Dostoevsky (51 page)

During the agonizing minutes that Dostoevsky stood on the scaffolding in Semenovsky Square, his eyes may well have turned to the massed crowds surrounding the spectacle. If Dostoevsky had been able to distinguish one person from another, he would surely have been struck by one young man—just barely seventeen years of age, and wearing the three-cornered hat and uniform overcoat of the elite Alexander Lyceum located at Tsarskoe Selo—who was watching the proceedings with a sorrowful air of concern. The name of this young man was Baron Alexander Yegorovich Wrangel, and he belonged to one of those Russian-German aristocratic families of Baltic origin that, under Nicholas I, staffed the higher echelons of the bureaucracy and the army.

The young Wrangel had heard conversations about the case at home—and he pricked up his ears, because he had just read
Poor Folk
and was reading
Netotchka Nezvanova
with great admiration. Any information concerning the fate of the gifted and unfortunate Dostoevsky aroused his curiosity, although he took care
not to reveal in public a literary taste that would have been considered politically suspect in his milieu. On the day of the mock execution, despite reprimands from a relative to leave the square, Wrangel stayed to the very end of the macabre comedy and only left when the crowd dissolved, “crossing themselves and blessing the mercifulness of the Tsar.”
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After graduating from the lyceum and dying of boredom in the Ministry of Justice, Wrangel decided to join a number of his classmates in applying for a post in Siberia. Just twenty-one years old, he was appointed public prosecutor of the region that included Semipalatinsk. He had met Mikhail Dostoevsky on some occasion in Petersburg and was happy to call on him before beginning his journey and to receive from him letters for Dostoevsky, some clothes, books, and fifty rubles. Arriving in Semipalatinsk on November 20, 1854, he immediately sent a message inviting Private Dostoevsky to take tea with him the very next day. “Dostoevsky did not know who had summoned him and why,” Wrangel recalls, “and when he came in, was extremely reserved. He was in his gray soldier’s overcoat, with a stiff red collar and red epaulettes, morose, his face pale and sickly. . . . Intently looking at me with his sharp, gray-blue eyes, it seemed that he was trying to peer into my very soul—now what sort of a man is he?”
²¹

Dostoevsky buried himself in the letters that Wrangel had brought, beginning to sob quietly while reading those written by his brother and sister. Wrangel too had a packet of correspondence awaiting him, and he too began to sob uncontrollably as memories of his family and friends rose before his eyes. “We both stood there face to face, forgotten by fate, solitary. . . . I felt so distressed that, despite my exalted rank . . . as it were involuntarily, without thinking, I threw myself on the neck of Feodor Mikhailovich, who stood opposite looking at me with a sad and pensive expression.”
²²
The older man comforted the younger, and the two promised to see each other frequently.

Dostoevsky and Wrangel became fast friends. “He is,” Dostoevsky explains to Mikhail, “very gentle, although with a strongly developed
point d’honneur
, incredibly kind . . . what irritates and enrages others distresses him—the sign of an excellent heart.
Très comme il faut
.”
²³
The two began to spend so much time together that tongues started to wag among what Wrangel calls “the bribetaking bureaucrats,”
²⁴
and he noticed that his mail began to arrive four days later than its distribution to others. The military governor, considering Wrangel’s tender years, felt called upon to warn him about falling under the influence of such a notorious revolutionary. Taking matters into his own hands, Wrangel asked the
official to invite Dostoevsky to his home and judge for himself. As it turned out, the visit was a great success; the invitation was repeated; and from this moment Dostoevsky was received, through Wrangel’s good offices, in whatever good society could be found in Semipalatinsk.

Three months after Wrangel set foot in Semipalatinsk, an event occurred that opened up a more promising perspective on Dostoevsky’s future. Nicholas I died suddenly, on February 18, 1855, struck down while the Russian Army in the Caucasus was still engaged in battle against Turkey, and almost a month later the news finally arrived in the distant Siberian outpost. The thoughts of the many political exiles at once turned to the prospects of amnesty, which traditionally accompanied the installation of a new regime. Moreover, “rumors of the gentleness of character, humaneness, and kindliness of the new tsar had long since penetrated to Siberia.”
²⁵
Dostoevsky shared such general expectations; and now, with the influential Wrangel at his side, whose family had connections with the highest court circles, he had every reason to believe they would be fulfilled.

Less than a month later, Wrangel wrote a letter to his father in which he spoke of Dostoevsky for the first time. “Fate has brought me together with a rare person as regards both qualities of heart and mind,” he says; “he is our young and unfortunate writer Dostoevsky. I am much obliged to him, and his words, advice, and ideas will strengthen me for my entire life.” And then he arrived at the real issue: “Do you know, dear father, whether there will be an amnesty? So many unfortunates are waiting and hoping, as a drowning person clutches at a straw.” Two weeks later he sent a letter to his sister, urging her to question their father on the prospects of an amnesty for political prisoners and suggesting that a word might be uttered on Dostoevsky’s behalf to General Dubelt or to Prince Orlov. “Can it be that this remarkable man will perish here as a soldier? . . . I am sad and sick about him—I love him like a brother, and honor him like a father.”
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By the time these letters were written, Dostoevsky and Wrangel had taken up residence together in a dacha, affectionately called “Cossack Garden,” on the outskirts of town. The climate of Semipalatinsk during the summer months was unbearably hot, and Wrangel decided to escape at the beginning of spring the moment the steppe began to blossom and turn green. He found an empty house on a bank of the river in the midst of luxuriant vegetation, and, since the summer encampment of Dostoevsky’s regiment was close by, it was easily arranged for the latter to share his quarters. The picture Wrangel gives of their life together has an idyllic quality that Dostoevsky was not to know again for many years. Wrangel, an enthusiastic and versatile gardener, had determined to show the natives that all sorts of flowers and fruits unknown to the region could be
cultivated there, and the work connected with this project “very much pleased and occupied Dostoevsky, [who] more than once recalled his childhood and the farmhouse of his family.”
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By this time, Dostoevsky’s illicit romance with Marya Dimitrievna had become more and more absorbing, and the need to possess her completely soon drove all other thoughts out of his mind. Much to everyone’s astonishment, Alexander Isaev succeeded in finding another post—in the small town of Kuznetsk, a miserable backwater lost in the depths of the Siberian wilderness. The news struck Dostoevsky like a blow, and suddenly shattered the fragile world of relative contentment he had so laboriously managed to construct. “And look, she agrees,” he tells Wrangel bitterly, “she doesn’t object, that’s what’s so shocking.”
²⁸

Since the Isaevs were destitute, the impoverished Dostoevsky, borrowing money from the obliging Wrangel, helped them scrape together what they needed for the journey. The departure took place on a soft May night, bathed in moonlight, and Wrangel and Dostoevsky, according to the Russian custom, accompanied the party on the first leg of the journey after they had paused for a final visit at Cossack Garden. Wrangel plied Isaev with champagne until he lapsed into a drunken stupor, then deposited him in a separate carriage so as to give the two lovers a period of privacy at parting. When the time came to say farewell, Dostoevsky and Marya Dimitrievna embraced, wiped away their tears, and the befuddled
paterfamilias
was placed back in the open
tarantas
in which the Isaevs were forced to make the journey. “The horses started up,” recalls Wrangel, “puffs of dust rose from the road, already the cart and its passengers could scarcely be seen, the post bell grew fainter and fainter . . . and Dostoevsky still stood as if rooted to the spot, silent, his head lowered, tears coursing down his cheeks. I went up to him, took his hand—he seemed to wake up after a long sleep, and, not saying a word, got into the carriage. We returned home at daybreak.”
²⁹

Letters immediately began to fly between Semipalatinsk and Kuznetsk at a weekly rhythm, and thanks to one that survived we can obtain some firsthand impression of Dostoevsky’s feelings for his first great love. “I have never considered our meeting as an ordinary one,” he writes, “and now, deprived of you, I have understood many things. I lived for five years deprived of human beings, alone, having nobody, in the full sense of the word, to whom I could pour out my heart. . . . The simple fact that a woman held out her hand to me has constituted a new epoch in my life. In certain moments, even the best of men, if I may say so, is nothing more or less than a blockhead. The heart of a woman, her compassion, her interest, the infinite goodness of which we do not have an idea, and which often, through stupidity, we do not even notice, is irreplaceable. I found all that in you.”
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12. Marya Dimitrievna Isaeva

Their relationship had already seen some stormy moments, and its tempestuous past hardly augured well for the future. But Dostoevsky took most of the blame himself (“in the first place I was an ungrateful swine”), and attributed Marya Dimitrievna’s outbursts to a noble nature “offended by the fact that a filthy society did not value or understand you, and for a person with your force of character it is impossible not to rebel against injustice; that is an honest and noble trait. It is the foundation of your character. Life and trouble have of course exaggerated and irritated much in you; but, good God! all this is redeemed with interest, a hundred times over.”
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Dostoevsky would always see Marya Dimitrievna in a flattering light, as a person whose violent indignation and explosions of temper expressed a noble rage against the injustices of life. One day he would immortalize this aspect of her personality in the tragically wrathful Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova of
Crime and Punishment
.

Dostoevsky’s separation from Marya Dimitrievna marked the beginning of an agitated and torturing relationship. The arrival of each weekly letter, filled with accounts of the illness of his beloved, the tedium and loneliness of her existence, the burdens of caring for her alcoholic husband (whose health was now
failing badly) and of trying to bring up Pasha decently—all this drove Dostoevsky into a frenzy of despair. Nor was his anxiety lessened by the increasingly frequent references to a sympathetic young schoolteacher who had begun to play the role in her life formerly assumed by Dostoevsky. “With each letter,” writes Wrangel, “the utterances about him became more and more enthusiastic, praising his kindness, devotion, and nobility of soul. Dostoevsky was torn apart by jealousy; it was pitiful to observe his gloomy state of mind, which affected his health.”
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His mood became so downcast that the alarmed Wrangel arranged a meeting between the erstwhile lovers at a town midway between the two localities. But when the friends arrived after some very hard riding, they found, instead of Marya Dimitrievna, a letter explaining that she could not keep the rendezvous because her husband’s condition had worsened.

In August 1855, Isaev drew his last breath, leaving Marya Dimitrievna alone, ailing and penniless, to struggle along in the quagmire of Kuznetsk. Frantic on receiving the news, Dostoevsky wrote to Wrangel, then traveling on business, to send the destitute woman some money, and to do so with particular tact and care; the obligation of gratitude would only make her more sensitive to any undue negligence of tone. No one understood better than the creator of Devushkin in
Poor Folk
the agonies of a cultivated sensibility humiliated by poverty and an inferior social position.