Dostoevsky (149 page)

Writing to Victor Putsykovich, who had taken over the editorship of
The Citizen
, Dostoevsky asks for “material on the trial of Dolgushin and company from the newspapers.”
²⁰
The public trial of this radical group (named after its leader, Alexander Dolgushin) will be partially employed in
A Raw Youth
for a fleeting portrayal of the fictional Dergachev group. Many of the Dolgushintsy had been in contact with the Nechaevsty and jailed in connection with that affair, though they took no part in any of Nechaev’s activities. Indeed, they had now converted to that reverence for a Socialist Christ and for Christian moral ideals so typical of the Populists. Their propaganda was drawn from the ideas of V. V. Bervi-Flerovsky, an economist whose
Position of the Working Class in Russia
(1869) was one of the major works, along with those already mentioned by Lavrov and Mikhailovsky, that inspired the Populist movement. “Bervi-Flerovsky,” writes Andrzej Walicki, “painted a vivid picture of the growing destitution of the peasantry following the introduction of capitalist social relations in agriculture; the conclusion he drew was that everything possible should be done to prevent capitalism from making further headway, and to utilize, instead, the possibility of the peasant commune.”
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A discussion of Bervi-Flerovsky’s ideas had appeared in
Dawn
, which Dostoevsky read assiduously during its brief life span.

One of the three proclamations among the Dolgushintsy documents was a shortened version of a brochure written for them by Bervi-Flerovsky in a semi-liturgical style, “Of the Martyr Nikolay and How Mankind Should Live by the Laws of Nature and Justice.” Another, furnished with an epigraph from Saint Matthew, was even more stylistically adapted to the sacramental language of church services. All the proclamations of the Dolgushintsy were based on moral appeal. As the commentator in the Academy of Sciences edition of
A Raw Youth
notes, “The ethical substance of the ‘justice’ that the Dolgushintsy desired coincided objectively . . . with the substance of the Christian teachings, even though the Dolgushintsy were opponents of Christianity. . . . ‘[T]he religion of
equality’ as the source and goal of their strivings, runs through all of their proclamations.”
²²

Labors on his novel were broken only by letters from his stepson Pavel Isaev, who had married and become a father for the second time. A letter in November from Pavel’s wife to Anna revealed that she had no idea of his whereabouts. Also, she requested Anna’s aid in finding a foundling home where she could place their baby daughter. Locating Pavel at last, Dostoevsky sent twenty-five rubles, “because of your harsh situation,” but urged him “to try and send it all to Nadezhda Nikolayevna [his wife].”
²³
Anna did not mince words in expressing her disapproval of his behavior in her reply to his wife. Insulted, Pavel sent the twenty-five rubles back to his stepfather and complained that Anna had over-stepped “
all the bounds of decency
” in dressing him down. Taking this rebuke to Anna badly, Dostoevsky replied, “It’s impossible not to be indignant, if only from the side (and I’m not on the side for you) about how you treat your children. Do you have any notion of what a foundling home is and of the raising of the newborn by a Finnish woman, amid refuse, filth, pinches, and perhaps punches: certain death. . . . After all, I didn’t send you, only a stepson, just anywhere to be taught, brought up, made into a shoemaker.”
²⁴

It was not Dostoevsky who made the first trip to Petersburg from Staraya Russa that winter but Anna, who left in mid-December to supervise the publication of
House of the Dead
under the Dostoevsky imprint. He was gloomy about the prospects of any further demand for his prison memoirs, but Anna succeeded in selling or placing on commission seven hundred copies, returning home with a small profit. She had left him in charge of the children, aided of course by the servants and the old nanny of whom he was so appreciative, and his letters show him to be a devoted
paterfamilias
, observing his children with pleasure. “Yesterday,” he writes Anna, “during the cigarettes [Dostoevsky, an inveterate smoker, rolled his own cigarettes], they started dancing, and Fedya invented a new
step
: Lilya would stand at the mirror, Fedya opposite her, and they both would go toward each other in time (moreover, Lilya was very graceful); after coming together (all the while in time), Fedya would kiss Lilya, and after kissing they would go their separate ways.”
²⁵

Although by this time he had sent off the first chapters of
A Raw Youth
to
Notes of the Fatherland
, so far no response to them had been forthcoming. Two days later, from a story in
The Citizen
, Dostoevsky learned that Katkov had purchased
Anna Karenina
at five hundred rubles per folio sheet. “They couldn’t immediately resolve to give
me
250 rubles,” he remarks ruefully, “but
they paid L. Tolstoy 500 with alacrity!”
²⁶
Even more than this blow to his literary pride, what bothered him was that “now it’s quite possible that Nekrasov will cut me back if there is anything contrary to their orientation. . . . But even if we have to beg for alms, I won’t compromise my orientation by so much as a line!”
²⁷

A month later he went to Petersburg. Nekrasov had finally written that the next installment was to be put into galleys; but he still had not proferred any opinion about the work, and Dostoevsky had begun to fret that perhaps his depiction of the Dergachev group had met with some hostility. He cheerfully informs Anna, however, that Nekrasov was “terribly happy with the novel, although he hasn’t yet read the second part.” Moreover, the co-editor, Saltykov-Shchedrin, with whom he had slashingly polemicized in the past, “praises [it] very highly.” The opinion of the satirist, if correctly reported, drastically altered with later installments, which he spoke of as being “almost crazy.”
²⁸

Dostoevsky read part of his proofs at Nekrasov’s home and took the remainder back to his hotel, but feeling the need for company he called on the Maikovs and found Strakhov there as well. Maikov “greeted me with apparent heartiness,” he writes Anna, “but . . . not a word about my novel and obviously because of not wanting to
pain
me. They also talked a little about Tolstoy’s novel [
Anna Karenina
], and what they said was ridiculous in its enthusiasm. I started to speak and made the point that, if Tolstoy published in
Notes of the Fatherland
, then why were they criticizing me, but Maikov frowned and broke off the conversation and I didn’t insist. In short, I see that something is going on here, and precisely what you and I talked about, that is, Maikov has spread that idea about me [that he had betrayed his former beliefs and commitments].”
²⁹

Dostoevsky read the first installments of
Anna Karenina
during this Petersburg visit “under a bell,” that is, his compressed-air treatments for emphysema. Tolstoy’s novel “is rather boring and so-so,” he reports to Anna. “I can’t understand what they’re all so excited about.”
³⁰
He was overjoyed when Nekrasov, as he proudly told Anna, dropped in unexpectedly on the fourth day of his stay “to express
his delight
after reading the end of the first part [of
A Raw Youth
]. ‘I got so carried away that I stayed up all night reading . . . And what freshness you have, my dear fellow . . . that sort of freshness doesn’t happen at our age and not a single other writer had it. Lev Tolstoy’s latest novel only repeats what I’ve read in him before, only it was better before’ (Nekrasov said this).”
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Dostoevsky’s perturbation over the accidental competition between his novel and
Anna Karenina
was considerable. One of the warmest articles greeting the first chapters of
A Raw Youth
had appeared in the
St. Petersburg Gazette
(written under a pseudonym) by Vsevolod Solovyev. When Dostoevsky paid him a visit, Solovyev recalls the novelist was “in a highly irritable state and in the gloomiest frame of mind. ‘Tell me, tell me honestly—do you think I am envious of Lev Tolstoy?’ he blurted out, having greeted me and intently looking me in the eye.” The startled Solovyev, hardly knowing how to respond, adroitly replied that, since the two writers were so different, he could not imagine Dostoevsky being envious of Tolstoy. “They accuse me of envy,” exclaimed Dostoevsky. “And who? Old friends, who have known me for twenty years.” These could only be Maikov and Strakhov. He sank into a chair, but then leaped up and, grasping Solovyev by the hand, broke out into an anguished tirade:

Even though matters were smoothed over on the surface between Dostoevsky and Strakhov, and to all external appearances they remained friends, the rancor was never dispelled. An entry in Dostoevsky’s notebook for 1876–1877 reveals the depth of his anger, and also a good deal of contempt. He ridicules Strakhov for leading a sycophantic, sybaritic life. He “loves to eat turkey, and not his own, at others’ tables” (Strakhov dined regularly at the Dostoevskys’), while deriving his self-importance from holding “two public posts”—“a purely seminarian trait,” Dostoevsky sneers. Even more, he accuses Strakhov of lacking any sense of “civic feeling or duty,” so that “for some gross, coarsely voluptuous filth he is ready to sell everyone and everything . . . and not because he does not believe in the ideal, but because of the thick layer of fat which prevents him from feeling anything.”
³³
This extremely insulting characterization was never published, but one assumes that Strakhov must have come across it in preparing Dostoevsky’s biography.
³⁴

27. Tolstoy in 1877, by I. N. Kramskoy

The estrangement from his oldest friends made him all the more eager to grasp at the chance of reviving his intimacy with Nekrasov, and perhaps establishing a new friendship with the notoriously bearlike Saltykov-Shchedrin. But he had certainly not forgotten their wounding satirical exchanges of the 1860s, which are reflected in his recently reread novel
The Idiot
. Although there is nothing to indicate that Dostoevsky was subject to any direct editorial pressure, as he had anticipated, an article by Mikhailovsky, published alongside Dostoevsky’s first chapters in the January issue of
Notes of the Fatherland
, raises questions. The Populist reading public was, apparently, as much taken aback by his presence in
the pages of their favorite journal as was his own literary circle, and Mikhailovsky felt called upon to offer some explanation. “First, Dostoevsky is one of our most talented belletrists, and second . . . the scene at Dergachev’s . . . has only an episodic character. If the novel were based on this motif (as had been the case with
Demons
),
Notes of the Fatherland
would be forced to renounce the honor of seeing the creation of Dostoevsky in its pages, even if he were a writer of genius.”
³⁵
From the amount of space accorded the Dergachev motif in Dostoevsky’s notes, compared with their ancillary role in the novel, it seems likely that he might have wished to avoid any editorial clash over his final text.

Dostoevsky returned to Staraya Russa after two exhausting weeks. As well as looking after his literary affairs and taking his compressed air treatments, he had dispatched the business of his publishing firm, visited the lawyer handling the litigation over the Kumanina estate as well as the dentist repairing his dentures, and made the rounds of a host of friends and relatives. He hardly had time to sleep and, to make matters worse, he suddenly received a summons from the police informing him, when he showed up, that he lacked an internal passport. On protesting that “there are twenty thousand people without passports in Petersburg, and you’re detaining a person everybody knows,” he was told that, even though he was “a famous person all over Russia,” laws still had to be obeyed.
³⁶
However, he was promised a certificate of residency in a few days and told not to worry. In his last letter from Petersburg, he writes: “Today I’m riding around and living as though in hell. . . . Tomorrow there are the devil only knows how many things still to take care of.”
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