Dostoevsky (96 page)

Returning to the immediate situation, Dostoevsky sees his position as hopeless: “But in order to begin I need, and right away, at least 3,000 rubles. I am beating the bushes trying to get it—otherwise, I am done for. I feel that only an accident can save me. What remains from all the reserve of strength and energy in my soul is something troubled and disturbed, something close to despair. Worry, bitterness, a complete cold industriousness, the most abnormal state for me to be in, and in addition loneliness—of all my past forty years, nothing remains to me. And yet it still seems to me that I am just now preparing to live. Funny, isn’t it? The vitality of a cat.”
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Nothing could have been more unexpected than this last remark, and yet nothing is more characteristic of the man who had not allowed himself to be crushed by the house of the dead and who, no matter how desperate his situation, had never given way to a paralyzing despondency. Dostoevsky, after all, believed in the freedom of the will, and in his case this conviction sprang from the deepest resources of his personality. There is never a moment in Dostoevsky’s life when we can catch him giving up entirely, never a moment when—in the wreckage of whatever hopes he may have been building on, or whatever disaster has overtaken him—he is not making plans for the future and feeling the same surge of energy and expectation to which he so surprisingly gives expression here.

Time had already proceeded with its healing work, and just a month or two before his letter to Wrangel, Dostoevsky had probably struck up a liaison—for how long it is hard to say—with a worldly-wise and emotionally battered woman by the name of Martha Brown. Also, in that very month of April, just as he was completing his letter to Wrangel, Dostoevsky proposed marriage to the beautiful and rebellious young daughter of a wealthy, highly placed family, Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, whose short stories he had printed in
Epoch
and whose talent he had encouraged. The sudden shift so noticeable in the letter—the abrupt transition from past to present—may be attributed to such events, when a resurgence of faith in the future suddenly intruded on the melancholy past that he was recalling. Indeed, an entirely new life for Dostoevsky was to begin in a little more than a year, when he would marry another young woman and then flee to Europe for a prolonged exile in order to escape his creditors.

Dostoevsky first heard of Martha Brown from the man with whom she was then living, a minor contributor to
Epoch
named Peter Gorsky. He was one of the numerous denizens of St. Petersburg’s literary Grub Street who clustered around
the various publications, eking out a beggarly existence on the edge of destitution and often supplementing their literary labors with manual work. All that we know of the relations between Dostoevsky and Martha Brown is contained in a handful of letters written by her between November 1864 and January 1865, which raises the possibility that the two became lovers.

Her real name, which Dostoevsky may never have learned, was Elizaveta Andreyevna Chlebnikova, and she was the wayward daughter of a landowning family (her maiden name had been Panina) who had received some education and could write a literary Russian. An adventurous existence had taken her over most of Western Europe in the company of various men—a Hungarian, an Englishman, and a Frenchman, among others. On first setting foot in England, without a penny and ignorant of the language, she had tried to take her life in despair and was saved by the police. For some weeks she lived under the bridges of the Thames among other vagabonds. Thanks to the zeal of various missionaries concerned to save her soul, she acquired English rapidly; and a charitable Methodist pastor, impressed by her knowledge of the Bible and ability to recite the Lord’s Prayer in English, took her to live with his family on the Isle of Guernsey. With the blessing of her patron, she married a sailor named Brown, and she then lived (one assumes as Mrs. Brown) in Weymouth, Brighton, and London. When or why the marriage ended is unknown; equally obscure is what brought Martha Brown back to Russia, where, as she remarks, many people no longer thought she was Russian at all.

Her first letter to Dostoevsky is a formal reply to an offer of work as a translator; the others are an appeal to Dostoevsky, as someone with position and moral authority, to intervene with Gorsky and attempt to bring him to his senses. By this time she was occupying a bed in the Peter and Paul Hospital, where Gorsky had shown up to exhibit his displeasure and make a drunken scene. Two letters indicate that, although now fully recovered, she preferred to remain in the disease-ridden hospital rather than lapse back into a life of misery and abuse with Gorsky. The last letter, dated sometime in the second half of January 1865, reveals a new state of affairs. Brown, living in the city, is no longer with Gorsky. The letter suggests some previous conversation between the pair about Martha Brown coming to stay with Dostoevsky as his mistress. “In any case,” she goes on, “whether I can succeed or not in satisfying you in a physical sense, and whether there will exist between us that spiritual harmony on which will depend the continuance of our acquaintance, believe me when I say that I shall always remain grateful that you favored me with your friendship. . . . I swear to you that I have never, until now, resolved to be as frank with anyone as I have ventured to be with you.”
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“Forgive me for this egoistic admission,” she continues, “but so much grief, despair, and hopelessness has accumulated in my soul during these past two years, which I have spent in Russia as in a prison, that, as God is my witness, I am happy, I am fortunate, to have met a man possessing such calmness of soul, such patience, such good sense and righteousness as could be found neither in Flemming [an earlier lover] nor in Gorsky. I am absolutely indifferent at present as to whether our relation will be long or short. But I swear to you that what I value, incomparably more than any material gain, is that you were not squeamish about the fallen side of my personality, that you placed me higher than I stand in my own estimation.”
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Whether this letter led to the love affair she so obviously desired, or whether such an affair had already begun, cannot be determined.

At the same time as this final letter from Brown, Dostoevsky also received another from a young woman with whom he was soon to fall in love. Her name was Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, and two of her stories had been printed in
Epoch
during the previous months, but both had appeared under a pseudonym. For Miss Korvin-Krukovskaya, who had sent the stories in secret to the magazine, was the elder daughter of a retired lieutenant-general with strict principles about the behavior of his female folk. A gentleman of the old school, strongly imbued with the sense of his own importance and the dignity of his family, he lived with his much younger wife and two daughters on his estate at Palibino in the depths of the countryside near Vitebsk on the Polish-Russian border. Young Anna, then all of twenty-two, had hidden her literary exploits from her father, if not from her sister Sofya—later to become famous under the name of Kovalevskaya as the first woman to hold a chair of mathematics in Europe—and dispatched them with the conspiratorial aid of the estate steward. Sofya’s memoirs allow us to peer into the recesses of this isolated nest of gentlefolk in the Russian provinces, out of which would emerge two extraordinary women with whom Dostoevsky maintained cordial relations throughout the remainder of his life.

General Korvin-Krukovsky had little taste for the social frivolities of Petersburg. But, in deference to the desires of his more convivial spouse, and also to introduce his daughters to a wider range of suitors, he allowed them to plunge into the fashionable Petersburg whirl each year for a period of a month. The letter Dostoevsky received from Anna on February 28 signified that one of these annual descents on Petersburg relatives was impending, and informed him that the Korvin-Krukovskys would be glad to receive a visit if notified in advance of his intention to call. Since Dostoevsky was a noted author who had accepted the fledgling literary efforts of their daughter, such an invitation would seem the least that might be expected. In fact, however, permission to extend it had been
granted to Anna only after a long struggle against the deeply rooted prejudices of her suspicious and disgruntled father.

The general had met one Russian literary lady as a young man, the then reigning society belle Countess Rostopchina, and he had chanced on her again years later at the gambling tables of Baden-Baden behaving in a distinctly unladylike manner. Such was the inevitable fate of all Russian authoresses, and when he discovered by accident that his own Anyuta was glorifying in this dubious appellation, he flew into such a rage that his frightened family feared he would be felled by a stroke. To make matters worse, the encouraging letter from Dostoevsky that he read also contained payment for Anna’s contributions to
Epoch
. “Anything can be expected from young ladies who are capable, unbeknownst to their father and mother, of entering into correspondence with an unknown man and receiving money from him!” he thundered. “Now you are selling your stories, but the time may come, perhaps, when you will sell yourself!”
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After this first paroxysm of wrath, the general relapsed into sullen silence. Permission was given to Anna to meet Dostoevsky on the next trip to Petersburg only after much maneuvering on the part of the women. But the general, though kindhearted enough under his forbidding exterior, still felt uneasy, and prudently admonished his wife to be on her guard. “Remember, Lisa, that you have a great responsibility,” he told her before departure. “Dostoevsky is not a person of our society. What do we know about him? Only that he is a journalist and former convict. Quite a recommendation! To be sure! We must be very careful with him.”
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Such were the origins of the letter that Dostoevsky received inviting him to call on the family in Petersburg.

Shortly after their arrival in Petersburg, in the early spring of 1865, the Korvin-Krukovskys received Dostoevsky for the first time; and the long-awaited visit, anticipated by Anna with such eagerness and trepidation, turned out to be a catastrophe. Strictly conforming to her husband’s parting injunctions, Anna’s mother insisted on being present; Sofya too, consumed with curiosity, had received permission to remain in the living room; two elderly Russian-German aunts, finding one pretext or another to enter and catch a glimpse of the famous author, finally installed themselves there for good. Furious at this solemn assemblage, Anna exhibited her displeasure by silence. Dostoevsky too, taken aback at being forced to confront such a forbidding gathering, failed to respond to Mme Korvin-Krukovskaya’s polite conversation. “He seemed old and sickly that day,” Sofya recalled, “as was always the case, incidentally, when he was in low spirits.”
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After half an hour of this slow torture, Dostoevsky seized his hat and hastily departed. Anna ran into her room, uncontrollably burst into
tears, and her reproaches soon reduced her mother to the same lachrymose condition.

Five days later, Dostoevsky called again unexpectedly and found only the two girls at home. He and Anna immediately engaged in eager conversation, as if they had been old friends, and matters could not have gone more swimmingly. He seemed to Sofya to be quite another person, much younger than before and marvelously kind and clever; she could hardly believe that he was all of forty-four years old! When their mother returned home, she was startled and a little frightened to find Dostoevsky ensconced there alone with her daughters, but the two were so radiantly happy that she promptly invited him to stay for dinner. The ice was finally broken, and Dostoevsky now began to call on the Korvin-Krukovskys two or three times a week.

Dostoevsky, however, was a guest who sometimes shocked the strait-laced household, concerned to guard against any improprieties in the conduct of the unexpected friend of their daughters. According to Sofya, Dostoevsky once told his spellbound female audience about a novel he had intended to write in the days of his youth. He had wished, he said, to depict an educated and cultivated gentleman who, traveling abroad, wakes one morning in his sunny hotel room filled with a sense of physical contentment and self-satisfaction. But he suddenly begins to feel uneasy, and as he concentrates his thoughts, he recalls an incident from the distant past. Once, after a riotous night, and spurred on by drunk companions, he had violated a ten-year-old girl . . . But at this moment Mme Korvin-Krukovskaya broke in with a horrified shriek: “Feodor Mikhailovich! For pity’s sake! There are children present!”
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To what extent Dostoevsky’s referral of this literary idea to the days of his “youth” should be taken as literally true can only remain a matter for speculation; the juxtaposition of refined aestheticism and lustful depravity emerges in his works sharply only after his return from Siberia in the 1860s. Yet his lifelong preoccupation, and what some have considered his pathological obsession, with this scabrous theme can hardly be doubted. Sometime in the late 1870s Dostoevsky was sitting in another drawing room when the question arose of what should be considered the greatest crime on earth.