Dostoevsky (5 page)

What sustained Mikhail Andreevich in the midst of his woes was, first and foremost, the unstinting and limitless devotion of his wife. But in his very darkest moments, when no earthly succor seemed available, he took refuge in the conviction of his own virtue and rectitude, and in the belief that God was on his side against a hostile or indifferent world. “In Moscow,” he writes to his wife on returning from the country, “I found waiting for me only trouble and vexation; and I sit brooding with my head in my hands and grieve, there is no place to lay my head, not to mention anyone with whom I can share my sorrow; but God will judge them because of my misery.”
¹⁰
This astonishing conviction that he was one of God’s elect, this unshakable self-assurance that he was among the chosen, constituted the very core of Dr. Dostoevsky’s being. It was this that made him so self-righteous and pharisaical, so intolerant of the smallest fault, so persuaded that only perfect obedience from his family to all his wishes could compensate for all his toil and labor on their behalf.

While Dr. Dostoevsky may have made his family pay a heavy psychic price for his virtues, these virtues did exist as a fact of their daily lives. He was a conscientious father who devoted an unusual amount of his time to educating his children. In the early nineteenth century, corporal punishment was accepted as an indispensable means of instilling discipline, and in Russia the flogging and beating of both children and the lower classes was accepted as a matter of course. Dr. Dostoevsky, however, never struck any of his children, despite his irritability and his temper; the only punishment they had to fear was a verbal rebuke. It was to avoid having his children beaten that, though he could scarcely afford to do so, Dr. Dostoevsky sent them all to private schools rather than to public institutions. And even after his two older sons had gone away to study at military
schools, Dr. Dostoevsky still continued to worry about them and to bombard them—as well as others, when his sons neglected to write—with inquiries about their welfare. If we disregard Dr. Dostoevsky’s personality and look only at the way he fulfilled his paternal responsibilities, we can understand a remark that Dostoevsky made in the late 1870s to his brother Andrey that their parents had been “outstanding people,” adding that “such family men, such fathers . . . we ourselves are quite incapable of being, brother!”
¹¹

Despite the diversity of their characters, Dr. Dostoevsky and his wife were a devoted and loving couple. Their twenty years of marriage produced a family of eight children, and nobody reading their letters without
parti pris
can doubt that they were deeply attached to each other. “Good-bye, my soul, my little dove, my happiness, joy of my life, I kiss you until I’m out of breath. Kiss the children for me.”
¹²
So writes Dr. Dostoevsky to Marya Feodorovna after fourteen years of marriage, and while some allowances must be made for the florid rhetoric of the time, these words seem far in excess of what convention might require. Marya Feodorovna is equally lavish with her endearments. “Make the trip here soon, my sweetheart,” she writes from Darovoe, “come my angel, my only wish is to have you visit me, you know that it’s the greatest holiday for me, the greatest pleasure in my life is when you’re with me.”
¹³

The letters of his parents reflect the image of a close-knit and united family, where concern for the children was in the foreground of the parents’ preoccupations. Nonetheless, Dr. Dostoevsky’s emotional insecurity was so great, his suspicion and mistrust of the world sometimes reached such a pathological pitch, that he could suspect his wife of infidelity. One such incident occurred in 1835, when he learned that she was pregnant. Andrey recalls seeing his mother break into hysterical weeping after having communicated some information to his father that surprised and vexed him. The scene, he explains, was probably caused by the announcement of his mother’s pregnancy. The letters indicate, however, that Dr. Dostoevsky was tormented by doubts about his wife’s faithfulness, although he made no direct accusations. Schooled by long experience, Marya Feodorovna was able to read his state of mind through the distraught tone of his letters and his deep mood of depression. “My friend,” she writes, “thinking all this over, I wonder whether you are not tortured by that unjust suspicion, so deadly for us both, that I have been unfaithful to you.”
¹⁴

Her denial of any wrongdoing is written with an eloquence and expressiveness that even her second son might have envied. “I swear,” she writes, “that my present pregnancy is the seventh and strongest bond of our mutual love, on my side a love that is pure, sacred, chaste and passionate, unaltered from the day of our marriage.” There is also a fine sense of dignity in her explanation that she has never before deigned to reaffirm her marriage oath “because I was ashamed to lower myself by swearing to my faithfulness during our sixteen years of marriage.”
¹⁵
Dr. Dostoevsky nonetheless remained adamant in his dark imaginings, accusing her of delaying her departure from the country so as to avoid returning to Moscow until it was too late to make the journey without risking a miscarriage. In reply, she writes sadly that “time and years flow by, creases and bitterness spread over the face; natural gaiety of character is turned into sorrowful melancholy, and that’s my fate, that’s the reward for my chaste, passionate love; and if I were not strengthened by the purity of my conscience and my hope in Providence, the end of my days would be pitiful indeed.”
¹⁶

One could easily imagine the life of the Dostoevsky family being torn apart and subject to constant emotional upheaval, but nothing dramatic seems to have occurred. In this very letter, the current of ordinary life flows on as placidly as before. Information about the affairs of the estate are exchanged, and the older boys in Moscow append the usual loving postscript to their mother; there is no break in the family routine, and both partners, in the midst of recriminations, continue to assure the other of their undying love and devotion. Dr. Dostoevsky went to the country in July to assist at the delivery of Alexandra, and then, on returning in August, writes affectionately to his wife: “Believe me, reading your letter, I tearfully thank God first of all, and you secondly, my dear. . . . I kiss your hand a million million times, and pray to God that you remain in good health for our happiness.”
¹⁷
Not a word recalls the tensions of the previous month; Marya Feodorovna’s soothing and loving presence seems to have worked wonders.

Displays of such extreme emotion between the parents were probably rare. Nothing was more important for the Dostoevskys than to present an image of well-bred propriety and gentry refinement to the world; it is impossible to imagine them in their cramped apartment, with a household staff in the kitchen and neighboring hospital families all around, indulging in the violent quarrels and scandalous outbursts that Dostoevsky later so often depicted in his novels. Dr. Dostoevsky probably alternated between a grim and ominous silence and endless censoriousness about the minutiae of daily life. His reluctance to speak
out openly in the instance of Alexandra may be taken as typical, and when Marya Feodorovna stated the issue bluntly, he rebuked her for writing to him so directly and possibly revealing his secret suspicions to prying eyes. The impulse to cover and conceal is manifest, and was certainly operative in his personal behavior as well. It is therefore probable that the household in which Dostoevsky grew up was characterized far more by order, regularity, and routine, and by a deceptively calm surface of domestic tranquility, than by the familial chaos that so preoccupied him half a century later.

But we can hardly doubt that the gifted and perceptive boy would become aware of the stresses underlying the routine of his early years, and that he learned to feel it as beset with hidden antagonisms—as subject to extreme fluctuations between intimacy and withdrawal. Family life for Dostoevsky would always be a battleground and a struggle of wills, just as he had first learned to sense it from the secret life of his parents. And for a boy and youth destined to become famous for his understanding of the intricacies of human psychology, it was excellent training to have been reared in a household where the significance of behavior was kept hidden from view, and where his curiosity was stimulated to intuit and unravel its concealed meanings. One may perhaps see here the origin of Dostoevsky’s profound sense of the
mystery
of personality and his tendency to explore it, as it were, from the outside in, always moving from the exterior to deeper and deeper subterranean levels that are only gradually brought to light.

Life in the Dostoevsky family was carefully organized around the pattern of Dr. Dostoevsky’s daily routine. The family awakened promptly at six in the morning. At eight Dr. Dostoevsky went to the hospital and the children were put to their lessons. Dr. Dostoevsky returned around twelve and inquired about the work that had been accomplished, and lunch was served at one o’clock. After lunch a deathly silence was maintained for two hours while the
paterfamilias
napped on the couch in the living room before returning to the hospital. The evenings were spent in the living room, and each evening before dinner, if Dr. Dostoevsky was not too busy with his sick lists, he read aloud to the children. At nine in the evening the family had dinner, and the children, after saying their prayers in front of the icon, then went to bed. “The day was spent in our family,” Andrey comments, “according to a routine established once and for all, and repeated day after day, very monotonously.”
¹⁸
Feodor was also subjected to this routine from his earliest years—one that combined the physical discomfort of crowded and gloomy quarters (“low ceilings and cramped rooms crush the mind and the spirit,” Raskolnikov tells Sonya) with the psychic discomfort of an
unrelaxing pressure to work under the eye of a stern paternal overseer. The children were rarely allowed outdoors during the frigid Moscow winters.

During the periods of mild weather, the Dostoevsky family went for walks in the early evening. Dr. Dostoevsky was in charge of these excursions, and the children were held in with a tight rein; any display of exuberance or animal spirits was out of the question. Andrey describes him taking the occasion to give them lessons in geometry, using the crazy-quilt pattern of the Moscow streets to illustrate the various types of angle. The importance of hard work and self-discipline was constantly drummed into their minds, and though their father did not terrorize them physically, his impatient vigilance constantly hung over their heads as a threat. It is probable that, when Dostoevsky spoke to his friend Dr. Yanovsky in the late 1840s about “the difficult and joyless circumstances of his childhood,”
¹⁹
he was thinking of circumstances such as these.

A great change occurred in the life of the Dostoevsky children when their parents acquired the small property at Darovoe in 1831. Feodor and Mikhail spent four months there with their mother every year for four years; after this time, because of their studies, they could come only for shorter stretches of a month or so. These were the sunniest periods in Dostoevsky’s boyhood. If he later told his second wife that he had had a “happy and placid childhood,”
²⁰
it was undoubtedly of these months in the country that he was thinking, free from the menace of paternal disapproval and from the oppressive confinement of life in the city. Evocations of a happy childhood are exceedingly rare in Dostoevsky’s novels and the one or two that exist are set either in a village or on a country estate; no pleasant memories were linked in his sensibility with life in the city. “Not only that first voyage to the village,” Andrey writes, “but all the following trips there always filled me with some kind of ecstatic excitement.”
²¹
No doubt the high-spirited and impressionable Feodor experienced the same sensation even more intensely as the carriage to Darovoe pulled away every spring with bells tinkling on the horses’ harness and as the at first unfamiliar (and then beloved) rural sights began to unroll before his eyes, until they finally arrived at the family’s thatched-roof, three-room cottage sheltered by a grove of ancient linden trees.