Dostoevsky (21 page)

Dostoevsky also carried on a running polemic with the Romantic enemies of the Natural School and with those literary jobbers who exploited the latest fashions solely out of pecuniary motives. Ratazyaev is the first of Dostoevsky’s many unflattering portraits of the literary tribe, and it is interesting to see how early this deep-seated antipathy to his fellow writers set in. Ratazyaev is a versatile hack who knocks out works in various genres, and Devushkin, terribly impressed, transcribes sample passages for Varvara’s edification from such masterpieces as
Italian Passions
or
Yermak and Zuleika
. These give Dostoevsky the opportunity to parody Romantic novels in the high-society style of Marlinsky, and to poke fun at the dime-a-dozen imitators of Scott: “What is the poor maiden [Zuleika], nurtured amid the snows of Siberia in her father’s
yurta
to do in your cold, icy, soulless, selfish world?” (1: 52–53). Ratazyaev, naturally, does not think much of “The Station Master” because now, he tells Devushkin, all that is “old-fashioned,” and physiological sketches are all the rage (1: 60).

These parodies serve by contrast to deepen the characterization of Devushkin; and they serve also as a background to heighten the moral elevation of his own life. For Devushkin is
in fact
living the life of love and is
really
engaged in the struggle against “a cold, icy, soulless, selfish world” that these bombastic exaggerations merely counterfeit. Dostoevsky thus uses the implicit relation of his form to the literary tradition, the direct comment of his characters, and satirical parody to endow his pathetic-sentimental story with an “ideological” dimension that defines his strikingly independent position among the social-literary currents of the 1840s.

¹
DW
(January 1877), 584.

²
Pis’ma
, 1: 75; March (February) 24, 1845.

³
P. V. Annenkov,
The Extraordinary Decade
, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 150.

⁴
Pis’ma
, 1: 82; October 8, 1845.

⁵
Both names have allegorical echoes. Devushkin evokes
devushka
, the word for a young girl or maiden. The incongruity of this appellation is touchingly humorous, and yet indicates some of the quality of Devushkin’s character. Dobroselova is a combination of the Russian word for “good” and for “country village.”

⁶
Belinsky’s article is reprinted in
DRK
, 24.

⁷
V. V. Vinogradov,
Evolutsiya Russkogo naturalizma
(Leningrad, 1929), 311–338. This is part 2 of Vinogradov’s classic study of
Poor Folk
.

⁸
His very name is derived from the Russian word for “doo-doo” (shit),
kaki
.

⁹
Victor Terras,
The Young Dostoevsky, 1846–1849
(The Hague, 1969), 14–15; for discussions of parody, see Wido Hempel, “Parodie, travestie und pastiche,”
Germanische-Romanische Monatsschrift
46 (April 1965), 150–175, and Yu. Tynyanov, “Dostoevsky i Gogol (K teorii parodii),” in
Texte der Russischen Formalisten
, ed. Jurij Striedter (Munich, 1969): 1: 301–371.

¹⁰
Cited in V. I. Kuleshov,
Naturalnaya shkola v literature XIX veka
(Moscow, 1965), 256.

¹¹
Vinogradov,
Evolutsiya
, 390.

Belinsky’s excitement over the manuscript of
Poor Folk
quickly made Dostoevsky’s name a byword among his circle, and the fame of the new young author spread throughout the literary community even before the publication of the novel in January 1846. Panaev, who paid Dostoevsky the compliment of immediately beginning to imitate his manner, wrote several years later: “We carried him in our arms through the streets of the city, and, exhibiting him to the public, cried: ‘Here is a little genius just born, and whose works in time will kill off all the rest of the literature past and present. Bow down! Bow down!’ We trumpeted his name everywhere, in the streets and in the salons.”
¹
The ironic tone of this passage reflects the later attitude of the Belinsky Pléiade to Dostoevsky, but it also confirms the enormous acclaim that he received even before his first novel appeared in the
Petersburg Almanac
, a collection of writing of the Natural School edited by Nekrasov.

With his usual impetuosity and wholeheartedness, Belinsky immediately adopted the young author as an intimate and spoke of him to others with unconstrained affection. “ ‘Yes,’ [Belinsky] used to say proudly,” recalls Turgenev, “as though he had himself been responsible for some terrific achievement, ‘yes, my dear fellow, let me tell you it may be a tiny bird,’ and he would put his hand about a foot from the floor to show how tiny it was, ‘but it’s got sharp claws.’ . . . in his access of paternal tenderness to a newly discovered talent, Belinsky treated him like a son, just as if he were his own ‘little boy.’ ”
²

Dostoevsky thus became—for an all-too-brief season—the literary lion of cultivated Petersburg society, and the newfound glory of his position, the flattering adulation he received on all sides, would have turned the head even of a more balanced personality. In Dostoevsky’s case, it opened the floodgates of a boundless vanity that, up to this point, he had kept tightly closed. His letters are now filled with a manic exuberance and self-glorification quite comprehensible under the circumstances. “Everywhere,” he tells Mikhail, “an unbelievable esteem, a passionate curiosity about me. . . . Everybody considers me some sort of prodigy. I can’t even open my mouth without it being repeated in all quarters
that Dostoevsky said this or Dostoevsky thinks of doing that. . . . Really, brother, if I began to recount all my successes, there would not be enough paper for them. . . . I tell you quite frankly that I am now almost drunk with my own glory.”
³

He reports to Mikhail that two aristocratic
littérateurs
, Count Odoevsky and Count Sollogub, have been asking about him, and that A. A. Kraevsky, the powerful proprietor of
Notes of the Fatherland
, had bluntly told Sollogub, “Dostoevsky will not honor you with the pleasure of his company.” “This is really so; and now this petty little aristocrat has mounted his high horse and thinks he will crush me with the magnificence of his condescension.”
⁴
Face-to-face with Sollogub, though, who called on him unexpectedly one day, Dostoevsky was nervous, confused, and frightened.

More important for Dostoevsky than such casual acquaintance with celebrity-hunters was his acceptance into the charmed inner circle of the Belinsky Pléiade. At first everything went perfectly with the Pléiade—or so it seemed to the eager young initiate, who had lived a solitary life lacking any true intimacy except with Shidlovsky and with his brother Mikhail. “Recently the poet Turgenev came back from Paris,” he tells Mikhail, “and he attached himself to me at first sight with such devotion that Belinsky explains it by saying he has fallen in love with me! And what a man, brother! I have all but fallen in love with him myself. A poet, an aristocrat, talented, handsome, rich, intelligent, well-educated, and twenty-five years old. And, to conclude, a noble character, infinitely direct and open, formed in a good school. Read his story ‘Andrey Kolosov’ in
Notes of the Fatherland
. It’s the man himself, though he was not thinking of self-portrayal.”
⁵
There is a good deal of vanity in this passage, but also a touching innocence and an obvious need for genuine friendship—a need that caused him to mistake Turgenev’s well-known but casual affability for a sincere inclination.

The passage was written the day after Dostoevsky had paid his first visit to the salon of the Panaevs, which had become the favorite rendezvous for Belinsky and his group. Weak-willed, good-natured, dissipated, with a knack for writing amusing satirical sketches of fashionable Petersburg life, the amiable Panaev was everybody’s friend. His wife Avdotya was not only a famous beauty but also the most notable bluestocking of her time, who had achieved some notoriety as a novelist. Already, or soon to become, Nekrasov’s mistress (he lived with the Panaevs in a peaceful
ménage à trois
for ten years), she was at the center of mid-nineteenth-century Russian literary life, and her
Memoirs
gives one of the best behind-the-scenes portraits of the period. “Dostoevsky visited us for the first time in the evening with Nekrasov and Grigorovich,” she writes, “who had just
begun their literary careers. It was evident, from only one glance at Dostoevsky, that he was a terribly nervous and impressionable person. He was slender, short, fair-haired, with a sickly complexion; his small gray eyes darted somewhat uneasily from object to object, and his colorless lips were nervously contorted. He already knew almost all of our guests, but, clearly, he was disconcerted and did not take part in the general conversation. Everyone tried to involve him, so as to overcome his shyness, and to make him feel that he was a member of the circle.”
⁶

Once Dostoevsky’s original diffidence had worn off his manner changed completely, and he began to display in public the same uncontrollable vanity so noticeable in his letters. “Because of his youth and nervousness,” Mme Panaev observes, “he did not know how to conduct himself, and he would only too clearly express his conceit as an author and his high opinion of his own literary talent. Stunned by the unexpected brilliance of his first step in his literary career, showered with the praises of competent literary judges, he could not, as an impressionable person, conceal his pride vis-à-vis other young writers whose first works had started them modestly on the same career. With the appearance of new young writers in the circle, trouble could be caused if they were rubbed the wrong way by his irritability and his haughty tone, implying that he was immeasurably superior to them in talent.”
⁷

All the evidence agrees that Dostoevsky’s behavior with the Pléiade would have caused difficulties with a group of saints, not to speak of a circle of young and not-so-young writers competing for public attention and each with his own vanity to coddle. The result, only to be expected, was that they turned on Dostoevsky after a certain point and made him the butt of a veritable campaign of persecution. To make matters worse, the leader of the pack, alas, was the same Turgenev whom Dostoevsky had believed to be his devoted friend. “They began to pick him to pieces,” Mme Panaev tells us, “to exasperate his pride by pinpricks in conversation; Turgenev was a past master at this—he purposely drew Dostoevsky into argument and drove him to the farthest limits of irritability. Dostoevsky, pushed to the wall, sometimes defended with passion the most ridiculous views, which he had blurted out in the heat of argument and which Turgenev pounced on and laughed at.”
⁸

It was clear to an observer like Mme Panaev, who felt genuinely sorry for Dostoevsky, that he was an abnormally high-strung personality whose irritability and susceptibility should be discounted as the symptom of some affliction. This was apparently the view of Belinsky as well. When Turgenev would gleefully relate some of Dostoevsky’s latest enormities to the critic, his response was,
“Well, you’re a fine one! You latch on to a sick man, you egg him on, as if you didn’t know that when he gets worked up he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
⁹
The situation was only envenomed by Grigorovich, a notorious purveyor of gossip, who reported to Dostoevsky everything said about him in his absence; and so Dostoevsky usually arrived at the reunions already boiling with rage.

Matters came to a head one day sometime in the fall of 1846, when Turgenev went too far in his mockery. Mme Panaev describes the scene: “Once, while Dostoevsky was present, Turgenev depicted his meeting in the provinces with a person who imagined himself a genius, and painted the ridiculous side of this individual in a masterly fashion. Dostoevsky, white as a sheet and quivering from head to foot, took flight, not waiting to hear the rest of Turgenev’s story. I remarked to them all: why drive Dostoevsky out of his mind like that? But Turgenev was in the very highest spirits and carried away the others, so that nobody paid any attention to Dostoevsky’s sudden exit. . . . From that evening, Dostoevsky no longer visited us, and even avoided meeting any member of the circle in the street. . . . He saw only [Grigorovich], who reported that Dostoevsky abused us vehemently . . . that he had become disenchanted with all of us, that all [of us] were envious, heartless, and worthless people.”
¹⁰
By November 1846 Dostoevsky writes to Mikhail, “They [the Pléiade] are all scoundrels eaten up with envy.”
¹¹

The persecution of the Pléiade turned Dostoevsky’s life into sheer torture. His physical and nervous equilibrium had already shown signs of fragility, and it buckled completely under the new strain. In the spring of 1846 Dostoevsky suffered what he describes as “a severe shock to the whole nervous system.”
¹²
This shock, according to the diagnosis of the time, had caused an excessive influx of blood to the heart and resulted in an inflammation of that organ; it was checked by the application of leeches and two bloodlettings. Dostoevsky was declared out of danger after this treatment but was advised to follow a severe diet, to avoid strong emotions, and to lead an orderly and regular life—advice more easily given, in his case, than followed. In the late spring Dostoevsky’s friend Valerian Maikov suggested that he consult Dr. Stepan Yanovsky, a young medical man just then establishing his practice. Much interested in literature, Yanovsky struck up a friendship with Dostoevsy that lasted for the remainder of their lives. His reminiscences of Dostoevsky in the mid-1840s contain details about his health, although, unfortunately, Yanovsky refers specifically only to a “local
ailment” that took several months to cure.
¹³
(Such discretion leads one to suspect that the ailment might have been venereal.)