pushkin?10 Not only had Pushkin created the very language of Russian literature, but he had turned his life into an art, cutting a swathe through society, seducing the wives of the gentry and fighting duels. It sometimes seemed as if Fyodor had spent his whole life at his desk, his hand cramped in a fury of writing, of logorrhoea, insisting upon a great idea and yet, like Cassandra, destined not to be truly understood.
If, before his discovery of America, Columbus had begun telling his idea to other people, I am convinced that for a very long time people would not have understood him.440 There is something at the bottom of every new thought of genius that can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years;11 there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you for ever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone, perhaps, the most important of your ideas. But if I have failed to convey all that has been tormenting me, it will in any case be understood that I have paid very dearly for my convictions. And serving this idea did not release me from the moral obligation of making at least one creature in my life happy, in a practical way.441
On 28 January 1881, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky lay on the sofa in his study underneath the Sistine Madonna, his head propped up by a cushion, his face pale, a dark spot of blood on his chin, surrounded by his family. His breath whistled. He asked for the parable of the prodigal son to be read to the children: transgression, repentance, forgiveness. It was the only story. His son and daughter knelt in prayer. He saw Pasha and Maikov. The sky was dark and Anna was beside him. She held his hands, a finger gently probing for his pulse, which was receding like footsteps in a mist.
‘Remember, Anna, I always loved you passionately and was never unfaithful to you, even in my thoughts,’ he told her.442 He tried to sit up but this was the end.
Often I couldn’t look at the setting sun without shedding a tear.443 I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy while they live on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. Let’s say that paradise will never come to pass – I do understand that, and yet I’ll go on preaching. It’s so simple: in one day, in an hour it could all be arranged! The main thing is to love others like yourself, that is the main thing; there’s nothing else we need. It’s been said a billion times, but it hasn’t yet become part of our lives.444
I love and can love only that earth which I am leaving behind. Never, never have I ceased to love that earth, and even on the night I part from it I love it more than ever. Is there suffering in the next world? On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, right now, to kiss the earth that I am leaving behind.445 I don’t want, I won’t accept life on any other!
Notes
1 Vladimir Soloviev was already becoming a noted philosopher.
2 The recent history of Optina Pustyn has been more changeable: in Soviet times, the monastery was turned into a gulag; then, in 1993, after its restoration as a monastery, three monks were stabbed to death by a Satanist.
3 In 1988, on the restoration of the monastery, he was canonised as Saint Ambrose of Optina.
4 Let’s conclude our reflections, which are beginning to be suggestive of newspaper criticism. (The Idiot, p. 417)
5 If you are so corrupted by modern realism and can’t stand anything fantastic, let it be a case of mistaken identity. (The Brothers Karamazov, p. 274)
6 You cannot understand me so I won’t explain any more precisely, but know that I am nevertheless more liberal than you. My convictions are not Slavophile so much as Orthodox, i.e. peasant, Christian convictions. I don’t like their superstitions and ignorance, but I love their heart and all that they love. (The Unpublished Dostoevsky, Volume 2, p. 98)
7 Somerset Maugham once commented drily that the role of prophet is one ‘which few authors have been disinclined to play’. (Sunday Times, 18 July 1954)
8 Dostoevsky had tried to write his memoirs once, for a series the journalist Pyotr Bykov was compiling on Russian writers, but he made a false start and then abandoned it: I sensed that the piece was taking too much out of me, raising up before me the life I had lived, and required great love to carry out. If I am free and well, I’ll definitely write it, because I want to and feel a need to – but when I’ll get it written, that I do not know. (Letter to Bykov, 13 January 1877)
9 Barannikov had previously been involved in a number of unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Tsar Alexander II and his capture was overdue. On the morning of 25 January he and his accomplices had been tunnelling under a cheese shop for reasons that would soon become clear. Barannikov was arrested that afternoon when he tried to visit another member of the cell, and the police caught one of his accomplices, Nikolai Kolotkevich, at 4 a.m. on 26 January when he entered Dostoevsky’s building.
10 Many strong natures seem to have a sort of natural craving to find someone or something to which they can do homage. Strong natures often find it difficult to bear the burden of their own strength. (The Adolescent, p. 390)
11 The Idiot, p. 357. Writing this in 1868, Dostoevsky could have had no idea that his publication history would last exactly thirty-five years.
Epilogue
And now, I wi
ll pass on to the description of the subsequent incidents of my chronicle, writing, so to say, with full knowledge, and describing things as they became known afterwards, and are clearly seen today.446
The day after Dostoevsky’s death was a whirlwind. The apartment on Kuznechny Lane was packed with well-wishers jostling to see the body. Countesses and Grand Dukes who never normally had to wait for anything were stuck queuing for hours. There were even a few undercover revolutionaries there to pay their respects. The body was laid in an open coffin on a table, the face, so often creased in suffering, now tranquil. Around the coffin were flowers and candles. At one point, the candles flickered out, leaving only the dim light of the incense burner, and a surge from the crowd on the stairs knocked people against the coffin, which Anna had to grab to stop it falling off the table.
As word of Dostoevsky’s death spread through St Petersburg, student groups organised collections to buy wreaths for the funeral; Anna was awarded a pension of 2,000 roubles a year, the first pension ever to be granted by the Tsar for ‘services to Russian literature’; meanwhile, there was a frantic search behind the scenes for a cemetery that might agree to take Dostoevsky’s body for free, since Anna didn’t have the funds to buy a plot herself. Friends of the family suggested the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery and, after some arm twisting by the powerful Pobedonostsev, the Metropolitan there agreed to take him for a fee (though privately he didn’t see why they should bury a mere novelist on such holy ground).1
Anyone arriving in St Petersburg on 31 January 1881 might have assumed the city was burying a Tsar rather than an ex-convict. A huge crowd, numbering in the tens of thousands, carried the coffin covered with a golden cloth for three versts from Kuznechny Lane to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. There were dozens of wreaths bobbing along over the heads of the procession as it stretched out along Vladimirsky Prospect, each carrying a message from a different organisation: ‘to a Russian man’; ‘to the Great Teacher’; ‘to the Friend of Truth’. Around the coffin, mourners carried chains of flowers and sang hymns. On Nevsky Prospect, horse-drawn trams were forced to a halt as bystanders climbed onto roofs for a better view. To many present, it felt as if they were burying a part of Russia.
Just a month later, on 1 March 1881, revolutionaries finally assassinated Tsar Alexander II. For months they had been digging a tunnel, starting from the back room of a cheese shop on Sadovaya Street, underneath the road that the Tsar crossed on his way to the military roll call each Sunday at the Mikhailovsky Manège. The plan was to undermine the Tsar, detonating a bomb under the road as he passed over, but the assassins weren’t taking any chances – this was the sixth attempt on his life. Three other assassins stood nearby at street level ready to finish the job, armed with paraffin cans filled with nitroglycerine.
On the day in question, the Tsar took his bulletproof carriage on a different route that didn’t pass by Sadovaya Street, instead taking the alternative route via the Ekaterininsky Canal. At the parade he was in good spirits, and chatted amiably with the English ambassador about the Duchess of Edinburgh. On the way back to the palace, the three assassins were waiting for him, their bombs painted white to blend with the snow. At 2.15 p.m., as he approached Konyushennaya Bridge, the first assassin threw a bomb underneath the horses, killing a pedestrian and one of the Cossack guards and damaging the carriage, but leaving the Tsar unharmed. Instead of taking the driver’s advice to make their escape, the Tsar opened the door to confront his assassin.
‘Are you all right?’ one of the guards asked.
‘Yes, thank God,’ replied the Tsar, crossing himself.
The second assassin was waiting in position.
‘It’s too early to thank God,’ he said, hurling the second bomb.2
The Tsar lost his legs and bits of his torso. They dragged him to the Winter Palace in a sleigh but the severed legs were like a burst pipe and he died shortly after his arrival. The terrorists who had conducted the assassination, People’s Will, wrote respectfully to the new Tsar Alexander III petitioning him for reform and warning that, if it did not come, ‘a revolutionary earthquake throughout Russia will complete the destruction of the old order’.3
In fact, the destruction of the old order was already well underway, and the new had already been born. A three-year-old Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was growing up in Georgia. Later, trying to sound like a strong man, a man of industry, he would adopt the name Stalin, Man of Steel, and would read Devils not as a warning, but as a manual for revolution. (Lenin preferred Turgenev.)
In the wake of the assassination, Pobedonostsev advised his erstwhile pupil, now Tsar Alexander III, to tighten restrictions on Russia’s Jewish population. This resulted in the May Laws, with the explicit intention that a third of the population be converted to Christianity, a third emigrate, and a third die of hunger. The Jews were blamed for the assassination of Alexander II and in the three years after his death there were over 200 anti-Semitic incidents including horrific pogroms in Warsaw, Kiev and Odessa, in which thousands of homes were destroyed.
In 1884, Konstantin Sergeevich Alexeev adopted the stage name Stanislavsky so that his parents wouldn’t find out he had an amateur theatre company. In the years before creating the Moscow Art Theatre, the Stanislavsky Method, and his world-famous production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, he adapted Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo, which Dostoevsky had originally conceived as a play, but had been unable to stage in Semipalatinsk. Taking the part of the benign Uncle Rostanev, Stanislavsky felt that it was the first time he had really become the character: ‘In all previous roles to a greater or lesser extent I merely aped, copied or mocked other people’s images or my own.’4 When The Village of Stepanchikovo was first published, the motiveless, controlling malignity of Foma Fomich hadn’t seemed very realistic, but the stage production would come into its own with the arrival in court of the infamous Rasputin.
Meanwhile, in the decadent West, Sigmund Freud had just qualified as a doctor and was working as a clinical assistant at Vienna’s General Hospital, where he took a keen interest in cocaine. Always intrigued by the hidden recesses of the mind, the life and works of Dostoevsky held an instinctive appeal for him. They would soon provide part of the inspiration for Freud’s most influential theory, and another less influential idea: first, that all men, to some extent, wish for the death of their father figures and sexual union with their mother figures; and second, that addiction to gambling is a substitute for masturbation.3 Freud considered The Brothers Karamazov ‘the most magnificent novel ever written’.
A year after Dostoevsky died, and three years after he had written that ‘without God, everything is permitted’, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that ‘God is dead’. He had just embarked on the decade in which he would write all his best-known works of philosophy. In 1887, just over a year before he went mad, he encountered Dostoevsky’s Devils. He wrote in Twilight of the Idols that Dostoevsky was ‘the only psychologist . . . from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life.’ In January 1889, legend has it, Nietzsche saw a horse being flogged in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin and ran over to it, weeping as he threw his arms around its neck. It was his first act of insanity, or perhaps his last act of sanity.
As a new century dawned and Modernism destroyed the conventions of art, the significance of Dostoevsky as a novelist became clear to a new generation. Thinking back on the Russian suppression of the Polish uprising and the imprisonment of his father, Joseph Conrad wrote Under Western Eyes, explicitly responding to Crime and Punishment. Virginia Woolf found that ‘outside of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading’, and James Joyce saw Dostoevsky as ‘the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel.’
When the scholar Leonid Grossman met Anna Grigorievna over the course of the winter of 1916 in the newly renamed Petrograd,4 sh
e was still as sharp as a tack. ‘I am not living in the twentieth century,’449 she told him. ‘I have remained in the 1870s. My people are the friends of Fyodor Mikhailovich, my coterie a band of people who are gone. I live with them. And everyone who is studying the life or the works of Dostoevsky is a near relation.’
She lived alone, for the most part, helping to promote the works of Dostoevsky in Russia and abroad, delivering a comprehensive bibliography for a museum in Moscow, arranging the letters that she had meticulously kept and writing notes in the margins, transliterating parts of her diaries into longhand. ‘There are moments in the life of everyone, when one needs to be alone, to tear oneself from the habitual rut, to endure one’s sorrow away from the everyday bustle . . . I am deeply convinced that this continuous realisation of one’s designs is the only road to happiness. No, I can’t complain – I have known happiness.’
In 1917, the revolution that Dostoevsky had predicted half a century before came to her hotel, but the soldiers knew who she was and left her alone out of respect. That summer, she travelled to the Caucasus, where she caught malaria along with most of the village. Her son, Fyodor, wrote to tell her to move away – the nearby railway works were throwing up clouds of mosquitoes – so she went to Yalta.5
Anna soon became too weak to return to Petrograd. At the start of 1918, Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar, and Anna stuttered out of existence along with the rest of the country between Wednesday 31 January and Thursday 14 February. In the spring, the German army cut the line of communication with her son. With no money, and no way of getting money, she found herself starving. One day, a well-wisher gave her two pounds of black bread and she ate it all immediately, inflaming her intestines.6
On 5 June a letter was sent to relatives explaining that she was in a critical condition, but in the confusion of the war, the post was all going missing. ‘So,’ a relative explains, ‘sadly and in complete loneliness, without her children or relations, almost in poverty, died in the seventy-third year of her life Dostoevsky’s most devoted friend, who had done so much for the writer’s happiness during his life and for his name after his death.’450
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