Dostoevsky (99 page)

It would be an exaggeration to speak of Dostoevsky as maintaining any normal social life during the second half of 1865, and he remarked himself that “I have not visited anyone all winter.”
¹⁶
In fact, however, Apollinaria Suslova was now living in Petersburg, and he continued to pursue her, though with results that hardly alleviated his loneliness. On November 2, 1865, Suslova confided to her diary: “Today F M was here and we argued and contradicted each other all the time. For a long time now he has been offering me his hand and his heart, and he only makes me angry doing so. Speaking of my character, he once said: ‘If you were to get married, you’d begin to hate your husband three days later, and leave him.’ ”
¹⁷
Their relationship ended when his offers of marriage were persistently refused. But Dostoevsky would soon recreate the strained intensity of their love-hate bickering in
The Gambler
—where, however, he acquires imaginatively what he had failed to achieve in reality. For there the beautiful and contemptuous Polina is in love with the feckless and self-destructive gambler.

The first and second parts of
Crime and Punishment
were serialized in the January and February issues of
The Russian Messenger
. Despite predictable reactions from the radicals on
The Contemporary
(its critic G. Z. Eliseev wrote of “this new ‘fantasy’ of Mr. Dostoevsky, a fantasy according to which the entire student body is accused without exception of attempting murder and robbery”),
¹⁸
the book’s installments were a sensational success with the reading public. “Only
Crime and Punishment
was read during 1866,” Strakhov recalled, “only it was spoken about by lovers of literature, who often complained about the stifling power of the novel and the painful impression it left, which caused people with strong nerves almost to become ill and forced those with weak ones to give
up reading it altogether.”
¹⁹
Strakhov also remembered “most striking of all,” the coincidence “with reality.” On January 12, 1866, a student named A. M. Danilov killed a moneylender and his manservant in order to loot their apartment, and the crime instantly recalled Raskolnikov’s deed.

Despite the furor aroused by these early chapters, which, as Dostoevsky later learned from Katkov, had brought
The Russian Messenger
at least five hundred new subscribers, as the manuscript increased in length there were disturbing indications that the journal editors hoped to lower the price so as to decrease their overall outlay. Dostoevsky believed it would be necessary to travel to Moscow and talk to Katkov personally, but he did not wish to make a move before at least half the work had been published. “With the help of God,” he remarked fervently to Wrangel, “this novel can be the most splendid thing.”
²⁰
Dostoevsky thus continued to live on the very edge of poverty, haunted by the fear that his creditors would press him to the wall and ruin everything. In response to some friendly advice from Wrangel counseling him to enter government service, and thus assure himself of a guaranteed income, Dostoevsky sketched for Wrangel’s benefit his hopes for a substantial economic return. “But here’s the trouble,” he added sadly: “If I am locked up in prison for debt, then I will certainly spoil it and maybe not even complete it at all; everything will then go to pieces.”
²¹

By mid-March, Dostoevsky made the trip to Moscow and was promised a further advance of a thousand rubles. He also visited the family of his second sister, Vera, whose husband, A. P. Ivanov, served as a physician in the Konstantinovsky Land Surveying Institute. The hospitable Ivanovs always had a houseful of guests, and one of them was an attractive twenty-year-old by the name of Marya Sergeevna Ivanchina-Pisareva, a friend of one of the Ivanov daughters. Just a month before, Dostoevsky had written gloomily to Wrangel that “at least you, my good friend, are happy with your family; while fate has so far denied me this great and
sole
human happiness.”
²²
Dostoevsky had, all this time, been eagerly seeking some remedy for his emotional solitude, and he was very much taken with Marya Sergeevna. One morning, when the family had gone to Easter matins, he remained at home with her and formally proposed marriage, but in view of the difference in their ages (Dostoevsky was then forty-five), the sprightly young lady turned him off with an unmistakably discouraging quotation from Pushkin’s “Poltava”: “Okameneloe godami / Pylaet serdtse starika” (Petrified by the years / The heart of the old man flames up).
²³

It was just a day or two after Dostoevsky’s return from Moscow that the shattering event occurred that left all of Russia aghast. The tsar’s habit, well-known to his adoring subjects, was to walk his dog every day in the Summer Gardens adjacent to the Winter Palace, and a small crowd was watching on April 4, 1866, as he was about to enter his carriage. At that moment a pale and desperately poor ex-student pushed his way through the spectators, took aim with a pistol, and fired. Whether Dimitry Karakozov was a faulty marksman or whether someone—a tradesman named Osip Kommissarov, who became a national hero overnight—had jostled his arm, the shot went wild, and Karakozov was overpowered by the crowd. Saved by the police from a lynching at the hands of the outraged mob, he was dragged to Alexander II, who personally took his pistol from him and asked if he were a Pole. It seemed inconceivable to the tsar that an attempt on his life would be made by anyone but a foreigner, yet Karakozov, who came from a family of small, impoverished landowners and who had been expelled from the university, like Raskolnikov, for failing to pay his fees, replied: “Pure Russian.”

News of Karakozov’s attempt stunned all of Russia and produced a spontaneous outpouring of devotion to the monarch rivaling the manifestations of patriotism exhibited during major historical catastrophes such as the Napoleonic invasion. Like many others, Dostoevsky was shocked into a state of near hysteria by the unbelievable report, and he rushed to the home of his oldest friend, Apollon Maikov, to share his agitated feelings. Peter Weinberg, who was visiting Maikov, left this image of Dostoevsky:

Dostoevsky was horrified at the news itself, but he must also have been filled with foreboding at the severe consequences that he knew would now ensue. Herzen, who strongly repudiated Karakozov’s action, wrote forebodingly in
The Bell
that “we expect only calamity from it, and are dumbfounded at the thought
of the responsibility that this fanatic has taken upon himself.”
²⁵
Turgenev hastened to write Annenkov that “one cannot but shudder at the thought of what would have happened in Russia if the dastardly deed had succeeded.”
²⁶

What
did
happen was bad enough: Count N. M. Muraviev, who had suppressed the Polish rebellion of 1863 with bloody ferocity, was appointed head of a commission to investigate the assassination attempt and given virtually the powers of a dictator. Simultaneously, Katkov launched a ferocious press campaign against all liberal and radical organs of opinion whose nefarious influence had led to the horrendous crime. As Herzen accurately foresaw, the government, aided by the demagogic jeremiads of Katkov, now would “mow down everything right and left, . . . mow down the freedom of speech that has not yet fully emerged, mow down independent thought, . . . mow down ‘the people’ who at present are being so flattered, and all this under the name of saving the Tsar and avenging him.”
²⁷
The reigning atmosphere of terror is conveyed in the memoirs of Eliseev, who had criticized the early chapters of
Crime and Punishment
in the pages of
The Contemporary
. “Every day,” he recalled, “news arrived that during the night this or that literary man had been taken, and the next morning they took so-and-so and so-and-so. Little by little half of the literary men I knew had been taken. . . . All of these rumors, the constantly growing apprehension and the sleepless nights had so enervated me and brought me so near the point of complete prostration that I considered going and asking them to lock me up in the fortress.”
²⁸

Another editor of
The Contemporary
, Dostoevsky’s erstwhile friend Nekrasov, behaved under these nerve-shattering circumstances in a manner that has always been considered especially reprehensible. As a man of letters and a poet, Nekrasov had been personally associated with all the eminent representatives of Russian radical opinion beginning with Belinsky, and it was Nekrasov who had entrusted the editorial fate of his journal to Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. His own poems had been filled with “civic themes,” those social-humanitarian motifs expressing the convictions of the radical intelligentsia. Despite all this, in a desperate effort to preserve
The Contemporary
from extinction, he read a poem in honor of Muraviev at a banquet given for the count at the exclusive English Club. His eulogy concluded with the threatening words, “Spare not the guilty ones!” And to heighten the disgrace, Nekrasov also composed a poem in honor of the pitiable and drink-sodden Kommissarov, who was everywhere
being celebrated as “the instrument of God” chosen to avert a great calamity from the Russian people. All these demeaning efforts, which severely tarnished Nekrasov’s reputation and poisoned the remainder of his days, proved to be futile. The implacable Muraviev, after the public obeisance of the poem, is reported to have told Nekrasov with condescending contempt: “I would like to protect you from collective responsibility for the evil we are combating, but that is hardly within my power.”
²⁹
And he promptly closed down
The Contemporary
for good and all.

Dostoevsky too may well have felt a shudder of fear during these frightening days of grim repression. As an ex-convict, he was still under police surveillance; he was also the ex-editor of a journal that had been banned for political unreliability. Nor did Dostoevsky have any illusions about the authorities’ powers of discernment; he knew they were too obtuse to distinguish between various shades of social-political opinion, and that he would be lumped in the same suspicious category as the radicals he had been polemically combating in
Epoch
. Nothing untoward occurred to him personally, however, though he blamed his difficulty in obtaining a passport to go abroad “on the present circumstances.”

This remark is made in an important letter (April 1866) to Katkov, which contains a lengthy appraisal of the situation in the country brought on by the measures taken in the wake of Karakozov’s fateful shot. One should remember that Dostoevsky was writing to the leader of the violent assault against all shades of liberal and radical opinion, and that he was now financially dependent on Katkov for his very sustenance. It is thus all the more praiseworthy that he felt impelled to speak out against the wave of repression sweeping the country. Dostoevsky frankly confides that “I am, and probably always will be, an authentic Slavophil by conviction.”
³⁰
The Slavophils had always insisted that the Russian people were God-fearing and obedient subjects of the tsar, and that there was no necessity for the authorities to regard them with suspicion.

If the Nihilists have been successful in influencing Russian youth, Dostoevsky insists, it is for reasons that can hardly be considered evil. “All those high school pupils, those students, of whom I have seen so many, have become Nihilists so purely, so unselfishly, in the name of honor, truth, and genuine usefulness! You know they are helpless against these stupidities, and take them for perfection.” The captive Karakozov was being interrogated and tried in secret, and little information was available about what those doctrines (“these stupidities”) may have been; but Dostoevsky would have been surprised to discover how accurately he had intuited the consequences of that “unsteadiness” of moral convictions he was then portraying in Raskolnikov. Karakozov was a member of
small underground group of radicals headed by Nikolay Ishutin, all students or ex-students and all inspired by the extremism of the revolutionary ideas of the 1860s as Dostoevsky had just described them—including the desire for self-sacrifice. “One member of the group,” writes Franco Venturi, “thought of poisoning [his father] so as to be able to give his legacy to the cause.”
³¹
It was out of such a milieu that Karakozov had emerged.
³²

Dostoevsky insists that “the innocents are convinced that Nihilism—gives them the most complete chance to exhibit their civic and social activity and freedom.”
³³
The only possible answer, implied though not stated, is to provide more freedom for the idealism of youth to express itself in some socially permitted fashion. “Do you know what the people are saying?” he asks. “They say that April 4th has proven mathematically the powerful, extraordinary, sacred union of the tsar with the people. And such union should allow certain governmental personalities to show more faith in the people and in society. Meanwhile, everybody now awaits with fear more constraints on speech and thought. . . . But how can Nihilism be fought without freedom of speech? Even if they, the Nihilists, were given freedom of speech . . . they would make all Russia laugh by the
positive
explanation of their teachings. While now they are given the appearance of sphinxes, an enigma, wisdom, secrecy, and this fascinates the unexperienced.”
³⁴