Dostoevsky (131 page)

All through these Dresden months, as can be seen from his comments on Russian literary and cultural matters, Dostoevsky was following closely events in his homeland. To Maikov, Dostoevsky writes, “I go through
three
Russian newspapers to the last line daily (!), and receive two journals.”
²⁴
A constant preoccupation was the fate of
Dawn
, which had failed to attract subscribers. Dostoevsky was liberal with advice on ways to increase Strakhov’s feeble popularity. “Nihilists and Westernizers require an absolute whip,” admonishes Dostoevsky, and should be attacked “more passionately and
coarsely
. . . . [the Nihilists] will consider you a backward old man who is still fighting with bow and arrow, while they have long since been using rifles.”
²⁵
But such combative skill and ardor was entirely foreign to Strakhov’s furtive temperament and scholarly disposition.

In addition to Strakhov’s article on Granovsky, another of his contributions to
Dawn
, a major series on Herzen published soon after the great man’s death in Paris in January 1870, can also be linked to Dostoevsky’s presentation of the character of Stepan Trofimovich. After reading the first installment, Dostoevsky wrote appreciatively, “you have done an extremely good job of establishing Herzen’s main point—pessimism.” Of greatest interest is Dostoevsky’s own view of Herzen, whom he sees in terms not mentioned by Strakhov at all: “the main essence of all of Herzen’s activity [was] that he has been, always and everywhere,
primarily a poet
. . . . The propagandist is a poet; the political activist is a poet; the socialist is a poet; the philosopher is a poet in the highest degree! That quality of his nature, I think can explain a great deal in his actions, even his flippancy and inclination to pun about the loftiest moral and philosophical questions (which, by the way, is very revolting in him).
²⁶
The “poetic” quality of Herzen’s temperament, his inability to commit himself wholeheartedly to whatever intellectual or practical activity he was involved in, will constitute one of the most engaging traits of Stepan Trofimovich’s whimsically volatile character. This Herzen component of Stephan Trofimovich, as we shall see, also provides the historical background for his stormy relations with Peter Verkhovensky and the Nihilist ideas of his offspring.

Strakhov wrote a number of articles about Turgenev at this time, and Dostoevsky chided him for their lack of severity. More fuel for Dostoevsky’s already red-hot animosity was added by the publication of Turgenev’s article, “The Execution of Troppmann,” in the journal
European Messenger
(
Vestnik Evropy
). Like Dostoevsky, Turgenev opposed capital punishment, and he had written an eyewitness account of the execution of a famous criminal as a protest. But, as Dostoevsky saw it, Turgenev had concentrated more on his own discomfiture and distaste than on the sufferings of the condemned, and his self-conscious finickiness filled Dostoevsky with a scarcely controllable rage.

“You may have a different opinion, Nikolay Nikolayevich,” he fumed to Strakhov, “but that pompous and refined piece made me indignant. Why does he keep on being embarrassed and repeating that he does not have the right to be there? Yes, of course, if he only came to see a show; but no person on earth has the right to turn away and ignore what happens on earth, and there are supreme
moral
reasons for that.
Homo sum and nihil humanum
, and so on. . . . The main impression of the piece . . . is a terrible concern, to the point of extreme touchiness, for himself, for his safety and his peace of mind, and that in sight of a chopped-off head!”
²⁷
Dostoevsky would parody this article in
Demons
, and also make use of the observation that “I consider Turgenev the most written out of all written-out Russian writers—no matter what you write ‘in favor of Turgenev’ Nikolay Nikolaevich.” The phrase cited is the title of an article in which Strakhov gently chides Turgenev’s newly announced allegiance to Nihilism, but insists that the nature of his artistic talent makes such an alliance impossible.

Strakhov continued to praise Turgenev’s artistry and to maintain that his literary gifts more than compensate for his ideological vacillations. Dostoevsky could hardly believe it, and thought that perhaps he had misread Strakhov’s words. “If you recognize that Turgenev has lost the point and is hedging,” he objects, “and
does not know what to say
about certain phenomena of Russian life (treating them mockingly
just in case
), then you ought to have recognized that his greatest artistic ability had weakened (and this was inevitable) in his latest works.” But Strakhov had not arrived at any such conclusion, much to Dostoevsky’s surprise: “You recognize his former artistry even in his latest works. Is that really so? But perhaps I am mistaken (not in my opinion of Turgenev, but in your article). Perhaps you just did not state your opinion quite correctly.”
²⁸

Dostoevsky had not been mistaken, however, and this defense of Turgenev leads him into an insight that has since become classic about the evolution of Russian literature and his own position in its ranks. Dostoevsky had once accepted the opinion that Turgenev’s work had been enfeebled by his prolonged
residence in Europe, but now he felt that “the reason is more profound” and goes far beyond Turgenev personally. “It really is all gentry-landowner literature. It has said everything that it had to say (superbly by Lev Tolstoy). But this in the highest degree gentry-landowner word was its last. There has not yet been a
new word
to replace that of the gentry-landowners, and besides, there has been no time for it.”
²⁹
Dostoevsky certainly thought of himself as capable of supplying such a
new word
—by dramatizing and combating the moral-spiritual confusion and chaos that had led to the rise of Nihilism.

Dostoevsky’s reactions to Strakhov’s articles about Herzen and Turgenev fed directly into the creation of his new novel; and he was also keeping a watchful eye on literary competitors dealing with the same subject. In
The Russian Messenger
he had been reading installments of a recent anti-Nihilist novel,
At Daggers Drawn
(
Na nozakh
), which N. S. Leskov was publishing under a pseudonym. Dostoevsky comments dismissively to Maikov that the book “contains a lot of nonsense . . . it is as though it takes place on the moon.”
³⁰
Dostoevsky of course is thinking of his own novel by contrast, in which he takes pains to delineate a verisimilar social framework. Dostoevsky also is careful to present his Nihilists in
Demons
not as villains acting out of dishonest or purely selfish motives but as vain, pretentious, frivolous, and simply naïve—easy prey for someone like Peter Verkhovensky who knows how to play on their human weaknesses.

It was in the spring of 1871, just before embarking on the return trip to Russia, that Dostoevsky took his final stab at gambling. This was the last time he ever approached a roulette table. He was laboring industriously at the first chapters of
Demons
, but in a mood of depression and anxiety. Anna had become pregnant with another child, and the expectation of an addition to the family only increased Dostoevsky’s torments about their lack of means. They both desired desperately to return to Russia before the new child was born, which meant a departure by the beginning of July. It so happened that Anna had accumulated a small surplus of three hundred thalers and was willing to sacrifice one hundred of them to provide some distraction for her husband. Some subterfuge was necessary because of the presence of Dostoevsky’s mother-in-law, who disapproved of gambling, and the couple concocted a little code that Dostoevsky could use in telegraphing for money from Wiesbaden. Anna writes with hindsight that she was convinced her husband would lose as usual, but perhaps even she harbored a shred of hope that he might, as had occasionally happened, bring home some winnings.

But Dostoevsky lost all his money almost immediately, and, to make matters worse, also gambled away the thirty thalers sent him for the return home. Once more he writes the familiar pitifully pleading, imploring, self-castigating letters, not even asking for pardon but rather the opposite: “if you feel sorry for me at this moment, do not do so, I am not worth it.” He is frantic about how the news will affect Anna, now in her final months of pregnancy, and also feels guilty when he thinks of his little daughter: “And Lyuba, Lyuba, how vile I have been!” In asking Anna to dispatch thirty more thalers, which he swears not to use for gambling, he envisions the terrible prospect of what might happen if he betrays her trust yet again. “But, my angel, try to understand, after all, I know that you will die if I were to lose again! I am not at all a madman! After all, I know that then I am done for. . . . Believe me for the last time, and you will not regret it.”
³¹

This last phrase refers to Dostoevsky’s promise, a few sentences later, that he would never gamble again—a promise he had made often enough in the past and often enough broke. But with the benefit of hindsight, one may perhaps detect a new note of resoluteness in his vehement declarations, a desire at last to come to terms with himself once and for all. “Anya, my guardian angel! A great thing has been accomplished within me, a vile fantasy that has
tormented
me almost ten years has vanished. For ten years (or, rather since my brother’s death, when I was suddenly crushed by debt) I kept dreaming of winning. I dreamed seriously, passionately. Now all that is finished. This was ABSOLUTELY the last time! Will you believe, Anya, that my hands are untied now; I had been bound by gambling.” As usual, too, the letter is filled with affirmations of a desire to return to work, and he proclaims that “I will think about serious things now, and will not dream whole nights on end about gambling, as I used to. And therefore
the serious business
will move better and more quickly, and God bless it.”
³²
Anna, who had heard all this before, was understandably skeptical; but time would show that something decisive
had
occurred.

The specter of Anna dying from the grief brought on by his follies should be taken as more than a rhetorical flourish. Indeed, this fear had already manifested itself to him palpably in two terrifying dream images. “I dreamed of my
father
last night,” Dostoevsky tells her, “but in such a horrible way as he has appeared to me only twice in my life, foretelling a terrible disaster, and twice the dream came true. (And now when I also recall my dream three days ago, that you had turned gray, my heart stops! Lord, what will happen to you when you get this letter!)”
³³

Dostoevsky not only took dream images seriously, but he also believed in signs and premonitions; in general he was superstitious and susceptible to being
influenced by any intimations of the dictates of a higher will. In Wiesbaden, after playing until 9:30 p.m. and losing everything, he ran off to seek the Russian priest. “I thought on the way,” Dostoevsky explains to Anna, “running to see him, in the dark, down unfamiliar streets, that after all he is the Lord’s shepherd, that I would talk to him not as with a private person, but as at a confession.” Lost in the obscurity, he saw looming before him a building whose vaguely Oriental outlines seemed to mark out his destination. “When I reached the church that I had taken for a Russian one, I was told at a shop that it was . . . a Jewish one. It was as though I had had cold water poured over me. I came running home; it is now midnight, I am sitting and writing to you.”
³⁴

Clearly, he intended to convey that he had received a shock to his entire nervous system, and this sensation he may perhaps have interpreted as an ominous sign. It could be that Dostoevsky took this error to indicate, by a signal from on high, that his gambling mania was bringing him into a degrading proximity with those people traditionally linked with the amassing of filthy lucre. Perhaps, whenever he was tempted to gamble in the future, this (for him) demeaning and chilling recollection continued to recur and acted as a barrier. A postscript to the letter confirms that he felt a decisive turning point in his life had been reached: “I
will not go to see
a priest, not for anything, not in any case. He is one of the witnesses of the old, the past, the former, the vanished! It will be painful even for me to meet him!”
³⁵
Never again did he gamble during his several trips to Europe in the following years.

Dostoevsky came back from Wiesbaden determined, despite the loss of one hundred and eighty thalers, to return to Russia in July. He had calculated that he needed three or four thousand rubles to arrive in safety, but he now resolved to make the journey even though only a thousand might be available. “Staying in Dresden for another year,” he wrote Maikov, “is the most impossible thing of all. That would mean killing Anna Grigoryevna with despair that she is unable to control. . . . It is also impossible for me not to move for a year.”
³⁶
Katkov had promised him the thousand by the end of June; but Dostoevsky wrote immediately, as he had done so often after a gambling disaster, to retail his woes and ask that the money be sent as soon as possible. Although the trip would be difficult—the Dostoevskys would be traveling without help and with Lyubov on their hands—there was no time to lose: Anna was expected to give birth at the beginning of August.