Dostoevsky (143 page)

Dostoevsky’s inclusion into the Meshchersky literary-political circle, though, had already led him to suggest the publication of a yearly almanac of the type mentioned by Liza Drozdova as a supplement to Meshchersky’s journal,
The Citizen
, and an announcement of such a supplement appeared in October. In addition, Dostoevsky’s participation in revisions of articles written by Meshchersky during the Wednesday evening gatherings at the prince’s home allowed him to gradually slip into becoming a member of the journal’s editorial board. When an editorial crisis arose in the winter of 1872–1873—Gradovsky, the moderately liberal editor resigned because of the prince’s interference in editorial matters—it was only natural that he, the famous writer now freed from the burden of his novel, should be the person to whom all turned in their hour of need.

After obtaining the approval of the press authorities, on December 20 Dostoevsky was confirmed as editor-in-chief of
The Citizen
. A new phase in Dostoevsky’s literary activity thus began, whose unexpected ideological twists and turns would surprise both his friends and his enemies during the seven years still remaining to his life. His salary was set at the modest sum of three thousand rubles a year, although he was also to be paid at space rates for all his own contributions. Anna estimates that, for the first time in his literary life, he could count on a regular income, and besides this advantage he now had the opportunity to experiment with his idea for the
Diary of a Writer
. After his long isolation from the Russian literary scene, he savored the chance to make his voice heard on all the social-cultural issues confronting his troubled country.

Dostoevsky’s appearance in the editorial offices of
The Citizen
is recorded in one of the best memoirs written about him. Twenty-three-year-old Varvara Timofeyeva was then writing a column about social-cultural events in the radical journal
The Spark
and worked as a proofreader in the printing plant producing
The Citizen
. Setting down her recollections, based on notebook entries, in 1904, Timofeyeva gives us a striking picture of Dostoevsky in terms of what may be called his ideological physiognomy at this time of his life, and her own comments help to define the social-cultural climate to which he was then responding.

Word had spread in the printing plant that Dostoevsky was to be the next editor of
The Citizen
, and Timofeyeva could hardly contain her excitement: “At this moment, there would arrive here the famous author of
Poor Folk
and
House of the Dead
, the creator of Raskolnikov and
The Idiot
—he would arrive, and
something extraordinary, new would happen to me.” What she saw, however, was a middle-aged man who “seemed very tired and perhaps ill.” He stood there “with a gloomy, exhausted face, covered like a net with some sort of unusually expressive shadings caused by a tightly restrained movement of the muscles. As if every muscle on this face with sunken cheeks and a broad, high forehead was alive with feeling and thought. And these feelings and thoughts were irresistibly pushing to come to the surface, but not allowed to do so by the iron will of this frail and yet at the same time thick-set, quiet and gloomy man with broad shoulders.”
²
Dostoevsky shook hands with his proofreader, bowing slightly, after a formal introduction. “His hand was cold, dry, and as it were lifeless. Indeed, everything about him that day seemed lifeless . . . [his] barely audible voice and lackluster eyes that fastened on me like two immovable dots.”
³
He sat silently at his table, reading proof for an hour without uttering a single word; even his pen moved silently over the proof sheets as he made corrections.

By all accounts Dostoevsky was taciturn and secretive with members of the young intelligentsia like Timofeyeva. After the denunciations of
Demons
in the radical and progressive press, he could be certain that he would be looked on with repulsion by them as a renegade from the radical ranks, and she herself bears out such a view of his suspicions. “In liberal literary circles,” she writes, “and among the student youth, with whom I had some familiarity, he was unceremoniously called someone ‘off his rocker,’ or—more delicately—a ‘mystic’ or ‘abnormal’ (which, as understood in those days, meant the same thing). This was the time just after the din had died down of the Nechaev trial and the publication of
Demons
in the
Russian Messenger
. We, the young people, had read the speeches of the noted trial lawyers in
The Voice
and the
St. Petersburg News
, and Dostoevsky’s novel seemed to us then a monstrous caricature, a nightmare of mystical ecstasies and psychopathology. . . . And after the author of
Demons
assumed the editorship of
The Citizen
, many of his friends and admirers turned against him once and for all.”
⁴

Even aside from such ideological undercurrents, Dostoevsky proved to be an exacting taskmaster as an editor. He made it clear that he wished his orders to be obeyed without question, even when they were unreasonable or impossible to carry out. “Neither his preemptory tone,” writes Timofeyeva, “to which I was totally unaccustomed, nor his peevishly dissatisfied remarks and exasperated anxieties over a wrongly placed comma, fitted in with my image of the writer as
man
, the writer as
sufferer
, the writer as
seer of the human heart
.”
⁵
Indeed, Timofeyeva was deeply shocked one day by an episode involving Mikhail Alexandrov, the
foreman in charge of typesetting, in which Dostoevsky, flying into a rage at this man’s entirely reasonable explanation for not inserting a last-minute change in proof, shouted “like a landowner” (
pro-barski
) to make the change. “ ‘Whether on the wall or on the ceiling, I want [this] printed,’ he shrieked,” according to Timofeyeva, “his face turning dead-white, his lips twitching spasmodically.” Alexandrov answered that he was not capable of such miracles; and at this ironic retort, Dostoevsky thundered that he needed people who would carry out his instructions to the letter “with doglike devotion.” (Timofeyeva was outraged by this phrase.) He scribbled off a note on the spot—handing it to the silent and stony-faced Timofeyeva for transmission—demanding that Alexandrov be dismissed immediately. But the insertion was dropped, the note was never passed on, and nothing more was heard about firing Alexandrov.
⁶
When in 1875 Dostoevsky was making preparations to publish his
Diary of a Writer
as an independent publication, he took great pains to place Alexandrov in charge of its production.

Varvara Timofeyeva only gradually overcame her hostility to Dostoevsky’s chilling reserve. The ice was broken late one evening when they were going over the proofs of Dostoevsky’s article about an art exhibit in Petersburg, and his analysis of a work of the artist N. N. Ge called
A Mysterious Evening
. This painting represented the Last Supper as if it had taken place in the present (“all the apostles in the picture [were shown] as if they were present-day ‘Socialists,’ ”), and the work was a favorite of the radicals for this reason.
⁷
Dostoevsky’s article criticized this reduction of the great Christian theme to a day in the life of a Russian radical, and Timofeyeva quotes him as writing, “Where is the Messiah, the Savior promised to the world—where is Christ?”
⁸
Like most of the younger radicals of the 1870s, Timofeyeva had become responsive again to the moral values of Christianity, and she was swept away by the passion of Dostoevsky’s eloquence, which aroused memories of the reverence for Christ imbibed during childhood from her mother, “a woman of burning faith.” “Suddenly,” she recalls, “without knowing why myself, I was irresistibly drawn to look at him . . . Feodor Mikhailovich looked at me intently and point-blank, with an expression that seemed to indicate he had been observing me for some time and waiting for me to turn my glance toward him.” The young woman’s face must have revealed to Dostoevsky that she had been moved, though neither uttered a word, and when, long after midnight, she came to say good-bye, he stood up, clasped her hands, and spoke to her tenderly as he led her to the door. “You wore yourself out today,” he said solicitously. “Hurry home and sleep well. Christ be with you!”
⁹
Timofeyeva walked home that night filled with joy at having finally
encountered what she felt to be the
real
Dostoevsky, at last illuminated by the power of his thought and the depth of his feeling.

Although he was always subject to sudden shifts of mood, when he would retreat broodingly into himself, his relations with Timofeyeva became more open and friendly. She depicts him reciting some favorite verses from the poetry of Nikolay Ogarev—verses in which the poet, opening the Bible at random, hopes “That would come to me by the will of fate / The life, and grief, and death of a prophet.” Timofeyeva continues: “Feodor Mikhailovich then got up, stepped into the middle of the room, and with flashing eyes and inspired gestures—exactly like a priest before an invisible sacrificial altar—recited for us “The Prophet” of Pushkin, then of Lermontov.”
¹⁰
For Timofeyeva, it seemed that the poems “were Dostoevsky’s own confession. To this day I still hear how he twice repeated: ‘I know only—that I can endure / . . . And can endure!—’ ”
¹¹

Despite the young radical’s growing affection for the seer in her midst, she found some of his pronouncements disconcerting. In the course of an impromptu attack on the danger to Russia of absorbing European influences, he said, “our people are holy in comparison with those over there. . . . [I]n Rome, in Naples, on the streets I was made the most shameful offers—youths, almost children. Disgusting, unnatural vices—and openly, before everybody, and no one even bothered about it. Try to do that amongst us! All our people would condemn it, because for
our
people that’s a deadly sin, but there—it’s in the customs, a simple habit, nothing more.” When Timofeyeva objected that it was not
this
aspect that admirers of the West wished to emulate, he rancorously replied that “there is no other,” that “Rome went to pieces because they began to transplant Greece among themselves; beginning with luxuries, fashions, and various sciences and arts, it ends with sodomy and general corruption.”
¹²

If Timofeyeva objected to the extremity of Dostoevsky’s anti-Westernism, she found it even more difficult to accept his literal predictions of apocalyptic doom triggered by recent political events. Lifting up his head from the proofs of an article dealing with Prussia, Bismarck, and the papacy, he declared: “They [radicals] do not suspect that soon everything will come to an end—all their ‘progress’ and chatter! They have no inkling that the Antichrist has been born . . . and is
coming
—.” Dostoevsky, she says, “pronounced this with an expression in his face and voice as if announcing to me a terrible and grandiose secret.” When she gingerly expressed some skepticism, he struck the table with his fist and “proclaimed like a mullah in his minaret: ‘The Antichrist is coming! It is coming! And the end of the world is closer—closer than they think!’ ” Timofeyeva
confesses, with some retrospective embarrassment, that she could not help recalling the opinion about him accepted by her Populist comrades: “ravings, epileptic hallucinations . . . the mania of one idea . . . an obsession.”
¹³

Timofeyeva had no such negative reaction to another of their dialogues on religious matters, when he asked, “how do you understand the Gospels?” She thought about the matter for the first time and answered, “The realization of the teachings of Christ on earth, in our life, in our conscience.” When Dostoevsky expressed disillusionment (“And that’s all?”), she thought harder and replied, “No. . . . Not everything finishes here, on earth. . . . All this life on earth is only a step . . . to another existence.” “To other worlds!” he exclaimed triumphantly, throwing up his arm to the wide-open window, through which could be seen a bright and luminous June sky.
¹⁴

This revelatory exchange focuses the crux of Dostoevsky’s ideological-artistic preoccupations during the 1870s—the conflict between a worldly (Utopian Socialist and Populist) acceptance of Christian morality and one grounded in divine illumination. It is then followed by some poignant words: “ ‘And what a wonderful though tragic task this is—to tell this to the people—’ he continued, momentarily hiding his eyes with his hands—‘wonderful and tragic because there is so much suffering here. So much suffering, but then—so much grandeur! . . . It’s impossible to compare it with any well-being in the world!’ ”
¹⁵
Nowhere else in the Dostoevsky canon do we find another passage expressing so simply and spontaneously his conception of his own creative task and the core values of his theodicy.