Dostoevsky (198 page)

Anna’s brother arrived that evening, two hours after Dostoevsky’s death, and “thanks to [him], I was relieved of all practical problems, and was spared much that was difficult and unpleasant in these sorrowful days.”
³⁴
The next morning, the twenty-ninth, Suvorin was in the apartment early and, in an article the next day, described with a shudder how the corpse had been washed and prepared for burial. He dashed off a note to the artist Kramskoy, asking him to come round immediately because Anna had spoken of “photographs and masks” being made.
³⁵
Kramskoy did produce a famous drawing of the dead Dostoevsky, with his head lying on a pillow and with what seems to be the beginning of a faint half-smile on his face. All of the many memoirists confirm that Kramskoy had caught the unusual expression they had seen themselves. The sculptor Bernshtam, instead of beginning on the planned bust of Dostoevsky, took the plaster cast for a death mask.

Dostoevsky’s friends in high places began to do what they could on behalf of the family. Pobedonostsev informed Loris-Melikov of the death and requested that he inform Alexander II. He also wrote the tsarevich to enlist his aid in obtaining some financial help for the family, urging him to speak to Loris-Melikov as well. An official of the Ministry of Internal Affairs soon arrived to inform Anna that the expenses of the funeral would be borne by the government, but Anna claimed to have proudly refused: “I considered it my moral obligation to bury my husband with the money he had earned.”
³⁶
No such refusal is mentioned in the official report, and she is described as having expressed gratitude for the aid.

30. Dostoevsky on his bier, by I. N. Kramskoy

The first service for the dead (
panikhida
) began at one o’clock in the afternoon. It had been announced in the newspapers, and Anna observed that “known and unknown arrived to pray at his coffin, and there were so many that very quickly all the five rooms were filled with a dense crowd, and when the office for the dead was recited the children and I had a hard time pushing through the crowd to stand near the coffin.”
³⁷
Pobedonostsev wrote to Katkov the same day, requesting that the money owed Dostoevsky be sent to Anna as speedily as possible, along with the authority to collect it in her name. “Today was the first
panikhida
,” he added. “He seems as if still alive, with a face of total quietude, as in the best moments of his life.”
³⁸
Anna’s brother then went to the Novodeichy
monastery, where, at the time of Nekrasov’s funeral, Dostoevsky had expressed a desire to be buried. But the price demanded for a gravesite seemed so exorbitant that it was decided to seek elsewhere. Anna suggested the Okhtinsky monastery, which contained the graves of their son Alyosha and of Anna’s father, and they planned to go there the next morning to buy a plot.

Meanwhile, however, others had heard of the Dostoevskys’ difficulties, and an important editor and publisher, prompted by the wife of a general, approached Metropolitan Isidor of the Alexander Nevsky
lavra
(a religious compound containing a cemetery) to suggest that it would be fitting for Dostoevsky to be buried there free of charge. Their request was met with a flat refusal: the worthy and learned metropolitan said that he was nothing but “a simple novelist, who never wrote anything serious,” and that in addition his funeral might cause a “disorder undesirable within the walls of the
lavra
.”
³⁹
When Pobedonostsev, now the highest secular official in charge of the Russian Church, heard of this retort at the evening
panikhida
, he responded, “We will allocate the money for the burial of Dostoevsky.” Metropolitan Isidor was no doubt read a thorough lesson in private, and the next day the newspapers announced that the place of burial would be the Alexander Nevsky
lavra
.

At the evening
panikhida
, the cramped apartment of the Dostoevskys was even more filled to overflowing; a newspaper correspondent wrote that those arriving at eight could not reach the coffin until at least ten. Saltykov-Shchedrin was there, and so was Countess Komarovskaya, accompanied by Baroness Feleisen. In a letter to Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, the countess described how the two titled ladies were unable to approach the coffin all through the service—no doubt a new experience for those before whom everyone made way. When the countess finally saw Dostoevsky, she too was struck by his expression: “As if alive, a bright, peaceful face . . . like a man who has done his duty, borne everything, not at all embittered.” The children were busy around the coffin, lighting candles that had been snuffed out by the lack of air and “asking visitors not to kiss the forehead [of the corpse] but the icon.”
⁴⁰

Ever since his return from Siberia in 1860, Dostoevsky had dreamed of uniting Russian society into one harmonious whole linked by faith and love. The closest this sublime chimera ever came to being realized was during the days when his body lay in its bier. All—literally all—of those who made up the cultural-political life of St. Petersburg, the nerve center of the Russian Empire, came to pay him homage. Saltykov-Shchedrin rubbed elbows with Countess Komarovskaya; Mikhailovsky, who had just begun to write under a pseudonym for the underground newspaper of the terrorist People’s Will, found himself in
the same rooms with Pobedonostsev and Grand Duke Dimitry, who was there accompanied by his tutor. Contemporaries themselves could not help marveling at the unanimity of grief and of reverence suddenly exhibited by all sections of a society otherwise torn apart by unceasing conflict—a conflict that, just a month later, would culminate in the assassination of Alexander II. Anna later remarked that, if her husband had not died on January 28, he would have had only a month longer to live—the news about Alexander would certainly have brought on an arterial rupture.

It is not surprising that those who had known him personally, or had taken part either for or against him in the literary polemics of the day, should have felt it obligatory to participate in the funeral ceremonies. More remarkable is the astonishingly widespread response that the news of his death aroused in the community at large, especially among the student youth. Koni recalls one of his young lawyers, whom he had asked to read a legal brief aloud, hesitating and stumbling while doing so. When asked if he were ill, he blurted out the news (which Koni had not yet heard) that Dostoevsky was dead, and then dissolved into tears.
⁴¹
As the word spread in the
gymnasiums
and the schools of higher learning in the capital, groups immediately began to organize, to assign delegates to attend the
panikhida
, and to collect funds to buy wreaths so that they could participate en masse in the burial ceremonies.

Dostoevsky’s appeal to the student youth was never more apparent than on this final occasion. I. F. Tyumenev, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, has left a classic account of the funeral and the procession in which he and his comrades took part. He remarked that if Turgenev, Goncharov, or Ostrovsky had died, their loss would not have been as “painful” as that of Dostoevsky, “who had just begun to attract the attention of society, just begun to interest everyone with his ‘Karamazovs,’ and just getting ready to continue narrating the fate of Alyosha, this (according to his intention) new Russian evangelical Socialist.”
⁴²
Tyumenev is obviously in sympathy with what he accurately calls Alyosha’s “evangelical Socialism,” and he also speaks as if his work had just come to public attention and gained a widespread readership. Although far from being true, this error helps us to understand why a new generation had become so receptive to his influence; they had grown up absorbing Populist (not Nihilist) ideas, and thus would not turn away from the Christian implications of Dostoevsky’s moral ideal. The remainder of this entry describes the instantaneous decision of the students in the academy to collect funds. When those assigned to the task were met occasionally by the question, “And who is this Dostoevsky?” no answer was given; some of the collectors even spat to show their contempt for such ignorance.

On the afternoon of January 30, the head of the censorship, N. S. Abaza, presented Anna with a letter from the Ministry of Finance informing her that the tsar had deigned to grant her a lifetime pension of two thousand rubles a year “because of [her husband’s] services to Russian literature.”
⁴³
This was, apparently, the first pension of its kind ever awarded in Russia to a writer as such. (Those given to Pushkin and Karamzin, who had occupied official government positions as sinecures, were for their services to the state.) Two vacancies, one in the prestigious Corps of Pages and the other in the Smolny Institute (a school for daughters of the nobility), also were to be reserved for the Dostoevsky children, and while Anna accepted all these offers gratefully, she later sent both children to other educational institutions.

Meanwhile, on the evening of the same day, Grigorovich made a list of all the groups who wanted to march in the funeral procession and established an order of the places where the delegates should assemble. The student representatives were told to help maintain order; older Dostoevsky friends were also appointed to oversee various groupings. The procession would begin at 10:30 the next morning (it started at 11:00) and proceed from the apartment to the Alexander Nevsky
lavra
along the Nevsky Prospect.

January 31, a Saturday, dawned bright and clear.
The Diary of a Writer
appeared on that very day. A numberless crowd had gathered around the apartment at Kuznechny Alley by nine o’clock that morning, all bearing wreaths and banners inscribed with the names of their institutions and societies, including journals and newspapers. A count made came to sixty-seven such groups, with fifteen choirs accompanying the cortège. Tyumenev described the moment when the coffin emerged from the house and appeared to the crowd. “From the belfry of the Vladimirsky church sounded the bell, and just right after the first impact a solemn ‘Holy God’ rang out. . . . At the first sound of the prayer all heads were bared . . . and to many of us, sobs rose in our throats. At that moment everyone, whether believer or not, felt something like the breath of godliness.”
⁴⁴
The procession wound its way through the streets, the coffin being carried by alternating bearers; among the first were Dostoevsky’s surviving fellow Petrashevtsy, A. I. Palm and A. N. Pleshcheev. They were followed by mourners stretching for almost a mile, with banners and wreaths. “It can boldly be said,” wrote Strakhov, “that, up until then, there had never before been such a funeral in Russia.”
⁴⁵

Observers were struck by the orderliness of the crowd. The police kept their distance, except for one episode not reported in the newspapers but appearing
in two private memoirs. One delegation of women students, instead of a wreath, displayed a pair of the convict shackles that Dostoevsky had worn and about which he had written in
House of the Dead
. When the police came to appropriate them, they were surrendered peacefully so as not to disturb the solemnity of the occasion. Dostoevsky’s prison past was one of his badges of honor, and when an elderly passer-by asked a member of the delegation who was receiving such a majestic funeral, the answer came back, “A
katorzhnik
” (an exiled convict). The mass of the population assumed that such an imposing cortège must be that of some important general.

It took two hours for the coffin to reach the portals of the Alexander Nevsky
lavra
, where it was met at the gateway by the students of the Theological Seminary and the clergy in their ceremonial robes. The clergy were led by the head of the
lavra
, Archimandrite Simeon, and the rector of the Theological Seminary, Dostoevsky’s old friend Father Yanishev. After the coffin was carried into the Church of the Holy Spirit within the
lavra
, the doors of the entry were closed and only delegations with wreaths were admitted. The crowd was told that the church would hold at most fifteen hundred mourners, and the procession began to disperse until about four the next day, when the burial would take place. At eight o’clock that evening the night service for the dead began, attended by Anna and the children (Lyubov had almost been crushed in the crowd around the gates earlier in the day). “The church,” Anna wrote, “was filled with those in prayer; many were . . . students of various higher educational institutions, the Theological Academy and
kursistki
. The majority of them stayed in the church for the entire night, relaying each other in reading the psalms over Dostoevsky’s coffin.”
⁴⁶