Dostoevsky (4 page)

Dr. Dostoevsky had thus succeeded, with a good deal of determination and tenacity, in pulling himself up by his bootstraps and rising from the despised priestly class to that of civil servant, member of a learned profession, and nobleman. It is clear from the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s younger brother Andrey—our only reliable source for these early years—that the children had been informed about the family’s ancient patent of nobility, and looked on their father’s recent elevation as a just restoration of their rightful rank.
³
The Dostoevskys thought of themselves as belonging to the old gentry aristocracy rather than to the new service nobility created by Peter the Great—the class to which, in fact, their father had just acceded. Their actual place in society was in flagrant contradiction to this flattering self-image.

Medicine was an honorable but not very honorific profession in Russia, and Dr. Dostoevsky’s salary, which he was forced to supplement with private practice, was barely enough for his needs. The Dostoevskys lived in a small, cramped apartment on the hospital grounds, and living space was always a problem.
Mikhail and Feodor slept in a windowless compartment separated by a partition from the antechamber; the oldest girl, Varvara, slept on a couch in the living room; the younger children spent the nights in the bedroom of the parents. It is true, as Andrey notes, that his family had a staff of six servants (a coachman, a so-called lackey, a cook, a housemaid, a laundress, and a
nyanya
or governess for the children), but this should not be taken as an indication of affluence. From Andrey’s comment on the “lackey,” who was really a
dvornik
or janitor, we see how eager the Dostoevskys were to keep up appearances and conform to the gentry style of life. His job was to supply the stoves with wood in winter and to bring water for tea from a fountain two versts distant from the hospital, but when Marya Feodorovna went to town on foot, he put on livery and a three-cornered hat and walked proudly behind his mistress. When she used the coach, the livery appeared again and the “lackey” stood impressively on the back footboard. “This was the unbreakable rule of Moscow etiquette in those days,”
⁴
Andrey remarks wryly. Dostoevsky certainly remembered this rule, and his parents’ adherence to its prescripts, when Mr. Golyadkin in
The Double
hires a carriage and a livery for his barefoot servant Petrushka in order to increase his social standing in the eyes of the world.

The Dostoevskys’ pretensions to gentry status were wistfully incongruous with their true position in society. Dostoevsky would one day compare Alexander Herzen, born (even if out of wedlock) into the very highest stratum of the ruling class, with the critic Vissarion Belinsky, who was “not a
gentilhomme
at all! Oh no! (God knows from whom he descended! His father, it seems, was a military surgeon).”
⁵
So, of course, was Dostoevsky’s, and the remark indicates what he learned to perceive as the reality of his family’s situation. Dr. Dostoevsky and his offspring would never enjoy the consideration to which they felt entitled by right of descent from noble forebears.

While stationed at a Moscow hospital in 1819, the thirty-year-old Dr. Dostoevsky must have mentioned to a colleague that he was seeking a suitable bride. For he was then introduced to the family of Feodor Nechaev, a well-to-do Moscow merchant with an attractive nineteen-year-old daughter, Marya Feodorovna. Marriages in those days, especially in the merchant class, were not left to chance or inclination. Dr. Dostoevsky, after being approved by the parents, was probably allowed to catch a glimpse of his future bride in church, and then invited to meet her after he agreed to a betrothal; the introduction to the girl was the sign of consent, and the future bride had nothing to say about the matter. Both Dr. Dostoevsky and his new in-laws were similar in having risen from lowly origins to a higher position on the Russian social scale.

1. Dr. M. A. Dostoevsky

2. Mme M. F. Dostoevsky

The older sister of Dostoevsky’s mother, Alexandra Feodorovna, had married into a merchant family much like her own. Her husband, A. M. Kumanin, had risen to fill various official functions, and the Kumanins were among those merchant families whose wealth allowed them to compete with the gentry in the opulence of their lifestyle. The proud and touchy Dr. Dostoevsky, who probably felt superior to his brother-in-law both by birth and by education, had to swallow his pride and appeal to him for financial succor on several occasions. Dostoevsky’s own attitude to his Kumanin relatives, whom he always regarded as vulgarians concerned only with money, no doubt reflected a view he had picked up from his father. In a letter to Mikhail just after hearing of his father’s death, Dostoevsky tells him “to spit on those insignificant little souls”
⁶
(meaning their Moscow relatives), who were incapable of understanding higher things. Andrey speaks of the Kumanins warmly; they looked after the younger Dostoevsky orphans as if they had been their own children. But though Dostoevsky too later appealed to them for aid at critical moments in his life, he never referred to them in private without a tinge of contempt.

Dostoevsky always spoke of his mother with great warmth and affection; and the picture that emerges from the memoir material shows her to have been an engaging and attractive person. Like her husband, Marya Feodorovna had assimilated a good bit of the culture of the gentry. In a letter, she describes her character as being one of “natural gaiety,”
⁷
and this inborn sunniness, although sorely tried by the strains of domestic life, shines through everything that we know about her. She was not only a loving and cheerful mother but also an efficient manager of the affairs of the family. Three years after Dr. Dostoevsky became a nobleman, he used his newly acquired right to own land to purchase a small estate about 150 versts from Moscow called Darovoe. A year later, the Dostoevskys hastened to acquire an adjacent property—the hamlet of Cheremoshnia—whose purchase caused them to go heavily into debt. No doubt the acquisition of a landed estate with peasant serfs seemed to make good business sense to the doctor, and it was a place where his family could spend the summer in the open air. But in the back of his mind there was probably also the desire to give some concrete social embodiment to his dream of becoming a member of the landed gentry. It was Marya Feodorovna, however, who went to the country every spring to supervise the work; the doctor himself could get away from his practice only on flying visits.

Located on poor farming land, which did not even furnish enough fodder for the livestock, the Dostoevsky estate yielded only a miserable existence to its
peasant population, but as long as Marya Feodorovna was in charge things did not go too badly. During the first summer she managed, by a system of canals, to bring water into the village from a nearby spring to feed a large pond, which she then stocked with fish sent from Moscow by her husband. The peasants could water their livestock more easily, the children could amuse themselves by fishing, and the food supply was augmented. She was also a humane and kindhearted proprietor who distributed grain for sowing to the poorest peasants in early spring when they had none of their own, even though this was considered to be bad estate management. Dr. Dostoevsky reprimands her several times in his letters for not being more severe. Almost a hundred years later, the legend of her leniency and compassion still persisted among the descendants of the peasants of Darovoe.
⁸
It was no doubt from Marya Feodorovna that Dostoevsky first learned to feel that sympathy for the unfortunate and deprived that became so important for his work.

Dostoevsky’s father, Mikhail Andreevich, forms a strong contrast in character to his wife. His portrait shows him to have had coarse and heavy features. His dress uniform, with its high, stiff, gilded collar, gives an air of rigidity to the set of his head that is barely offset by the faintest of smiles; and the rigidity was much more typical of the man than was the trace of affability. He was a hardworking medical practitioner whose ability was so appreciated by his superiors that, when he decided to retire, he was offered a substantial promotion to change his mind. He was also a faithful husband, a responsible father, and a believing Christian. These qualities did not make him either a lovable or an appealing human being, but his virtues were as important as his defects in determining the environment in which Dostoevsky grew up.

Dr. Dostoevsky suffered from some sort of nervous affliction that strongly affected his character and disposition. Bad weather always brought on severe headaches and resulted in moods of gloom and melancholy; the return of good weather relieved his condition. Dostoevsky later traced the incidence of his own epileptic attacks to such climatic changes. If Dr. Dostoevsky was, as even Andrey is forced to concede, “very exacting and impatient, and, most of all, very irritable,”
⁹
this can be attributed to the extreme and unremitting state of nervous tension induced by his illness. Dostoevsky, who inherited this aspect of his father’s character, constantly complained in later life about his own inability to master his nerves, and was also given to uncontrollable explosions of temper.

Dr. Dostoevsky was thus a naggingly unhappy man whose depressive tendencies colored every aspect of his life. They made him suspicious and mistrustful, and unable to find satisfaction in either his career or his family. He suspected the household servants of cheating, and watched over them with a cranky surveillance characteristic of his attitude toward the world in general. He believed that he was being unfairly treated in the service and that his superiors were reaping the benefits of his unrewarded labors in the hospital. Even if both of these conjectures may have had some basis in fact, he brooded over them in a manner quite out of proportion to their real importance. His relations with the Kumanins were also a continual source of vexation, because his pride filled him with an impotent bitterness at his feelings of inferiority. This acute social sensitivity is another trait transmitted from father to son; many Dostoevsky characters will be tormented by the unflattering image of themselves that they see reflected in the eyes of others.