Dostoevsky (156 page)

Dostoevsky’s
Diary
became the most widely read of all such publications during its two-year life span, reaching audiences not only in the depths of the Russian provinces but also in the highest court circles. In the fall of 1876, Pobedonostsev requested that he send a copy regularly to Tsarevich Alexander. “I know,” wrote the crown prince’s tutor, “that yesterday, in the presence of his brothers, he spoke of several articles and recommended them to their attention.”
²²
Overjoyed, Dostoevsky wrote directly to Alexander, to whom he had presented a dedicated copy of
Demons
three years earlier, saying that “the present great energies in Russian history have elevated the spirits and hearts of the Russian people with unimaginable power to a height of understanding of much that was not earlier understood, and have illuminated in our consciousness
the sanctity of the Russian idea
more vividly than ever before. . . . I have long since thought and dreamed of the happiness of offering my modest work to your Imperial Highness.” He then excuses himself for his “boldness,” and asks that the crown prince “not condemn one who loves you boundlessly.”
²³

Dostoevsky well knew that his own veneration for tsarism was hardly shared by those socially conscious members of the younger generation he was trying to influence. Indeed, there were disquieting signs that radical activity was no longer confined to “going to the people.” Discouraged by their failure to arouse the countryside, the Populists in 1876 were rethinking their position and turning to political agitation to attain their aims. One of the first open manifestations of this change of tactics was a demonstration in the square leading to the Church of Our Lady of Kazan in St. Petersburg. In December 1876 a small group led by G. V. Plekhanov (later the founder of the Russian Communist Party and the mentor of Lenin) gathered to listen to a speech by their leader and unfurled a red banner bearing the words “Land and Liberty” (Zemlya i Volya), the name of their revolutionary organization. The police, as well as local workmen and shopkeepers, charged into the group, and many of the demonstrators were severely beaten before being taken into custody.

For Dostoevsky, the demonstration was simply another instance of how easily Russian youth could be misled because of the purity of their moral idealism. “The young people on December 6 in Kazan Square,” he wrote in his
Diary
, “were doubtless nothing more than a ‘herd’ driven on by the hands of some crafty scoundrels. . . . Without a doubt there was a good deal of malicious and immoral tomfoolery here, a monkeylike aping of someone else’s doings; nonetheless, it would have been possible to bring them together simply by assuring them that they were to gather in the name of something sublime and beautiful, in the name of some remarkable self-sacrifice for the greatest of purposes” (24: 52). One of the aims of Dostoevsky’s
Diary
was to encourage such youthful self-sacrifice for what he considered worthier causes than those proclaimed in Kazan Square.

In May 1877, the Dostoevskys left St. Petersburg for the spring and summer months at Maly Prikol, the country estate of Anna’s brother Ivan Snitkin, located in the province of Kursk. Anna’s health had begun to flag under her combined responsibilities as mother, homemaker, and business manager, and Dostoevsky insisted that she take a complete rest during the summer. Russia had declared war against Turkey in April 1877, and on the journey to Maly Prikol Anna recalls the long delays at various stations, “where our train had to stand for hours because of the movement of the troops being sent off to war. At every stop Feodor Mikhailovich would go to the buffet and buy large quantities of rolls, honey cakes, cigarettes, and matches, and take them into the cars where he would give them out to the soldiers and have long talks with them.”
²⁴

At the end of June, the family departed together from Maly Prikol and separated at the railroad junction that took Anna and the two older children on a
pilgrimage to Kiev, the cradle of Old Russian civilization, and Dostoevsky to Petersburg. While in the capital, he received only one letter from his wife in a two-week period and became frantic for lack of news. The four letters he wrote are also filled with exasperation at the problems encountered with issuing the
Diary
on time, as well as in supervising its printing, binding, and mailing to various distributors. The personal origin of some of his most haunting literary scenes is illuminated in a passage describing the effects of a severe epileptic attack. “At 6:30 this morning,” he informs Anna, “on coming to after a seizure I headed off
to your room
and suddenly Prokhorovna told me in the parlor that the mistress wasn’t home. ‘Where is she?’ ‘Why, she’s in the country at a summer house.’ ‘How can that be? She should be here. When did she leave?’ Prokhorovna persuaded me that I had only arrived the day before yesterday myself.”
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Dostoevsky’s remarkable capacity to depict such states of semiconsciousness, when a character behaves according to subliminal drives and impulses, evidently derives from such episodes in his own life. He wrote his younger brother Nikolay that the seizure “has shattered me,” and he asked Nikolay, whom he saw rarely under ordinary circumstances, to come for a visit.

His seizures had apparently affected even his long-term memory. P. V. Bykov, a journalist and writer who had met Dostoevsky in the 1860s, had recently requested a biography and bibliography for a volume of essays on Russian writers that he planned to publish. But Dostoevsky confesses, “I’ll tell you right out that at present I am incapable of [sending you an exact biography]. As a consequence of my epilepsy . . . I have somewhat lost my memory, and—would you believe—have forgotten (literally forgotten, without the slightest exaggeration) plots of my novels and characters portrayed, even in
Crime and Punishment
. Nonetheless, I do remember the general outlines of my life.”
²⁶
He promised Bykov that he would perhaps “put together my biography for you” in Ems, where he planned to spend the summer.

The torment of not receiving any reply to his missives was more than he could endure, and he sent off two telegrams to Maly Prikol inquiring about Anna’s well-being. When a letter finally arrived on July 16, he wrote the next day to justify his harassed behavior. “I haven’t been able to sleep, I worry, sort through the chances [of an accident] pace around the room, have visions of the children, worry about you, my heart pounds (I’ve had palpitations of the heart start up these last three days). . . . It finally begins to dawn, and I sob, pace around the room and cry, with a sort of shaking (I don’t understand it myself, it’s never happened before) and I just try not to let the old woman [Prokhorovna] hear it.”
²⁷
This passage can stand for many others in which he describes losing control of
his nerves as his fertile imagination conjures up every disaster that might befall his family, especially the children.

Despite his desire to return to the sheltering warmth of the family circle, Dostoevsky felt it imperative to make a journey to Darovoe, the country property of his parents, unvisited since childhood, and now occupied by the family of his sister Varvara Karepina, who had inherited the property. He referred to this trip in his July–August 1877
Diary
, where he reports on a conversation with “one of my old Moscow acquaintances” (probably Ivan Aksakov). “This little, unremarkable spot,” he told his friend, “had left a deep and strong impression on me for my whole life.” Dostoevsky emphasizes the importance for children to store up “sacred memories” (a point he will illustrate through Alyosha Karamazov), and writes that “a person cannot even live without something sacred and precious from childhood to carry into life” (25: 172). Dostoevsky’s visit had unquestionably brought back recollections of his own father. A passage in Dostoevsky’s text can be read as a confession of how he may have judged (and pardoned) his own progenitor.

“Today’s fathers,” he writes, do not possess any “great idea” that they pass on to their children, and “in their hearts” they have no great faith in such an idea. Yet, “it is only a great faith of this kind that is capable of giving birth to
something beautiful
in the memories of children, and indeed it can, even despite that same moral filth that surrounds their cradles. . . . [E]ven . . . the most fallen of fathers, who . . . has been able to transplant the seed of this great idea and great feeling into the impressionable and eager souls of his pitiable children, . . . has later been wholeheartedly forgiven by them because of this good deed alone, despite other things” (25: 180–181). Dostoevsky often uses the expression “great idea” to mean the idea of the Christian morality of love and the Christian promise of eternity. He could well have felt, after the visit to Darovoe, that his own far from blameless father had nevertheless succeeded in planting these seeds in the hearts of his children.

During the fall and winter months of 1877 Dostoevsky toiled away at the
Diary
, even though he had been
“sick in bed
for two weeks with a fever.”
²⁸
In October 1877, however, he informed readers of the
Diary
that he intended to terminate its publication at the end of the year. An old confidant, Dr. Stepan Yanovsky, wrote from Vevey in Switzerland, expressing gratitude on behalf of the Russian circle there for the patriotic support given their homeland in the
Diary
. Like many others, Yanovsky expressed regret at the cessation of the
Diary
, and Dostoevsky explains that, aside from the worsening of his epilepsy, he had decided to suspend publication because “there is a novel in my head and my heart, and it’s beginning to be written.” Moreover, in the future “I want to try a
new publication into which the
Diary
will enter as a part.”
²⁹
Early in 1878 he had sketched a plan for such a new monthly, no longer written exclusively by himself, that included more literary material and critical essays. “You wouldn’t believe to what an extent I have enjoyed the sympathy of Russians during these two years of publication,” he exultantly informs the doctor. Yanovsky had spoken disparagingly of Kraevsky’s newspaper,
Voice
, which had become highly critical of the Russo-Turkish War, and Dostoevsky snaps, “These gentlemen will in fact disappear. . . . Those who do not understand the people will now undoubtedly have to join the stockbrokers and the Yids, and that’s the end of the representatives of our ‘progressive’ thought,”
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The “Yids” are thus automatically associated with all those non-Jewish Russians who remain skeptical about the war, and whose motives for doing so, in his extremely jaundiced eyes, can only be grossly and sordidly material.

Nekrasov died in December 1877, and the Dostoevskys attended the church services at the Novodeichy convent. Hordes of students and admirers came to pay their last respects to the poet who had given poignant expression to the social-humanitarian themes of the 1840s, and had later written so movingly of the limitless sorrows of Russian peasant life in his great cycle of poems,
Who Is Happy In Russia?
Several people spoke at the graveside, among them Dostoevsky, who improvised some remarks in response to a request, as Anna writes, from “the surrounding crowd of young people.”
³¹
Nekrasov, Dostoevsky said, “was the last of that series of poets who came to us with their ‘new word,’ ” and that “among such poets he should stand directly after Pushkin and Lermontov.” At this, a dissenting “voice from the crowd cried out that Nekrasov was
greater
than Pushkin and Lermontov and that the latter were only ‘Byronists.’ ” Several voices coming from a small group led by Plekhanov then took up the refrain and shouted, “Yes, greater!”
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This small episode may stand as a symbolic indication of the growing aggressiveness of the hitherto peaceful Populists. During 1877 the government brought three groups of them to trial: those who had demonstrated before the Cathedral of Kazan and two groups arrested for having “gone to the people” three years earlier. The second trial, known as that of “the fifty,” produced a deep and lasting impression on the radical intelligentsia. The accused testified with great dignity about the intolerable conditions they had been forced to endure, and brought the more humane and educated members of the public face to face with the
grim realities of a repressive regime. This public was shocked by the unconscionable length of time these young people had been imprisoned before being brought to trial, and by the severe sentences meted out for their perfectly peaceable and often charitable “crimes.”