Dostoevsky (22 page)

5. F. M. Dostoevsky in 1847

After a few weeks the two young men became fast friends; and Dostoevsky also consulted Yanovsky about the nervous disorders that continued to plague his life. These had grown worse since the days when he believed that someone was snoring beside him at night; now they took the form of veritable “hallucinations,” which he was afraid heralded the onset of what he called a “
kondrashka
” (apoplexy), that is, one of his fainting fits. While reassuring Dostoevsky that his “hallucinations” were the result of nerves, Yanovsky does report one severe attack of “apoplexy” during the summer of 1847.

So far as Dostoevsky’s hallucinations are concerned, there is nothing but the report of their existence to be gleaned from Yanovsky’s pages. It is likely, though, that Dostoevsky describes them in
The Insulted and Injured
(1861), a novel that contains many autobiographical details about his life during the mid-1840s. The narrator, an impoverished young author, writes: “I gradually began at dusk to sink into that condition which is so common with me now at night in my
illness, and which I call
mystic terror
. It is a most oppressive, agonizing state of terror of something that I cannot define, something ungraspable and outside the natural order of things, but which may yet take shape this very minute, as though in mockery of all the conclusions of reason, and come to me and stand before me as an undeniable fact, hideous, horrible, and relentless. . . . [I]n spite of all the protests of reason, . . . the mind . . . loses all power of resistance. It is unheeded, it becomes useless, and this inward division intensifies the agony of suspense. It seems to me something like the anguish of people who are afraid of the dead” (3: 208).

Dostoevsky later described the same symptoms in conversation with Vsevolod Solovyev, the famous historical novelist. “Two years before Siberia,” he said, “at the time of my various literary difficulties and quarrels, I was the victim of some sort of strange and unbearably torturing nervous illness. I cannot tell you what these hideous sensations were; but I remember them vividly; it often seemed to me that I was dying, and the truth is—real death came and then went away again.”
¹⁴
His hallucinations contributed to undermine his psychic balance and to make it impossible for him to control his emotions in the face of opposition or hostility.

All sorts of rumors and stories ridiculing Dostoevsky now began to make the rounds in Petersburg literary circles. At the end of 1846 a satirical poem about Dostoevsky, jointly written by Turgenev and Nekrasov, circulated in manuscript. Called “The Knight of the Rueful Countenance,” it labels Dostoevsky a “pimple” on the face of Russian literature, jeers at his inflated opinion of his literary prowess, and ridicules him for having fainted dead away on being presented to a beautiful, aristocratic society belle who wanted to meet the author of
Poor Folk
.
¹⁵
This humiliating incident actually occurred at a ball given by Count Vielgorsky at the beginning of 1846.

If Dostoevsky displays such a remarkable ability to portray feelings and states of suspicion, persecution, and exasperation reaching the pitch of hysteria, and if he has a tendency to see human relations in terms of a struggle for psychic domination, the reason is surely that he was all too familiar with such phenomena in his own psyche. The combination of excessive vainglory and egoism with an equal desire for acceptance and love is one that he often depicted, and these same incompatibles are manifest in his disastrous relations with the Pléiade.

These unhappy occurrences led to some critical self-scrutiny. One of the most poignant letters contains an apology for Dostoevsky’s behavior during a holiday
at Revel with his brother, and reveals his inability—which he would later embody in so many of his characters—to harmonize his true inner sentiments with his outward behavior. “I remember that you once told me,” he writes Mikhail, “that my behavior with you excluded mutual equality. My dear fellow. This was totally unjust. But I have such an awful, repulsive character. . . . I am ready to give my life for you and yours, but sometimes, when my heart is full of love, you can’t get a kind word out of me. My nerves don’t obey me at such moments. I am ridiculous and disgusting, and I always suffer from the unjust conclusions drawn about me. People say that I am callous and without a heart. . . . I can show that I am a man with a heart and with love only when
external circumstances themselves, accidents
, jolt me forcibly out of my usual nastiness. Otherwise I am disgusting. I attribute this lack of balance to illness.”
¹⁶
Such self-analysis goes a long way to explain Dostoevsky’s genius for portraying the contradictory fluctuations of love-hate emotions in his characters, and his limitless tolerance for the gap between deeply felt intention and actual behavior in human affairs.

6. Feodor’s older brother, M. M. Dostoevsky, in 1847

Dostoevsky had a stormy interview with Nekrasov prompted by reports that Nekrasov was reading the satirical poem about him aloud at various Petersburg gatherings, and in fact these malicious attacks remained a constant in the stormy relations beween the members of the Pléiade and Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky’s entire attitude to the generation of the 1840s, as he later depicted it in his works, was profoundly affected by his misadventures with the Belinsky Pléiade. For he never tired of satirizing the discrepancy between the moral posturings of members of this generation and the petty sordidness of their lives and conduct. And if he felt particularly qualified to undertake the task of unmasking their evasions and hypocrisies, it was because he could always draw on his unhappy memories to confirm his brilliantly devastating exposures.

¹
Cited in
DZhP
, 121.

²
Ivan Turgenev,
Literary Reminiscences
, trans. David Magarshack (New York, 1958), 148.

³
Pis’ma
, 1: 84–85; November 16, 1845.

⁴
Ibid.

⁵
Ibid., 84.

⁶
DVS
, 1: 140.

⁷
Ibid., 141.

⁸
Ibid.

⁹
Ibid., 142.

¹⁰
Ibid., 142–143.

¹¹
Pis’ma
, 1: 102; November 26, 1846.

¹²
Ibid., 90; April 26, 1846.

¹³
See
DVS
, 1: 154–157.

¹⁴
DVS
, 2: 191.

¹⁵
It is reprinted in
DZhP
, 121–122.

¹⁶
Pis’ma
, 1: 107–108; January–February 1847.

Belinsky’s age, as well as his authoritative position, excluded the intimate rivalry that pitted Dostoevsky against his contemporaries; and Dostoevsky, quite naturally, also felt an immense gratitude toward the man who had catapulted him to fame. Belinsky never joined in the persecution and openly expressed his disapproval; but despite all the good will on both sides, the acquaintance that began so promisingly in the late spring of 1845 ended in a quarrel in the first half of 1847. This short span of time remained one of the most important and memorable in Dostoevsky’s life.

Belinsky was a powerful and passionate personality who stood squarely at the center of the Russian culture of his time; and the memoir literature concerning him is enormous. But the most heartfelt and moving tribute he ever received was the one written by Dostoevsky, remembering, almost thirty years later, the exalted state of rapture in which he had emerged after his first interview with the great critic. “I left in a state of ecstasy. I stopped at the corner of his house, looked up at the sky, at the luminous day, at the passersby, and with my whole being I felt that a solemn moment had occurred in my life, a decisive cleavage; something entirely new had begun, but something that I had not anticipated even in my most impassioned dreams. . . . ‘Oh, I will be worthy of that praise; and what people, what people! . . . such men are only to be found in Russia; they are alone, but they alone have the truth, and . . . the good and the true, always conquer and triumph over vice and evil. We shall win; oh, to be of them, with them!’ . . . That was the most wonderful moment in all my life.”
¹

Dostoevsky’s period of elation, however, ended with the publication of
Poor Folk
. The book was attacked vehemently from many sides, the main criticisms being that it was terribly long-winded, tedious, and its language too obviously an imitation of Gogol’s stylistic mannerisms. He was cheered by the prospect of an impending critical campaign in his favor led by Belinsky, which would include lengthy articles by Odoevsky and Sollogub (he now called the latter “my friend”). “In me,” he had told Mikhail just before the novel was published, “they find a new original current (Belinsky and others) . . . I go deep and search for
the whole by examining the atoms, while Gogol grasps the whole directly and thus is not as profound as I am.”
²

7. V. G. Belinsky in 1843

But the critical campaign in his favor never materialized; and the essay that Belinsky published a few weeks later in
Notes of the Fatherland
must have proved a bitter disappointment. Even before the publication of this article, Belinsky had begun to nourish reservations about Dostoevsky that he had tried (tactfully but unsuccessfully) to communicate to the young author. During the summer and fall of 1845, Dostoevsky was hard at work on his next important novel,
The Double
(
Dvoinik
), and parts were read at Belinsky’s. Annenkov remembers that Belinsky “constantly drew Dostoevsky’s attention to the necessity of . . . acquiring a facility in rendering one’s thoughts, ridding oneself of the complexities of exposition.”
³
Belinsky apparently could not accustom himself to the author’s then still diffuse manner of narration with its incessant returns to what had already been said. Dostoevsky, according to Annenkov, “heard the critic’s recommendations out in a mood of affable indifference.”
⁴
But while he may have been self-confidently indifferent to such tentative suggestions, made in the still friendly and private atmosphere of the Pléiade, the same advice had an entirely different edge
when confronted in cold print. Every word of qualification struck a mortal blow at Dostoevsky’s boundless vanity and overweening sense of self-importance.