Dostoevsky (132 page)

The ever-compliant Katkov agreed to send the money, and the Dostoevsky family departed on July 5. At last back in their homeland, the Dostoevskys still had a twenty-four-hour train trip ahead, but they felt as if they were living
through the wondrous realization of a long-cherished dream. “Our consciousness of the fact that we were riding on Russian soil,” Anna recalls, “that all around us were our own people, Russian people, was so comforting that it made us forget all about the troubles of our journey.”
³⁷

¹
See the commentary to
The Devils
in
PSS
, 12: 198. I am greatly indebted in general to the material contained in pages 192–218.

²
Ibid., 199.

³
See Philip Pomper,
Sergei Nechaev
(New Brunswick, NJ, 1979), 112.

⁴
In 1840 Bakunin spread the word that Katkov was carrying on an affair with Ogarev’s first wife (the Russian intelligentsia constituted a very small world). After a furious quarrel in Belinsky’s quarters, during which Katkov called Bakunin “a eunuch” (the revolutionary firebrand appears to have been in truth sexually impotent), Bakunin challenged him to a duel. But no date was set, and Bakunin soon left for Europe in June 1840. See Aileen Kelly,
Mikhail Bakunin
(New Haven, CT, 1947), 64–65.

⁵
PSS
, 12: 200.

⁶
PSSiP
, 14: 103, 100–102.

⁷
N. N. Strakhov,
Kriticheskiye stati
, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1902–1908), 1: 82.

⁸
Zarya
7 (1869), 159; cited in
PSS
, 12: 170–171.

⁹
PSS
, 12: 172.

¹⁰
PSS
, 29/Bk. 1: 111; February 26/March 10, 1870.

¹¹
Ibid., 116; March 25/April 6, 1870.

¹²
Ibid., 151; December 2/14, 1870.

¹³
On January 7/19, 1870, Dostoevsky records: “NB in general, the results of an attack, that is, nervousness, weakening of the memory, a state of cloudiness, and some sort of pensiveness—now lasts longer than in previous years. Earlier, this passed in three days, now not before six. In the evening especially, by candlelight, a sick sadness without cause and as if a red coloration, bloody (not a tint) on everything. Almost impossible to work these days.” E. M. Konshina,
Zapisnie tetradi F. M. Dostoevskogo
(Moscow–Leningrad, 1935), 83–84.

¹⁴
PSS
, 29/Bk. 1: 139–140; September 19/October 1, 1870.

¹⁵
Ibid., 141–142; October 8/20, 1870.

¹⁶
Ibid., 145; October 9/21, 1870.

¹⁷
Ibid.

¹⁸
Ibid., 163–164; January 6/18, 1871.

¹⁹
Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 164.

²⁰
PSS
, 29/Bk. 1: 138n.14.

²¹
Ibid., 214; May 18/30, 1871.

²²
Ibid., 215.

²³
Ibid.

²⁴
Ibid., 115; March 25/April 6, 1870.

²⁵
Ibid., 125; May 28/June 9, 1870.

²⁶
Ibid., 113n.28.

²⁷
Ibid., 127–129; June 11/23, 1870.

²⁸
Ibid., 216n.21; December 2/14, 1870.

²⁹
Ibid.

³⁰
Ibid., 172; January 18/30, 1871.

³¹
Ibid., 196–199; April 16/28, 1871.

³²
Ibid., 199.

³³
Ibid., 187.

³⁴
Ibid., 198.

³⁵
Ibid.

³⁶
Ibid., 205; April 21/May 3, 1871.

³⁷
Reminiscences
, 168.

On July 8, 1871, Dostoevsky and his family returned to Russia after four years of living abroad, making as unobtrusive a reentry as possible into the St. Petersburg he had quit presumably only for a summer vacation. Already published were all of
Part I
and two chapters of
Part II
of
Demons
, whose plot made spine-chilling use of the most spectacular event of the moment. Indeed, the public trial of the Nechaevtsy was taking place during Dostoevsky’s arrival in the capital, and some of the essential documents, including the coldbloodedly Machiavellian
Catechism of a Revolutionary
(written by either Bakunin or Nechaev, and perhaps both), were placed in evidence and made publicly available on the very day he stepped off the train.

The Dostoevskys rented two furnished rooms near Yusupov Park, where they were soon assailed by daily visits from relatives and friends. As Dostoevsky complains in a letter to his favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova, “there was hardly any time to sleep.”
¹
In the midst of this overwhelming conviviality, Anna suddenly felt labor pains at dinner and gave birth to a son, Feodor, on July 16, happily without suffering the severe contractions of her earlier pregnancies. Dostoevsky was overjoyed and hastened to convey the good news to Anna’s mother (then abroad) and to his family in Moscow.

A week later, at the end of July, Dostoevsky himself was in Moscow to straighten out his accounts with Katkov, receiving payment for the chapters he had supplied in recent months. The new acquisition of funds enabled the Dostoevskys to envisage moving from their furnished flat, which “was very expensive, full of comings and goings, and owned by nasty Yids.”
²
The practical Anna, who had made a quick recovery after the birth of Feodor, soon turned up a suitable four-room dwelling and rented it in her own name, sparing Dostoevsky the legal formalities. Although forced to buy furniture, Anna believed she could retrieve the dinnerware and kitchen utensils, as well as the winter clothing, left in the care of relatives and friends four years earlier. But all had been lost—through careless reshufflings, or in the failure to pay insurance premiums sent
from abroad. Worst of all was the loss of Dostoevsky’s library, which had been left in the care of Pasha on condition that he preserve it intact, but it had been sold piecemeal and irretrievably scattered. Anna mentions as of particular value the books inscribed by other writers, “serious works on history and on the sect of Old Believers [
raskolniki
], in which [my husband] took an immense interest.”
³

At the end of September, news of Dostoevsky’s return was published, and the expected did not fail to occur: creditors immediately began to hammer at his door. One of the most importunate was the widow of a certain G. Hinterlach, who refused Dostoevsky’s request, made in a personal visit, for an extension of a few months, by which time he expected to receive additional payment from Katkov. He returned home in despair, fearing that Frau Hinterlach would attach his personal property and, if this proved insufficient, send him to languish in prison.

Anna decided to take matters into her own hands and, without informing her husband, paid a visit to the implacable lady. Instead of pleading, she advised her that the household furnishings and the Dostoevsky apartment were both in her name, which meant that neither could be assigned for a debt owed by her husband. Moreover, if Dostoevsky were put in debtor’s prison, Anna would insist that he remain there until the entire debt was canceled. Besides not obtaining a cent, Frau Hinterlach would also have to foot the cost of the prisoner’s upkeep (as the law required of creditors using such a recourse). Anna also threatened to air the whole matter in an article for a journal: “Let everybody see what the honest Germans are capable of!”
⁴
Realizing that Anna was made of sterner stuff than the nervous and distraught Dostoevsky, the creditor hastened to accept the installment arrangement. After this, Anna decided to take over all the debt negotiations, and, meeting the threats with the same arguments, she succeeded in stalling demands for payment on the spot.

Busily at work on
Demons
all this while, Dostoevsky was also eager to renew relations with old friends and to make up for the cultural isolation from which he had suffered during his European sojourn. The poet Apollon Maikov, his staunchest friend and most faithful correspondent during his years abroad, introduced Dostoevsky to a literary-political circle that had gathered around Prince V. P. Meshchersky, the founder of a new publication,
The Citizen
(
Grazhdanin
), to counter the influence of the liberal and progressive press (though Meshchersky’s opinion of what was “liberal” and “progressive” included journals that the radical intelligentsia regarded as pillars of reaction). Prince Meshchersky was the close friend of the heir to the Russian throne, Tsarevich Alexander,
whom he had known since boyhood, and he moved freely in the very highest court circles. He gathered around him a small literary group that included Maikov, the great poet Tyutchev, Strakhov, Dostoevsky himself, and the tutor of the tsarevich, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Pobedonostsev later acquired a sinister reputation when his former pupil succeeded to the throne as Alexander III, and the ex-tutor became known as the malevolent
éminence grise
of his oppressive regime. But in 1871 he was regarded primarily as a legal scholar and highly placed government official with a liberal past (in the Russian sense), who had supported the cause of judicial reform and the abolition of serfdom. He was also cultivated, had read widely in English, French, and German literature, and had published a translation of Thomas à Kempis in 1869. This was the literary-political environment in which Dostoevsky was to be immersed during the next three years.

Dostoevsky took great pleasure as well in reestablishing connections within his own family circle. The husband of his niece, Professor M. S. Vladislavlev, who had once been a contributor to Dostoevsky’s journals, now taught philosophy at the University of St. Petersburg, and he frequently invited his eminent uncle-in-law to meet some of the luminaries of the learned world. Dostoevsky also began to entertain, and for a party on February 17, his name day, he sent invitations to close friends. Learning that N. G. Danilevsky, the author of
Russia and Europe
, was then passing through Petersburg, he asked Strakhov to bring Danilevsky along. They had known each other in the faraway days of the Petrashevsky Circle during the 1840s, when Danilevsky had earned the reputation of being the most thorough connoisseur of the Utopian Socialist doctrines of Fourier. Since then he had become a naturalist as well as a speculative historian of culture and had developed a theory of world civilization with a strong Slavophil tendency. Dostoevsky greatly admired his efforts to prove that Russian culture would soon create a new, independent phase of world history, and he employed some of these ideas for the impassionedly nationalistic speeches of Shatov in
Demons
.

In early February Dostoevsky wrote happily to his niece that, “thanks to a certain occurrence, my affairs have improved . . . I have gotten some money and satisfied the most impatient creditors.”
⁵
His discretion can be explained by a letter addressed to A. A. Romanov, the tsarevich, which expresses Dostoevsky’s embarrassment “at the boldness I exhibited.” One can only assume that (probably with the help of Meshchersky and Pobedonostsev) he had been urged to explain his circumstances to the heir to the throne, who had come to his aid with a grant of money. Dostoevsky thanked the tsarevich above all “for the priceless attention . . . paid to my request. It is dearer to me than anything else,
dearer than the very help that You gave me and which saved me from a great calamity.”
⁶

The first reactions to
Parts I
and
II
of
Demons
were beginning to appear, and Dostoevsky, who had anticipated hostility from the radical critics, was not disappointed. Enough aspects of the anti-Nihilist pamphlet remained to make the book anathema to those who sympathized even remotely with Nechaev’s revolutionary aims. In one of the most quoted passages of the novel, already cited earlier, a radical theoretician named Shigalev explains that, while he had begun his reflections with the idea of total freedom, he had regrettably discovered that he ended with that of total despotism. And he insists that the only logical answer to the social problem is to reduce all but one-tenth of humanity to the level of a “physiological” equality like a herd of cattle. A typical early review compares such notions to the madness of Poprishchin in Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman.” The novel, in the critic’s view, evokes “a hospital” filled with mental patients “supposedly making up . . . a gathering of contemporary people.”
⁷
One of the commonest charges leveled against Dostoevsky was that his characters were too mentally pathological to be taken as serious social commentary. An implicit subtext of such criticism was that the author himself, known to be epileptic, suffered from the same abnormality that filled his pages.