Dostoevsky (166 page)

On returning to Petersburg on October 3, the Dostoevskys moved into a new apartment for reasons that Anna poignantly explains: “We could not bring ourselves to go on living in that apartment, filled with memories of our dead child.” Anna also dwells on the shadow that continued to hang over their lives because of Alyosha’s death. “No matter how my husband and I strove to submit to God’s will and not grieve, we could not forget our darling Alyosha. All that autumn and the following winter were darkened by desolate memories. Our loss had the effect on my husband (who had always been passionately attached to his children) of making him love them even more intensely and fear for them even more.”
³⁴
All this time Dostoevsky was working on
The Brothers Karamazov
, and the very problems raised in the impassioned declamations of Ivan—the unmerited suffering of little children and the difficulty of reconciling oneself to God’s will because of their torments—lay at the very center of his own life and feelings.

In the beginning of November 1878, with the first two books of
The Brothers Karamazov
completed, he traveled to Moscow to make the financial arrangements for publication. Dostoevsky called on Lyubimov, who was co-editor now of the
Russian Messenger
and would be in charge of publishing the novel. Katkov had fallen ill and could not receive Dostoevsky, who then felt obliged to assure Anna, who might be suspicious, that “of course he is not making excuses. He is really sick.” He himself was suffering from constipation and censoriously declares that “everything is vile.” “I am terribly lonely here,” he complains, “unbearably so.”
³⁵

Visits to his relatives provided the only bright spots in his unending catalogue of woes, though even with them the talk turned on Alyosha’s death. Nor was his temper improved by visits to the lawyers who were haggling over the details of the never-ending litigation concerning the Kumanina estate. Katkov’s cashier at long last came to the hotel with Dostoevsky’s advance, and he was able to leave Moscow two days later after tidying up his other affairs. The strain of this trip probably took its toll on Dostoevsky’s health. At the end of the month he visited his physician, Dr. von Bretsall, who advised him not to leave the house for several days.

¹
One symbolic indication of this new status was his election in 1878 to membership in the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Division of Russian Language and Literature. He was pleased with such official recognition, though remarking to his wife that, compared with some of his contemporaries, his thirty-three years of literary activity made the distinction rather belated. See Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 297.

²
An introduction to Feodorov’s thought can be found in George M. Young, Jr.,
Nikolai Feodorov
(Belmont, MA, 1979).

³
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 13–15; March 24, 1878.

⁴
Reminiscences
, 297.

⁵
Ibid., 325.

⁶
Quoted in Samuel Kucherov,
Courts, Lawyers, and Trials under the Last Three Tsars
(New York, 1953), 217.

⁷
G. K. Gradovsky,
Itogi, 1862–1907
(Kiev, 1908).

⁸
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 42–44; August 29, 1878.

⁹
Letopis zhizni i tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo
, ed. N. F. Budanova and G. M. Fridlender, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1995), 3: 243, 247.

¹⁰
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 21–25; April 18, 1878.

¹¹
Ibid.

¹²
Ibid., 40–41; July 21, 1878.

¹³
Reminiscences
, 297–298.

¹⁴
Grand Duke Konstantin, who had serious literary interests, later published poetry and plays under a pseudonym, and a number of his poems were set to music by Peter Tchaikovsky.

¹⁵
LN
86 (Moscow, 1973), 135.

¹⁶
Reminiscences
, 292.

¹⁷
Letopis
, 3: 273.

¹⁸
Reminiscences
, 292, 293.

¹⁹
Ibid., 294.

²⁰
Cited in John B. Dunlop,
Staretz Amvrosy
(Belmont, MA, 1972), 60–61.

²¹
Letopis
, 3: 279.

²²
Ibid.

²³
Reminiscences
, 291–292.

²⁴
V. S. Solovyev,
Sobranie sochinenii
, 10 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1911–1914), 3: 197.

²⁵
See Vladimir Solovyev,
Chteniya o bogochelovechestve
(St. Petersburg, 1994), 195–196.

²⁶
Friedrich Schiller,
Samtliche Werke
, 16 vols. (Stuttgart, n.d.), 3: 15.

²⁷
Ibid., 16.

²⁸
Translated literally, this reads: “Receive back my authorized permit to good fortune! / I return it to you unopened / I know nothing of happiness.”

²⁹
V. L. Komarovich, “Dostojewski und George Sand,” in
Die Urgestalt des Brüder Karamasoff
(Munich, 1928), 214–219.

³⁰
See the excellent book of Isabelle Hoog Naginski,
George Sand
(New Brunswick, NJ, 1991), 260. An appreciative discussion of
Spiridion
is contained in chapter 6.

³¹
Ibid., 146.

³²
Quoted in ibid., 149–150.

³³
Ibid., 150, 143.

³⁴
Reminiscences
, 294.

³⁵
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 48–49; November 9, 1878.

The first installment of
The Brothers Karamazov
was published on February 1, 1879. A few days later the governor-general of Kharkov—a cousin of the anarchist revolutionary Peter Kropotkin—was killed, and in March an unsuccessful attempt was made on the life of the new head of the secret police, the successor of General Mezentsev, as he was driving his carriage through the center of Petersburg. In April, a revolutionary acting on his own, but with the knowledge of the Populist Land and Liberty, attempted to assassinate the tsar as he was taking his morning walk in the Winter Palace grounds. The would-be assassin, Alexander Solovyev, missed his mark and was publicly hanged in May. It was in this atmosphere of murder and mayhem that Dostoevsky’s novel was being written and read. It was also the atmosphere in which he and Turgenev appeared together at benefit readings and banquets to represent the two extremes of the great debate that was taking place in the minds and hearts of all educated Russians—the debate between a despotic tsarism, unwilling to yield an inch of its authority, and the longing for a liberal, Western-style constitution that would allow for greater participation of the public in government affairs.

Just how intensively Dostoevsky was working at this time may be judged from the dispatch of
Chapters 6
–
11
of
The Brothers Karamazov
on January 31, even before the first installment had been published. The galleys of the first two chapters had just arrived, and he enlisted the help of Elena Shtakenshneider with the proofreading. She returned the proofs along with a request to send back a borrowed copy of Zola’s
L’Assomoir
. Dostoevsky evidently wished to keep up to date, and
The Brothers Karamazov
contains ironic references to the physiologist and psychologist Claude Bernard, the main source of Zola’s theories about heredity and environment. The literary prominence given by Zola to Bernard’s deterministic theories of human character imparted to the French novel an ideological as well as a literary significance. Dostoevsky was writing his own family novel, with its defense of the freedom of the human personality, in direct competition with Zola’s deterministic Rougon-Macquart series.

Just about this time, a young woman named E. P. Letkova-Sultanova (a
kursistka
in the higher education courses for women) wrote in her diary about a meeting with Dostoevsky at one of the famous Fridays of the poet Yakov Polonsky. Advancing into the drawing room, she saw everyone, dignified gentlemen and smartly dressed ladies, clustered around one of the three windows and intently listening to someone talking. Suddenly she recognized the voice of Dostoevsky and caught a glimpse of the speaker, whom she had never seen before. Her first impression did not correspond at all to the imperious image she had formed in her mind; he was shriveled, rather short, and struck her as someone who looked
vinovaty
, that is, as if he felt guilty about something. The window before which he stood gave onto Semenovsky Square; and he was holding the other guests spellbound as he relived the past. It was Polonsky who had led him to the window and asked if he recognized what he saw. “Yes! . . Yes! . . . Really! . . . How could I not recognize it,” he had replied.
¹

Dostoevsky’s words came tumbling out in a stream of spasmodic sentences. He evoked the freezing coldness of the morning, and the horror that overcame him and the other Petrashevtsy as they heard the death sentence being pronounced. “It could not be that I, amidst all the thousands who were alive—in something like five to six minutes would no longer exist!” The appearance of a priest holding a cross convinced them that death was inevitable. “They could not joke even with the cross! . . . They could not stage such a tragicomedy!” Dostoevsky remembered that a feeling of numbness and torpor overcame him: “Everything seemed insignificant compared to this last terrible minute of transition to somewhere, . . . to the unknown, to darkness”; and this numbness did not lift even after he learned that their lives had been spared. Polonsky approached him to break the tension and said consolingly, “Well, all this is past and gone,” inviting him to drink tea with their hostess. “Is it really gone?” Dostoevsky whispered.
²
The indelible impact of this confrontation with death had exercised a decisive effect on the remainder of his days.

Letkova was deeply moved by Dostoevsky’s words, uttered in breathless bursts, and she describes him, when he finished, standing “as if a waxen figure: sallow and pale, eyes sunken, lips bloodless, smiling but with a look of suffering.”
³
Her opinion of Dostoevsky up to that moment had been anything but favorable, and she tells of the heated discussions in her student group caused by each issue of the
Diary
. It was generally agreed that his anti-Semitism was intolerable; nor could they endorse the warmongering chauvinism of his articles about the Russo-Turkish War, whose sacrifice in human lives now seemed so vain and futile. Letkova and her fellow students had unanimously detested
Demons
, and felt light-years removed from Dostoevsky’s political tendency and ideas.

All this was forgotten, however, in the aftermath of what she had just heard. What now emerged before her mind’s eye was “his entire sacrificial path: the torture of awaiting death, its replacement by
katorga
, the ‘House of the Dead’ with all its horrors: and all this had been borne by this puny man, who suddenly appeared to me greater than everyone surrounding him.” Everything else vanished into oblivion before this vision, and “a feeling of unbelievable happiness, the happiness one can only feel when young, took hold of me. And I wanted to throw myself on my knees and bow down to his sufferings.”
⁴

Everyone had read
House of the Dead
, and the emotion she experienced was widely shared by all those who, at one public event or another, had listened to him read. Her reaction thus helps to explain some of the astonishing responses called forth by Dostoevsky’s presence on the platform before a mass audience—an audience that, in the majority and at a more sober moment, could well have been antagonistic to his politics. If it was true, as he untiringly maintained, that the Russian peasants particularly revered the suffering of their Christian saints who had endured martyrdom for their faith, then some of this reverence appears to have been transferred—by the new generation who once again accepted the value of suffering and self-sacrifice—to Dostoevsky himself.