Dostoevsky (122 page)

Another important note indicates Dostoevsky’s further reflections on the problem broached two months earlier in his letter to his niece—“How make the hero’s personality sympathetic to the reader? . . . If Don Quixote and Pickwick as philanthropists are sympathetic to the reader, it is because they are comical. The hero of this novel, the Prince, is not comical but does have another sympathetic quality: he is innocent” (9: 239–240). Both Don Quixote and Pickwick are also innocent, but become laughable because of the mocking attitude taken toward them by others. The Prince overcomes the initial suspicions of others by the evident sincerity of his ingenuousness—his total candor, his lack of any normal social vanity, his impassioned sympathy with human suffering (as in his discourses about capital punishment)—and there is as well an implicit recognition that his innocence, which discloses what others strive to keep hidden, possibly embodies a higher wisdom in the manner of the Russian “holy fools” (
yurodivy
). And so Myshkin’s bizarreries are very early endowed with a suggested religious aura.

Well into the month of April, Dostoevsky set down one of his major difficulties, which he never did solve satisfactorily: “little by little showing
the Prince in
a field of action
. . . . But for that
the plot of the novel
is essential.” The “plot” that Dostoevsky envisaged, however, was not one that he was able to incarnate artistically. “He [Myshkin] rehabilitates N. F. and exerts an ascendancy over Rogozhin. He induces humility in Aglaya, he drives the General’s wife to distraction with her . . . adoration of him” (9: 252). Except for this last reference to Mme Epanchina’s affection for the prince, none of these happy results of Myshkin’s influence are found in the text, and the lack of such a plot in the middle sections of the novel constitutes a major structural deficiency. In addition to wrestling with the problems of theme and temporal sequence, Dostoevsky was also concerned with the technique he should use as narrator. Here we can follow the analysis of Robin Feuer Miller, who points to the following passage as a key statement: “N.B. Why not present the character of the Prince enigmatically
throughout the entire novel
, from time to time defining by means of details (more fantastically and more questioningly, arousing curiosity) and suddenly to elucidate his character at the end. . .” (9: 220).

On the basis of this passage, Miller characterizes Dostoevsky’s narrative stance in
The Idiot
as a combination of “enigma with explanation,” and cites other notes in which Dostoevsky indicates his wish to “balance one with the other.”
¹⁴
There was to be an aura of mystery around the Prince, which the explanations of the garrulous narrator only
enhance
rather than dispel. “Write more concisely: only the facts,” Dostoevsky admonishes himself, “without reasoning and without a description of feelings.” But then he adds, “Write in the sense of
people say
 . . .” (9: 235). In other words, the narrator would report the facts as he knew them but would not be omniscient, and many “facts” would be simply gossip and rumor—the legend, as it were—that accumulates around the prince’s actions and behavior. As Miller acutely remarks, “this grouping of narrative methods has the effect of placing the facts on the side of rumor and mystery rather than on the side of description and explanation.”
¹⁵

A note sketching the final chapters in which the Prince prepares for his wedding with Nastasya reveals more about Dostoevsky’s narrative stance: “(The Prince is insane—according to general rumor that is), and except for a few people they all desert him” (9: 258). This desertion of the Prince in the face of the scandal he has provoked prefigures the attitude of the narrator in these concluding pages, who relays all the various distorted and malicious explanations of the Prince’s decision. Dostoevsky thus deliberately envisages in advance the abandonment of the Prince by the narrator, who continues to remain on the level of “people say,” and for whom the Prince becomes an inexplicable enigma. This limitation of the narrator, however, is part of Dostoevsky’s effort to present
Myshkin’s behavior as transcending
all
the categories of worldly moral-social experience.

Sometime in the latter part of April, Dostoevsky interrupted his work on the plans for the novel as a whole and managed to write the opening two chapters of
Part II
, which appeared in the May issue of
The Russian Messenger
, and he continued to work without interruption on the next three chapters. Meanwhile, his financial situation had worsened because of a few days of gambling at Saxon-les-Bains. Dostoevsky’s luck was even worse than usual on this occasion, and he gambled away all his money in the first half-hour of play. His letters to Anna (two on the same day) are filled with the usual semihysterical apologies, this time with additional self-castigations. Referring to his wife’s “troubles” in caring for Sofya, he adds, “Of whom I am not worthy. What kind of a father am I?”
¹⁶
He had intended to write Katkov and apologize for the scantiness of the chapters he had barely managed to send after a month’s respite, but for obvious reasons of literary pride had put off this demeaning task. Now, however, he sketches for Anna’s benefit a letter to Katkov in which he asks for a new advance to allow him to work more productively by moving his family to Vevey. “I will remain in complete solitude until I finish the novel. . . . Meanwhile, . . . we can bring up our child without fearing that she will catch cold in being exposed to the sudden local
bise
(the north wind from the mountains).”
¹⁷

Alas for the poor Dostoevskys, the very danger they had wished to guard against was exactly what occurred. Anna’s mother arrived in the early days of May, and Sofya was christened on May 4; her godparents were Mme Snitkina and Apollon Maikov. Misfortune struck just at the moment when the worst seemed over. Anna had been advised by the doctor to walk in the park with Sofya so that she could benefit from the fresh air, and when the weather turned mild and radiant in early May his counsel was zealously followed. But the hated
bise
blew in unexpectedly one day and Sofya caught a chill; it developed into an inflammation of the lungs in the course of a week, and though the worried parents were assured of recovery by the doctor just three hours before the end, she was carried off on May 12. Dostoevsky “sobbed and wept like a woman,” his wife writes, “standing in front of the body of his darling as it grew cold, and covering her tiny white face and hands with burning kisses. I never again saw such paroxysms of grief.”
¹⁸

A week later, the depth of Dostoevsky’s grief is revealed in a heartrending letter to Maikov. “Oh, Apollon Nikolaevich, what does it matter that my love for
my first child may have been ridiculous, that I expressed myself ridiculously about her in letters to those congratulating me. . . . This tiny, three months old being, so pitiful, so miniscule—for me was already a person, a character. She began to recognize me, to love me, to smile when I approached, when I, with my ridiculous voice, sang to her, she liked to listen. She did not cry or wrinkle her face when I kissed her; she ceased to cry when I approached. And now they tell me, in consolation, that I will have other children. But where is Sofya? Where is that little individual for whom, I dare to say, I would have accepted crucifixion so that she might live?”
¹⁹

All the more pathetic, and indicating the abyss of loneliness and desolation into which Dostoevsky had been plunged, is his request that Maikov say nothing as yet of Sofya’s death to Dostoevsky’s family. “It seems to me that not only will none of them feel sorry for my child but even, perhaps, feel the opposite, and the very thought of this fills me with bitterness. Of what is this poor little thing guilty of in their eyes? Let them hate me, let them laugh at me and my love—it makes no difference.”
²⁰
After they buried Sofya on May 24, the atmosphere of Geneva became intolerable to the Dostoevskys. They would have dearly wished to quit the country and travel to Italy, but this was impossible financially. Besides, it would take too much time from
The Idiot
, and their livelihood depended on the continuation of the novel for which Katkov was waiting. With a liberality that astonished Dostoevsky himself, Katkov again acceded to the plea of his tardy contributor and sent the requested new advance. The heartbroken pair, accompanied by Anna’s mother, moved only as far as Vevey, where Dostoevsky, choking back his inconsolable sorrow, continued to toil unremittingly at his novel.

The very first letter that Dostoevsky wrote from Vevey was an answer to one received from Pasha. “Oh, Pasha, I feel so low, so bitter that I would rather be dead. If you love me, pity me.”
²¹
Most of the letter is given over to practical matters, which could not have been worse. With the aid of Dostoevsky’s friends, especially Maikov, Pasha had obtained two jobs as a clerk in various offices, but he had left both after a short time because he had felt insulted by the treatment received from his superiors. When Dostoevsky heard this news from Maikov, he could not control his anger: “What a mentality, what opinions and ideas, what braggadocio!” he exploded to Maikov. “It’s typical. But then, on the other hand—how can I abandon him?”
²²

The death of little Sofya haunted him continually, and it is in his letters to Maikov that he expresses the full extent of his mourning. “Apollon Nikolaevich,
my friend,” he writes pitiably. “Never have I been as unhappy . . . as time passes, the memory and the image of the departed Sonya stands before me more and more sharply etched. There are moments that are almost impossible to bear. . . . Never will I forget, and never will I stop torturing myself !” Besides his own torment, Anna “is terribly melancholy, cries through entire nights, and this has a very bad effect on her health.”
²³
Coming to Vevey was a frightful mistake and was worse than Geneva, especially for Anna, who needed some cultural distraction, but given their limited resources no other alternative had been possible.

In mid-July Dostoevsky wrote to Maikov, complaining that he was sure his correspondence was being intercepted and delayed. Some well-wisher of Dostoevsky’s had informed him anonymously that an order had been issued by the secret police to search him if and when he crossed the Russian border. These instructions, circulated at the end of November 1867, no doubt were the result of the following notation in the files of the Third Section: “Among the overexcitable [
eksaltirovannikh
] Russians now present in Geneva, [our] agent names Dostoevsky, who is very friendly with Ogarev.”
²⁴
Dostoevsky’s frequentation of the notorious revolutionary had thus brought him under suspicion.

“The Petersburg police,” he told Maikov, “open
all
my letters, and since the Orthodox priest in Geneva, according to everything known (note that these are not suspicions, but facts), works for the secret police, the post office in Geneva (with whom he has secret connections) delays letters addressed to me, and this I know full well.” “This is why,” Dostoevsky continues, “I am firmly convinced that my letter never reached you, and that your letter has gone astray.” And then the outrageousness of the situation suddenly sweeps over him, and he cannot contain his anger: “N.B. But how can someone like myself, an honest man, a patriot, who has delivered himself into their hands to the point of betraying my previous convictions, idolizing the tsar—how can I bear to be suspected of some sort of connection with some sort of Polacks or
The Bell
! Fools, fools! . . . Really, they should know that the Nihilists, the liberals of
The Contemporary
, for three years running now have thrown mud at me because I broke with them, hate the Polacks and love my Fatherland. Oh, the scoundrels!”
²⁵

Maikov had already told Dostoevsky three months earlier that “among us, it is said, even in the higher circles, many do not know the difference between Katkov and Chernyshevsky, between writers devoted to Russia and the Sovereign to the marrow of their bones and the revolutionaries.”
²⁶
Now he attempted to console his friend with a story making the rounds that the letters of Katkov
and Ivan Aksakov (the Slavophil editor) were also being read, and in the list of their suspicious correspondents was found the inheritor to the Russian throne. “Why should we take offense,” Maikov asks jocularly, “if even he is listed in the category of suspects by the temporarily dominating party?”
²⁷