Picked-Up Pieces (22 page)

Reading through
The Gambler
and its attendant documents produces several unexpected impressions—chief among them that the lovers did not much like one another. Indeed, through the mist of egoistical preoccupations they hardly
saw
each other. Polina’s story “The Stranger and Her Lover” betrays no awareness that she is representing, in fictional guise, one of the century’s most fascinating spirits: “He started telling her various anecdotes and stories from his own life. These tales might have been, perhaps, of some interest to other people, but Anna saw little wit, and even less refinement, about them.” Once Dostoevsky returns to Russia, he drops out of her diary with scarcely a thud, to be replaced by a titillating series of (at the least) flirtations. Mr. Wasiolek, in his introduction, protests: “one is dismayed to find that it is only our interest that
lifts the image of Dostoevsky in her diary from the mesh of her prosaisms.” The literary scholar, necessarily in love with greatness, cannot help scolding this mediocre little blue-stocking who, awarded the living Dostoevsky’s love, betrayed him with a—Wasiolek’s phrase—“trivial and insensitive medical student.” Worse yet, in her fictional representation Dostoevsky appears “petty, boastful, and vulgar; his only redeeming features consist in his appreciation of her majestic character and beauty, in his astonishment at having possessed her, and in his contrition at having lost her.” It is true that Polina’s “The Stranger and Her Lover” is pitiably inept and self-promoting; the persistently “majestic” heroine obtusely refuses to perceive that her one ticket to significance, from the standpoint of posterity, lies with this repulsive, repelled lover, whose immortal genius is never for an instant permitted to wink through the vapors of her narcissism.

But does Polina fare better in Dostoevsky’s version of their affair, in the minor masterpiece
The Gambler
? Not much. The pages dealing with “Polina Aleksandrovna” and her willful abuse of the infatuated “Aleksei Ivanovich” seem rather perfunctory, as though the author were blocking out an idea instead of giving flesh to inspiration. “I simply don’t understand what I find in her. All right, she is beautiful, that she is; or it seems that she is. She drives other men out of their minds, too. She is tall and slender, though very slim. It seems as if one could tie her in a knot or bend her double. Her foot is long and narrow: tormenting. Exactly so: tormenting.” The focus is on the torment, not on the woman. When she dares Aleksei to insult a passing baron, the vivacity of the incident depends on his zealous willingness to play the fool; he overreacts to her, as he overreacts to the seductive spin of the roulette wheel. Her moods, indeed, have for Aleksei the blind chanciness of roulette, and they offer him the same opportunity to humiliate and impoverish himself and thereby to demonstrate his exalted Russian disregard of material consequence. Aleksei, and the author, do not attempt to discover an inner logic of Polina’s behavior, because a cruel arbitrariness is what satisfies them. So Polina remains too volatile to be grasped by our imaginations; “one could tie her in a knot or bend her double.” In contrast, a secondary female character, the French adventuress Blanche, is quite solid:

This musky creature develops amusingly when Aleksei, in a feverish trance of gambling clairvoyance, wins a hundred thousand gulden; Polina, though she is deeply in debt, in good Slavic style disdains the money (“The bankroll hit me painfully in the face and scattered all over the floor”), whereupon Blanche delightedly pounces upon the fortune: “First of all,
je veux cinquante mille francs
. You will give them to me in Frankfort.
Nous allons à Paris
. We’ll be living together there
et je te ferai voir des étoiles en plein jour
.” In Paris, however, instead of making him see stars in daytime, Blanche deigns to tie his necktie for him every morning and shrewdly uses his money to set herself up as a respectable person: “So now I have established myself in decent style once and for all, and nobody is going to put me out, not for a long time, at least that’s the way I’ve got it planned.” To crown her new status, she weds a useless but ornamental general, a Russian aristocrat whose mother’s fortune has been disastrously depreciated at the voracious tables of “Roulettenburg.” Nevertheless, Blanche will make the best of the bargain: “To begin with, he’s got his pension, and second, he’ll live in a back room, where he’ll be perfectly happy. I shall be ‘
madame la Générale
.’ I’ll belong to a nice social set.… Later I’ll be a Russian landowner;
j’aurai un château, des moujiks, et puis j’aurai toujours mon million
.” In this interplay between brisk French avarice and the mystical wastefulness of the Russian character,
The Gambler
finds its best comedy and its serious point, anticipating the magnificent if deluded Slavophilism of the great novels to follow. Seen, caricaturally, as a hard-headed, hard-hearted European, with her main-spring plainly diagrammed, Blanche succeeds as a character and as a lovable woman. “Blanche, it ought to be said, was indeed a very nice, good-natured girl—in her own way, of course; I did not appreciate her enough in the beginning.” Whereas Polina remains mysterious, and rather unlikable, to the end.

Polina Suslova’s diary explains her more sympathetically than does either work of fiction. The grandiose, ill-coordinated self-assertiveness that her own story expresses and that Dostoevsky’s portrays is here muted and disclosed as fruit of a central plight: she is a woman.

Clinically she observes herself in love with the indifferent Salvador, transcribing each of her pleading, unanswered letters; mordantly noting the fluctuations of her disease. “Any mention of S[alvador] gives me a terrifying, painful, and sweet feeling. However, what rubbish that whole thing was, everything that happened between me and Salv[ador].” Coolly, with her nearest approaches to irony, she admires her beloved’s stratagems of withdrawal while she records her own maneuvers with Dostoevsky, moderated “so that he could neither cherish hope nor be quite without it.” Out of her pain, she rises to chilling heights of detachment: “Today I have been thinking a great deal, and I almost felt glad that Salvador loves me so little; it makes me freer.” Freedom is what she wants and cannot attain:

She distrusts her ideas as she distrusts her loves. In the midst of a discussion with one of her intellectual, revolutionary boy friends, she flashes out, “Why go to see a woman? There isn’t much interesting about me, is there? If you are looking for intellect and erudition, you won’t come here to find them.” In a shocking passage, she is abruptly, without anesthesia or psychological preparation, operated upon by a doctor:

Polina’s feminism turns her diary outward from the stifling self-concern of her fiction; her jottings abound in sharp vignettes of the life
about her as she moves from Baden-Baden to Turin and Genoa and Rome, and then to Paris and Zurich and back to Petersburg. She is unself-consciously sensitive, as the pain of Salvador ebbs, to other women: waitresses, flower girls, kept women, landladies, lady novelists, countesses. Only with another woman can she relax and spill her grief: “I could not restrain myself, but dropped on my knees before her [the Countess Salias] and began to sob aloud. She was frightened and wanted to get me a glass of water. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘forget it; I feel good this way.’ ” As she receives compassion from women, so she gives it; she offers to find work for a young woman who begs for two sous on the street, and she takes note of the inequities between a young student and his mistress:

With the same eye, she observes her feelings, in the course of her entanglements, of humiliation, disgust, and uncertainly, and the contradictory behavior these feelings engender. As she tussles with an admirer called Robescourt:

Her awareness of her own ambivalence gives some episodes the sentence-by-sentence surprisingness of the best fiction:

Such a passage, in which the subtle female heart begs dignity and verity of a world that offers her only motherhood and “love,” illuminates from within the self-punishing, lover-punishing perversity that Dostoevsky was content to represent as an inscrutable delirium.

Yet these two people, who saw into each other so imperfectly, so carelessly, were useful to one another. Dostoevsky’s “turbulent and destructive affair with Polina Suslova,” as Wasiolek calls it, coincides, he admits, with the writer’s final awakening, the production of two works—
Notes from the Underground
in 1864,
Crime and Punishment
in 1866—that lift him into the empyrean of Western literature, into that small circle of writers who have appreciably enlarged Man’s self-knowledge. In her story, Polina has Dostoevsky’s surrogate say, “You have meant a lot to me. Your love descended upon me like a gift from God, against all hope and expectation, when I was weary and desperate. This young life at my side promised me so much and has already given me so much. It has resurrected my faith and what remained of my former strength.” Was this a real speech, or her own sentimental fantasy? At any rate, the heroine responds with a startlingly dry inner observation: “ ‘You’ve really put it to good use,’ thought Anna, but she said nothing.” This mirrors a passage in
The Gambler
, as Aleksei meditates:

What were these uses? In Dostoevsky’s case, Polina—apart from her sexual benefactions in the short period before she shut them off—helped him debase himself toward that ground of suffering nullity from which he drew creative strength. Self-humiliation is one of the writer’s most useful aids; it puts him in touch with the basal humanity that dignity, honors, flattery, and prosperity would estrange him from. It frees the artist of a respectable man’s baggage. Biting the dirt, he recovers the
taste of comedy and dread. Among contemporary practitioners, Norman Mailer most diligently, or at least most publicly, humiliates himself, but any serious writer needs keep some access to shame and abasement. Dostoevsky’s need was acute; that Polina taunted him with her lovers, banished him from her bed, ignored his immense gifts, and urged him to play the fool should not be counted against her. In her unhappiness, she had an instinct for the necessary plunge. With odd generosity, she lent Dostoevsky money for his gambling, which became to his temperament a religious trance, a frightful prostration to the divine
nihil
, a kind of induced epilepsy, a giddy descent into himself, a defiance of worldly wisdom. In his begging letters to Polina he exults in his pennilessness, in the contempt expressed by his German servants, for “there is no greater crime in the eyes of a German than to have no money.” But there
is
, he announces in the next letter, food beyond bread: “I continue to go without dinner, subsisting on my morning and evening tea for the third day now, and strangely enough, I am not very hungry at all.” Eventually, such a regimen kills; Dostoevsky turns from Polina and takes shelter in marriage to a kind woman.

What of Polina, though; what was Dostoevsky’s use to her? Not, I suspect, as an intellectual companion. In her diary, though she mentions a healing talk with him about “the emancipation of women,” it is the feline Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Gaut who manages to speak her heart’s language.