Dostoevsky (116 page)

Anna’s forbearance, whatever prodigies of self-command it may have cost her, was amply compensated for (in her eyes) by Dostoevsky’s immense gratitude and growing attachment. When Anna remarked once that she may have affected his luck adversely, Dostoevsky replied, “ ‘Anna, my little blessing, whenever I die remember only how I blessed you for the luck you brought me,’ adding that no greater good fortune had ever come his way, that God had been lavish indeed in bestowing me upon him, and that every day he prayed for me and only feared one day all this might alter, that to-day I both loved and pitied him, but once my love were to cease, then nothing would be the same.” “That, however,” Anna hastens to write, “will never happen, and I am quite certain we shall always love one another as passionately as we do now.”
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“One had to come to terms with it,” she wrote in her memoirs many years later, “to look at his gambling passion as a disease for which there was no
cure.”
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Such a conclusion merely extended to gambling the same attitude she took toward Dostoevsky’s personal irritability. Although this trait often led to an abusive treatment of herself as well as others, she blamed Dostoevsky’s epilepsy and refused to accept it as his genuine nature. On the morning after the seizure mentioned, she noted, “Poor Feodor, he does suffer so much after his attacks and is always so irritable, and liable to fly out about trifles, so that I have to bear a good deal in these days of illness. It’s of no consequence, because the other days are very good, when he is so sweet and gentle. Besides, I can see that when he screams at me it is from illness, not from bad temper.”
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As the nerve-racking days passed without noticeable change, so that no end seemed in sight, even Anna’s apparently infinite indulgence began to wear thin. Just after Dostoevsky had gone to pawn her brooch and earrings, she writes, “I could no longer control myself and began to cry bitterly. It was no ordinary weeping, but a dreadful convulsive sort of sobbing, that brought on a terrible pain in my breast, and relieved me not in the slightest. . . . I began to envy all the other people in the world, who all seemed to me to be happy, and only ourselves—or so it seemed to me—completely miserable.”
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Anna confesses to herself that she wished Dostoevsky to stay away as long as possible; but when he returned that day to tell her he had lost the money obtained for her jewelry, and wept as he said “Now I have stolen your last things from you and played them away!” she sank on her knees before his chair to try and calm his wretchedness. “Do what I might to comfort him, I couldn’t stop him from crying.”
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There are only a few instances in which she openly criticizes her husband; and these outbursts are always motivated by his incessant concern for the family of his dead brother. None of the torments of her present situation would bother her at all, Anna insisted, “if I knew that all this misery was unavoidable, but that we should have to suffer so that an Emilya Feodorovna and her lot can live in clover, and that I should have to pawn my coat so that she can have one, arouses a feeling within me the reverse of nice, and it hurts me to find such thoughtlessness and so little understanding and human kindness in anyone I love and prize so much.” This is the most extreme upsurge of revolt in the Baden pages of her diary, and just a few sentences later, Anna shrinks back from her own audacity: “I am furious with myself for harboring such horrid thoughts against my dear, sweet, kind husband, I am a horrid creature, surely.”
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Dostoevsky had written Katkov again for another advance, though he had hesitated doing so from Baden-Baden, whose reputation as a gambling spa would make the reason for this new appeal evident; but he swallowed his pride in the face of dire necessity. Meanwhile, scenes of the kind already described were repeated daily, and when their last resource—her mother—seemed to be exhausted, Anna began to display her dissatisfaction more openly. “I told him . . . for a whole month I had borne it and said not a word, even when there was nothing else left to us, for still I could hope from some help from Mama, but that now everything was finished, it is impossible to ask Mama for any more, and I would be, moreover, ashamed to do it.”
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She turned on Dostoevsky just after receiving a letter from her mother and learning that their furniture might be lost. “When Feodor began to speak of ‘the damned furniture,’ it hurt me so that I began to weep bitterly, and he was quite unable to calm me down. . . . I simply could not control myself, and said the very idea of winning a fortune through roulette was utterly ridiculous, and in my anger I jibed at him, calling him a ‘benefactor of humanity.’ . . . I am quite convinced that, even if we did win, it would only be to the benefit of all those horrid people, and we should not profit one jot or tittle.” Hurt by Anna’s phrase, Dostoevsky accused her the next day of being “harsh”; and this charge led to an explosion in the diary, where she lists all her many grievances and regretfully compares her own forbearance with the abusiveness of Dostoevsky’s first wife. “It isn’t worthwhile controlling oneself,” she writes. “Marya Dimitrievna never hesitated to call him a rogue and a rascal and a criminal, and to her he was like an obedient dog.”
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On July 21/August 2, Anna received another money order from her mother, and with this amount, combined with Dostoevsky’s recent winnings, they at last had enough to pay their debts, redeem everything in pawn, cover their fare to Geneva, and live there until Katkov’s next advance arrived. Anna mentions beginning to pack and making “various preparations for the journey.”
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Dostoevsky promptly began to gamble furiously on the very day these entries were made; and Anna, who was feeling unwell, flared up with indignation as he returned home with the usual litany and demands. Luckily he managed to win that evening and replenish their treasury.

The next day, having gone off to reclaim Anna’s jewelry and wedding ring in the morning, Dostoevsky returned at eight in the evening and “at once turned on me in an outburst of wrath and tears, informing me that he had lost every single penny of the money I had given him to redeem our things with. . . . Feodor called himself an unutterable scoundrel, saying that he was unworthy of
me, that I had no business to forgive him, and all the time he never stopped crying. At last I succeeded in calming him down, and we resolved to go away from here tomorrow.”
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She then accompanied him to the pawnbroker, fearing to entrust him with another sum, after which they both went to the station to inquire about schedules.

Dostoevsky continued to gamble on their very last day and lost fifty francs that Anna had given him, as well as twenty more obtained from pawning a ring. Now short of funds for the trip, they pawned Anna’s earrings again, redeemed the wedding ring, and bought their tickets. Just an hour and a half before departure, Dostoevsky returned to the casino with twenty francs for a last fling—of course to no avail. Anna jots down laconically: “I told him not to be hysterical, but to help me fasten the trunks and pay the landlady.”
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After settling accounts, which turned out to be an unpleasant affair, they finally left for the station. Nobody—not even the servant girls, whom Anna thought she had treated with consideration, and whose ingratitude she censures—bothered to bid them farewell.

In the opening pages of his novel
Smoke
, Turgenev vividly sketches the fashionable crowd thronging about the Konversationshaus in Baden-Baden. This was the name of the main building of the spa; it contained the notorious gambling rooms in its central portion, a reading room in the right wing, and a famous restaurant and café on the left. The ladies in their glittering frocks recalled for Turgenev “the intensified brilliance and light fluttering of birds in the spring, with their rainbow-tinted wings.”
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Poor Anna disliked going there because of the shabbiness of her one black dress, though she was driven by sheer tedium to visit the reading room stacked with French, German, and Russian journals.

Not far from the café was a spot known as the “Russian tree,” where the numerous Russian visitors were accustomed to assemble, exchange the latest gossip, and perhaps also to catch a glimpse of the most distinguished Russian inhabitant of the city, Turgenev. Dostoevsky never frequented the “Russian tree,” and he was perhaps the only Russian who had no interest whatever in seeing or being seen by Turgenev—indeed, who hoped fervently that neither he nor Turgenev would catch sight of the other at all. Turgenev was one of the few people to whom Dostoevsky had turned while trapped in Wiesbaden and the debt hung over him. As luck would have it, just a few days after arriving in Baden-Baden, Dostoevsky was strolling with Anna when he ran into Ivan Goncharov, the author of
Oblomov
, whom he once described as a person with “the soul of a petty official . . . and the eyes of a steamed fish, whom God, as if for a joke, has
endowed with a brilliant talent.”
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Goncharov told the Dostoevskys how “Turgenev had caught sight of Feodor yesterday; but had said nothing to him knowing how gamblers do not like to be spoken to.”
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It was now incumbent on Dostoevsky to pay a call on Turgenev. “As Feodor owes Turgenev fifty rubles, he must make a point of going to see him, or otherwise Turgenev will think Feodor stays away from him for fear of being asked for money.”
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Badly bruised by the altercation over
Fathers and Children
, Turgenev had retired to Baden-Baden to lick his wounds. Even an old friend and natural ally such as Herzen had turned against Turgenev’s moderate pro-Western liberalism, which shrank back before the specter of revolution. A brilliant series of articles,
Ends and Beginnings
, published by Herzen in
The Bell
during 1862–1863, constituted a direct onslaught on Turgenev’s most cherished convictions—and brought forth an equally famous reply. One cannot live without a God, Turgenev bitingly wrote in a personal letter, and Herzen “has raised [his] altar at the feet of the sheepskin [the Russian peasant], the mysterious God of whom one knows practically nothing.”
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This sharp divergence of political ideals was further envenomed by a nasty reference in
The Bell
that described Turgenev (without mentioning his name) as “losing sleep, appetite, his white hair and teeth” because of fear that the tsar did not know of his repentance.
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This was an allusion to a letter from Turgenev to the tsar, written when his name became involved in an investigation, futilely requesting that he not be recalled to Russia to testify, and untruthfully disclaiming any connection with the revolutionary propaganda emanating from London through Herzen’s Free Russian Press.

Echoes of this fierce quarrel resound all through
Smoke
and are responsible for some of its harshest passages, aimed at the Slavophilism of both the right and the left. Turgenev’s sharpest barbs are reserved for those of whatever political stripe who harbor any hope of a special destiny reserved for Russia and its people. Turgenev’s spokesman is a minor character named Potugin, who declares that if Russia were suddenly to disappear from the face of the earth, with everything it had created, the event would occur “without disarranging a single nail in the place . . . for even the
samovar
, the woven bast shoes, the yoke-bridle and the knout—these are our most famous products—were not invented by us.”
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The publication of Turgenev’s novel in April 1867 blew up a storm even more furious than the one attending
Fathers and Children
, and this time the novelist was assailed from all sides and by everybody. Annenkov wrote him, just after its
appearance in the pages of
The Russian Messenger
, that “The majority are frightened by a novel inviting them to believe that all of the Russian aristocracy, yes, and all of Russian life, is an abomination.”
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So outraged was good society, to which Turgenev belonged by birth and breeding, that the members of the exclusive English Club were on the point of writing him a collective letter excluding him from their midst (the letter was never sent, but a zealous “friend” informed Turgenev of the incident). Writing to Dostoevsky in late May 1867, Maikov brought him up to date on the Russian reaction: “The admirers of
Smoke
,” he says, “are found only among the Polonophils.”
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Dostoevsky’s reaction to the novel, which he had read before leaving Russia, was much the same; and the quarrel between the two men thus contained a social-cultural dimension as well as a purely personal and temperamental one.