Ten Novels And Their Authors (35 page)

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Early one morning, on the 29th of April, 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested and taken to the fortress of Peter-Paul. He had joined a group of young men, imbued with the socialistic notions then current in Western Europe, who were bent on certain measures of reform, especially on the emancipation of the serfs and the abolition of censorship, and who met once a week to discuss their ideas. They set up a printing-press for the purpose of circulating, in secret, articles written by members of the group. The police had for some time had them under surveillance,
and all were arrested on the same day. After some months in prison, they were tried, and fifteen of them, among them Dostoevsky, were condemned to death. One winter morning, they were taken to the place of execution, but as the soldiers prepared to carry out the sentence, a messenger arrived to say that the penalty was commuted to penal servitude in Siberia. Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment at Omsk, after which he was to serve as a common soldier. When he was taken back to the fortress of Peter-Paul, he wrote the following letter to his brother Michael.

‘To-day the 22nd of December, we were all taken to Semenovsky Square. There the death sentence was read to us, we were given the Cross to kiss, the dagger was broken over our heads, and our funeral toilet (white shirts) was made. Then three of us were put standing before the palisades for the execution of the death sentence. I was sixth in the row; we were called up by groups of three, and so I was in the second group, and had not more than a moment to live. I thought of you, my brother, and of yours; in that last moment you alone were in my mind; then first I learnt how much I love you, my beloved brother! I had time to embrace Plestchiev and Durov, who stood near me, and to take my leave of them. Finally, retreat was sounded, those who were bound to the palisades were brought back, and it was read to us that His Imperial Majesty granted us our lives. Then the final sentences were recited …’

In
The House of the Dead
Dostoevsky has described the horrors of his life in prison. One point is worthy of remark. He notes that, within two hours of arriving, a newcomer would find himself at home with the other convicts and live on familiar terms with them. ‘But with a gentleman, a nobleman, things were different. No matter how unassuming and good-tempered and intelligent he might be, he would to the end remain a person unanimously hated and despised, and never understood
and, still more, never trusted. No one would ever come to look upon him as a friend or a comrade, and though, as the years went on, he might at least attain the point of ceasing to serve as a butt for insult, he would still be powerless to live his own life, or to get rid of the torturing thought that he was lonely and a stranger.’

Now, Dostoevsky was not such a great gentleman as all that; his origins were as modest as his life and, but for a brief period of glory, he had been poverty-stricken. Durov, his friend and fellow-prisoner, was loved by all. It looks very much as though Dostoevsky’s loneliness, and the suffering it caused him, were in part at least occasioned by his own defects of character, his conceit, his egoism, his suspiciousness and his irritability. But his loneliness, amid two hundred companions, drove him back on himself: ‘Through this spiritual isolation,’ he writes, ‘I gained an opportunity of reviewing my past life, of dissecting it down to the pettiest detail, of probing my heretofore existence, and of judging myself strictly and inexorably.’ The New Testament was the only book he was allowed to possess, and he read it incessantly. Its influence on him was great. From then on, he practised humility and the necessity of suppressing the human desires of normal men. ‘Before all things humble yourself,’ he wrote, ‘consider what your past life has been, consider what you may be able to effect in the future, consider how great a mass of meanness and pettiness and turpitude lies lurking at the bottom of your soul.’ Prison, for the time at least, cowed his overweening, imperious spirit. He left it a revolutionary no longer, but a firm upholder of the authority of the Crown and the established order. He left it also an epileptic.

When his term of imprisonment came to an end, he was sent to complete his sentence as a private in a small garrison town in Siberia. It was a hard life, but he accepted its pains as part of the punishment he merited for his crime, for he had come to the conclusion that his activities
for reform were sinful; and he wrote to his brother: ‘I do not complain; this is my cross and I have deserved it.’ In 1856, through the intercession of an old schoolfellow, he was raised from the ranks, and his life became more tolerable. He made friends and he fell in love. The object of his affections was a certain Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, wife of a political deportee who was dying of drink and consumption, and mother of a young son; she is described as a rather pretty blonde of middle height, very thin, passionate and
exaltée
. Little seems to be known of her, except that she was of a nature as suspicious, as jealous and as self-tormenting as Dostoevsky himself. He became her lover. But after some time Isaev, her husband, was moved from the village in which Dostoevsky was stationed to another frontier post some four hundred miles away, and there died. Dostoevsky wrote and proposed marriage. The widow hesitated, partly because they were both destitute and partly because she had lost her heart to a ‘high-minded and sympathetic’ young teacher, called Vergunov, and had become his mistress. Dostoevsky, deeply in love, was frantic with jealousy, but with his passion for lacerating himself, and perhaps with his novelist’s proneness to see himself as a character of fiction, he did a characteristic thing. Declaring Vergunov to be dearer to him than a brother, he besought one of his friends to send him money so as to make it possible for Maria Isaeva to marry her lover.

He was able, however, to play the part of a man with a breaking heart, ready to sacrifice himself to the happiness of his well-beloved, without serious consequences, for the widow had an eye to the main chance Vergunov, though ‘high-minded and sympathetic’, was penniless, whereas Dostoevsky was now an officer, his pardon could not long be delayed, and there was no reason why he should not again write successful books. The couple were married in 1857. They had no money, and Dostoevsky had borrowed till he could borrow no more. He turned
again to literature; but as an ex-convict he had to get permission to publish, and this was not easy. Nor was married life. In fact it was very unsatisfactory, which Dostoevsky ascribed to his wife’s suspicious, painfully fanciful nature. It escaped his notice that he was himself as impatient, quarrelsome, neurotic and unsure of himself as he had been in the first flush of success. He began various pieces of fiction, put them aside, began others, and in the end produced little, and that little of no importance.

In 1859, as the result of his appeals and by the influence of friends, he received permission to return to Petersburg. Professor Ernest Simmons, of the University of Columbia, in his interesting and instructive book on Dostoevsky, justly remarks that the means he employed to regain his freedom of action were abject. ‘He wrote patriotic poems, one celebrating the birthday of the Dowager Empress Alexandra, another on the coronation of Alexander II, and a threnody on the death of Nicholas I. Begging letters were addressed to people in power and to the new Tsar himself. In them he protests that he adores the young monarch, whom he describes as a sun shining on the just and the unjust alike, and he declares that he is ready to give up his life for him. The crime for which he was convicted he readily confesses to, but insists that he has repented and is suffering for opinions that he had abandoned.’

He settled down with his wife and stepson in the capital. It was ten years since he had left it as a convict. With his brother Michael, he started a literary journal. It was called
Time
, and for it he wrote
The House of the Dead
and
The Insulted and Injured
. It was a success, and his circumstances were easy. In 1862, leaving the magazine in charge of Michael, he visited Western Europe. He was not pleased with it. He found Paris ‘a most boring town’ and its people money-grubbing and small-minded. He was shocked by the misery of the London poor and the hypocritical respectability of the well-to-do. He went to Italy,
but he was not interested in art, and he spent a week in Florence without going to the Uffizi and passed the time reading the four volumes of Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
. He returned to Russia without seeing Rome or Venice. His wife, whom he had ceased to love, had contracted tuberculosis and was now a chronic invalid.

Some months before going abroad, Dostoevsky, who was then forty, had made the acquaintance of a young woman who brought a short story for publication in his literary journal. Her name was Polina Suslova. She was twenty, a virgin and handsome, but, to show that her views were advanced, she bobbed her hair and wore dark glasses. Dostoevsky was greatly taken with her, and after his return to Petersburg seduced her. Then, owing to an unfortunate article by one of his contributors, the magazine was suppressed and he decided to go abroad again. The reason he gave was to get treatment for his epilepsy, which for some time had been growing worse, but this was only an excuse; he wanted to go to Wiesbaden to gamble, for he had invented a system to break the bank, and he had made a date with Polina Suslova in Paris. He parked his sick wife at Vladimir, a town some distance from Moscow, borrowed money from the Fund for Needy Authors, and set out.

At Wiesbaden he lost much of his money, and tore himself from the tables only because his passion for Polina Suslova was stronger than his passion for roulette. They had arranged to go to Rome together; but, while waiting for him, the emancipated young lady had had a short affair with a Spanish medical student; she was upset when he walked out on her, a proceeding women are not apt to take with equanimity, and refused to resume her relations with Dostoevsky. He accepted the situation and proposed that they should go to Italy ‘as brother and sister’, and to this, being presumably at a loose end, she consented. The arrangement, complicated by the fact that they were so short of money they had on occasion to
pawn their knick-knacks, was not a success, and after some weeks of ‘lacerations’ they parted. Dostoevsky went back to Russia. He found his wife dying. Six months later she was dead. He wrote as follows to a friend:

‘My wife, the being who adored me, and whom I loved beyond measure, expired at Moscow, whither she had removed a year before her death of consumption. I followed her thither and never once throughout that winter left her bedside … My friend, she loved me beyond measure, and I returned her affection to a degree transcending all expression; yet our joint life was not a happy one. Some day, when I meet you, I will tell you the whole story. But for the present let me confine myself to saying that, apart from the fact that we lived unhappily together, we should never have lost our mutual love for one another, but have become more attached in proportion to our misery. This may seem strange to you; yet it is but the truth. She was the best, the noblest, woman I have ever known …’

Dostoevsky somewhat exaggerated his devotion. During that winter he went twice to Petersburg in connection with a new magazine he had started with his brother. It was no longer liberal in tendency, as
Time
had been, and failed. Michael died after a short illness, leaving heavy debts, and Dostoevsky found himself obliged to support his widow and children, his mistress and her child. He borrowed ten thousand roubles from a rich aunt, but by 1865 had to declare himself bankrupt. He owed sixteen thousand roubles on note of hand, and five thousand on the security of his word alone. His creditors were troublesome and, to escape from them, he again borrowed money from the Fund for Needy Authors and got an advance on a novel which he contracted to deliver by a certain date. Thus provided, he went to Wiesbaden to try his luck once more at the tables and to meet Polina. He made her an offer of marriage. She refused it. It is evident that, if she had ever loved him, she loved him no longer.
One may surmise that she had yielded to him because he was a well-known author and, as editor of a magazine, might be of use to her. But the magazine was dead. His appearance had always been insignificant, and now he was forty-five, bald and epileptic. Nothing, I suppose, exasperates a woman more than the sexual desire for her of a man who is physically repellent to her, and when, to put it bluntly, he will not take no for an answer, she may very well come to hate him. Thus it was, I imagine, with Polina. Dostoevsky attributed her change of heart to a reason more flattering to himself. I shall come to it, and the effect it had on him, in due course. They had gambled their money away, and Dostoevsky wrote to Turgenev, with whom he had quarrelled and whom he detested and despised, for a loan. Turgenev sent him fifty thalers, and on this Polina was able to get to Paris. For a month longer Dostoevsky remained in Wiesbaden. He was ill and wretched. He had to sit quietly in his room so as not to get up an appetite which he had no money to satisfy. His straits were such that he wrote Polina for money. She was, it appears, already occupied with another affair and does not seem to have replied. He began another book, under the lash, he says, of necessity and against time. This was
Crime and Punishment
. At last, in answer to a begging letter he had written to an old friend of his Siberian days, he received enough money to leave Wiesbaden and, with his friend’s further help, managed to go back to Petersburg.

While still at work on
Crime and Punishment
, he remembered that he had contracted to deliver a book by a certain date. By the iniquitous agreement he had signed, if he did not do so the publisher had the right to issue everything he wrote for the following nine years without paying him a penny. The date was at hand. Dostoevsky was at his wits’ end. Then some bright person suggested that he should employ a stenographer; this he did, and in twenty-six days finished a novel called
The Gambler
. The
stenographer, Anna Grigorievna by name, was twenty, but homely; she was, however, efficient, practical, patient, devoted and admiring; and early in the year 1867 he married her. His stepson, his brother’s widow and her children, foreseeing that he would not thenceforward support them as he had done before, were bitterly antagonistic to the poor girl and, indeed, behaved so badly, and made her so miserable, that she persuaded Dostoevsky to leave Russia once more. He was again heavily in debt.