Dostoevsky (119 page)

Once having sent off his ill-fated Belinsky article, Dostoevsky settled into his larger task, and in mid-September Anna jotted down, “today Fedya began to sketch the program of the new novel.”
¹¹
Dostoevsky’s most immediate problem was, as usual, the financial one, and he wrote to everyone who might be willing to lend a helping hand. Maikov sent one hundred twenty-five rubles, and Dostoevsky also appealed to his old friend Dr. Yanovsky, requesting a loan of seventyfive rubles. The reply, happily containing one hundred rubles, arrived on a day when Anna was particularly gloomy because the pair had no money left at all. “I would certainly have to go to that dressmaker and pawn my lace mantilla. God! How much I wish I didn’t have to go,” she writes, adding that she would rather remain hungry for three more days than bow humbly before the condescending dressmaker.
¹²

Matters were not always arranged so conveniently, and more than once both Anna and Dostoevsky were forced to pawn their clothing like paupers under the gaze of the impassive Swiss. Letters from both Pasha and Emilya Feodorovna complained that
they
were short of funds, thus driving Anna into her usual rage at their exigencies. They had just returned to Petersburg from the summer dacha at Lublino and had moved into Dostoevsky’s old apartment, for whose rent he
made himself responsible. Anna was incensed at finding listed among her sister-in-law’s grievances a lack of money to redeem her pawned best overcoat. “That is really killing, my overcoat has also been pawned, for more than six months, and before hers mine must be redeemed.”
¹³
Katkov again exhibited his usual generosity, and the Dostoevskys finally had a regular but pitifully small income to tide them over until the novel could be gotten under way. Dostoevsky estimated, with his usual overoptimism, that once writing began he would complete it in five months.

Despite the pressure of his impending deadline, Dostoevsky nonetheless found time to make two short trips to Saxon-les-Bains for another fling at roulette. The lure of winning a large amount revived once more, and Anna could only mark its appearance with incredulity and stoic resignation. On September 17, she noted, “what a strange man. It would seem that fate has punished him so strongly, and showed him so many times that he cannot get rich by roulette. . . . [H]e still is convinced all the same . . . that he will certainly become rich, will certainly win, and then will be able to help his wretches.”
¹⁴
The usual results occurred, and after the second catastrophe, in a letter filled with the familiar frantic apologies and self-flagellations, he sketched a plan to ask Ogarev for a loan of three hundred francs (unaware of the veteran radical’s own circumstances). “After all, he’s a poet, a writer, he has a heart, and in addition he himself comes to me and seeks me, which means he respects me.”
¹⁵
When Dostoevsky put the question to Ogarev, the mention of such a large sum “almost frightened him,”
¹⁶
according to Anna, but he thought he might scrape together sixty francs. Two days later, the unfailingly generous Ogarev visited the Dostoevskys and brought the smaller amount, which they promised to return in two weeks (whether they kept their word remains unknown).

Dostoevsky’s entire future, of course, depended on the success of his next novel, which only increased the tension under which he was working. The notebooks for
The Idiot
illustrate how persistently Dostoevsky struggled to find his artistic path through the maze of incidents that he piles up in such profusion. What he counted on, as he wrote to Maikov, was the sudden flash of inspiration that would enable him to discover, among the swarming multiplicity of his scenarios, the one that he could most profitably develop. All through the fall and winter months Dostoevsky sought this moment and tried to provoke its appearance—with so little success, however, that he feared his capacities might be fading because of the frequency of his epileptic attacks. Writing to Dr. Yanovsky in a moment of depression, he complains that “this epilepsy will end up by carrying me
off. My star is fading—I realize that. My memory has grown completely dim (completely!). I don’t recognize people anymore. I forget what I read the day before. I’m afraid of going mad or falling into idiocy.”
¹⁷

Nonetheless, work stubbornly went on, though without the necessary spark of insight flashing forth from his notebook pages he became more and more discouraged. At the end of October, Anna awoke one night to find him lying on the floor in prayer, and while there were many blessings for which he might have been imploring God, inspiration for his next novel may well have been one of them. Above all, though, he had determined that he would not compromise his artistic integrity, whatever the cost. Explaining to Maikov why he had abandoned a considerable first draft, he declares, “I said to hell with it all. I assure you that the novel could have been satisfactory, but I got incredibly fed up with it precisely because of the fact that it was satisfactory and not
absolutely good
.”
¹⁸
Rather than produce a satisfactory mediocrity, Dostoevsky instead chose to launch himself, almost unprepared, into the writing of one of the most extraordinary and thematically unprecedented novels in the history of the genre.

Dostoevsky read the newspapers every day, particularly the Russian ones, and perhaps even more attentively now than in the past. “Read them, please,” he admonishes his niece Sofya Ivanova, “because the visible connection among all matters, general and private, is becoming stronger and . . . more obvious.”
¹⁹
It is not surprising then, to find that for
The Idiot
, at least in its initial stages, Dostoevsky drew extensively on material from the newspapers. His early notes were affected by what he read of a court case involving the Umetsky family, whose fourteen-year-old daughter Olga had tried to burn down the family house four times and was then brought to trial. Investigation uncovered an unspeakable picture of family tyranny, cruelty, and revolting neglect on the part of the parents. Their inhumanity had led the poor child to attempt to take her own life several times before turning to arson as a last resort. “I’m just dying to get back to Russia,” he tells Maikov in mid-October. “I wouldn’t let the Umetsky case go by without having my word; I’d publish it.”
²⁰
Eventually, Olga Umetskaya would inspire the creation of Nastasya Filippovna, the most genuinely tragic and enchanting of all Dostoevsky’s heroines.

The harrowing fate of Olga Umetskaya was not the only case that left its traces on
The Idiot
. It is likely that the character of Rogozhin, not mentioned in the early notes, is linked to the trial of a Moscow merchant named V. E. Mazurin,
who murdered a jeweler. The corpse, concealed in the house, was covered with an American oilskin; it was also surrounded, exactly as would be the corpse of Nastasya Filippovna, by two containers of something called Zhdanov fluid, used in Russia as a disinfectant and deodorant. Two other crimes culled from the newspapers are also referred to frequently in
The Idiot
. One is the murder of six people by an eighteen-year-old student named Gorsky, who came from a noble family. Hired as a tutor by the Zhemarin family, he carefully prepared for his crime before carrying it out, killing a doorman and a cook as well as four family members, including his pupil. In
The Idiot
, Lebedyev speaks of his young Nihilist nephew as being capable of committing a similar deed, and Dostoevsky thus brings this mass murder into the orbit of his conviction that Nihilist ideas were weakening the power and moral conscience in the younger generation.

The second crime that found its way into
The Idiot
involved the murder of a servant by an acquaintance for the sake of a silver watch. Just before slitting the throat of the watch’s owner, with whom he had been chatting peacefully, the criminal uttered a prayer: “Bless me, O Lord, and forgive for the sake of Christ.” The murderer’s motive in real life was to pawn the watch and return to his starving family in a village. But Dostoevsky uses the incident rather to indicate the deep, instinctive religiosity of the Russian people even in the midst of their worst excesses. Myshkin remarks, in what for Dostoevsky is a self-referential allusion, that if such a detail had been invented by a novelist, critics would have taxed it for being “improbable; but reading it in the newspapers as a fact, you feel that in such facts you are studying the reality of Russian life” (8: 412–413).

To supplement his devoted scrutiny of the newspapers, he was dependent on letters from friends like Maikov and from his immediate family, and his responses to these letters reveal, on the one hand, a growing antipathy toward European life in all its aspects, and on the other a compensating idealization of Russia that increased in proportion to his hostility. When Maikov wrote that he was translating
The Tale of Igor’s Campaign
, the famous twelfth-century epic, into modern Russian, Dostoevsky became excited at the news. This task was, as Maikov explained, his “small
monumentum
, an offering on the ‘altar of the fatherland,’ ”
²¹
and Dostoevsky’s headlong decision to write
The Idiot
may well have been at least partly inspired by the same impulse to celebrate the highest values of Russian culture as he conceived them. Otherwise, the field would be left to those whom Dostoevsky rails against in a choleric outburst (“just recall our best liberals, recall Belinsky; wasn’t he really a quite conscious enemy of the fatherland, wasn’t he really retrograde?”).
²²
This view will soon find its way into
The Idiot
, where it is expounded by the highly intelligent Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, and he is seconded by Prince Myshkin.

Dostoevsky grasped at every indication he could find to justify his belief that Russian life—however much appearances might seem to indicate the contrary—was, at its moral core, superior to the much-vaunted European civilization. A striking example of such superiority, for him as well as for Maikov, was furnished by the vicissitudes of V. I. Kelsiev, the former associate of Ogarev, about whom Dostoevsky was informed in a letter from his friend. Maikov recounts how Kelsiev, after years of unbelievable hardship and self-sacrifice—years spent trying to enlist various denominations of the Old Believers for the revolutionary cause—had appeared at the Russian border one day, declared himself a political criminal, and surrendered to the authorities. Taken to Petersburg, he was brought before a special commission and his case was then sent to the tsar, who, after reading Kelsiev’s confession and other documents, ordered him to be pardoned unconditionally. “You know,” Maikov continues, “all this moves me to tears. How Russian this is! How much far and away higher and better this is than all that humanistic bedlam in Geneva.” What carried the day, according to Maikov, was Kelsiev’s autobiographical confession, in which he explained that “only in the Slavic question and in the role of Russia in Slavdom” was he able to discover a resolution for “all his own ideal, deracinated strivings for liberty and activity.”
²³

Dostoevsky was ecstatic at such news and replied: “That’s the way, that’s the truth, that’s the way to do things. . . . [A]ll our trashy little liberals of a seminarian-socialist hue . . . will fall on him like wild beasts . . . now they’ll be saying of Kelsiev that he denounced everyone.”
²⁴
Dostoevsky will depict his young Nihilists in
The Idiot
as more ridiculous than menacing, and the abused Prince Myshkin treats them with the same magnanimity that the tsar displayed toward the hapless and remorseful Kelsiev (who honorably refrained from denouncing anybody, and defended his collaboration with Herzen and Ogarev). If Dostoevsky’s reaction to the history of Kelsiev may have influenced his handling of the young Nihilists, there is no question that the figure of Kelsiev himself served as one of the sources for Shatov, the passionately honest and repentant revolutionary-turned-nationalist in
Demons
.

Dostoevsky’s fanatical belief in the moral elevation of the Russian spirit, and the messianic destiny marked out for it in the future, is unabashedly proclaimed in an important letter to Maikov written just after sending off the first chapters of
The Idiot
. He mentions the admiration of their mutual friend Strakhov for the achievements of German culture, and he objects because “that’s the way their life has worked out! And we at that time were putting together a great nation, had
stopped Asia forever, endured endless suffering,
were able
to endure it all, did not lose the Russian idea, which will renew the world. . . . Our people are infinitely higher, more noble, more honest, more naïve, more capable, and full of a different, very lofty Christian idea, which Europe, with her sickly Catholicism and stupidly contradictory Lutheranism, does not even understand.”
²⁵
Dostoevsky had just taken the decision to embody this “lofty [Russian] Christian idea” in the character of Prince Myshkin, and some of the thoughts in this letter, especially the contrast between “the Russian idea” and Roman Catholicism, will appear in the Prince’s harangue during his engagement party.