Dostoevsky (8 page)

Up until the age of ten, when his parents acquired their small property in the country, Dostoevsky and his brothers and sisters left the city only once a year. Mme Dostoevsky always took the older children, accompanied by some relatives or friends, for an annual spring excursion to the monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergey about sixty miles from Moscow. This journey required several
days by carriage and terminated in a vast fortress-like beehive of churches, monasteries, and hostelries that, over the centuries, had clustered around the spot where St. Sergey had first constructed a hut in the northern forests in the fourteenth century.

A famous hermit and ascetic, St. Sergey became the patron saint of Moscow when, after he had blessed the armies of Prince Dimitry and sent two of his priestly followers to accompany the troops, Dimitry’s forces inflicted a crushing defeat on the hitherto invincible Tartar hordes. Since that time, the name of St. Sergey had become “at least as dear to every Russian heart as William Tell to a Swiss or as Joan of Arc to a Frenchman.”
¹²
St. Sergey’s humble dwelling in the woods grew into one of the main foci—more important even than the Kremlin—for the indigenous Russian amalgam of religious-patriotic sentiment. Its importance as such a symbol was reinforced in the seventeenth century, when it became the center of national resistance against the Polish invaders in the Time of Troubles.

Each year the Dostoevsky children visited this vast religious caravansary, swarming both with peasant pilgrims in bark shoes and elegant visitors in glittering uniforms and gowns in the very latest French mode. Each visit, as Andrey recalls, constituted an “epoch” in the lives of all the children;
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for his brother Feodor they were unforgettable. One of the most famous stories in the canonical life of St. Sergey is that of the bear that emerged from the woods to come face-to-face with the saint. Subdued by the sanctity of the holy man, the animal peacefully accepted some of the bread and water that was St. Sergey’s only nourishment, returning each subsequent day to share this frugal meal. This friendship between the beast and the saint is depicted among the frescoes on the entrance tower to the monastery, and Dostoevsky as a child must have seen it many times. In
The Brothers Karamazov
, when Father Zosima preaches to a young peasant about the innocence of animals and of all of nature, it is the story of St. Sergey and the bear that he uses to point the moral.

One can gauge from such details how completely Dostoevsky’s childhood immersed him in the spiritual and cultural atmosphere of Old Russian piety and brought him emotively close to the beliefs and feelings of the illiterate peasantry still untouched by secular Western culture. For the Russian upper class, of course, religion and the people were inseparable, and it was by frequenting the servants’ quarters that the offspring of the aristocracy first became acquainted with the sources of their native culture and the deep religious roots of Russian folk-feeling. The role that Pushkin assigned to his old nurse as a transmitter of folk tradition has immortalized this crucial encounter in the lives of so many
educated Russians. Dostoevsky also went through a similar archetypal initiation, but for him the contrast between his home environment and that of the servants and the peasants was much less accentuated. One can scarcely imagine him hiding in a closet, like the young Tolstoy, to watch the exciting and unfamiliar spectacle of the saintly fool (
yurodivy
) who lived in the Tolstoy household saying his nightly prayers amid sobs and exclamations. There was nothing exotic about the people and their faith to Dostoevsky as a child, and both entered his world in a more natural fashion.

One of the recurring events that the Dostoevsky children looked forward to with the greatest eagerness was the visit of the wet nurses who had been employed to suckle them in infancy. These peasant women lived in villages close to Moscow, and once a year, during the winter lull in peasant life, they came to pay a ceremonial call on the family and spend two or three days as guests. Such visits always gave rise to an orgy of storytelling in the late afternoon, after the children had done their lessons and it was too cold to go outdoors. Andrey remembered these stories as being a mixture of fairy tales and Russian folk legends; but his four-year-older brother Feodor recalled another type of story.

“Who has read the
Acta Martyrum
?” Dostoevsky asks the readers of his
Diary of a Writer
(1877). “In the whole of Russia the knowledge of the
Acta Martyrum
is extremely widely diffused—of course, not of the book
in toto
, but of its spirit, at least. . . . In childhood I heard these narratives myself, before I even learned to read.”
¹⁴
These stories of the lives of the saints were steeped in the special spirit of Russian kenoticism—the glorification of passive, completely nonheroic and nonresisting suffering, the suffering of the despised and humiliated Christ—that is so remarkable a feature of the Russian religious tradition.
¹⁵
Even a skeptical foreign observer like the French liberal Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, who had vast personal acquaintance with Russian life and culture, was still struck toward the end of the nineteenth century by the admiration of the Russian common people for “the spirit of asceticism and renunciation, the love of poverty, the craving for self-sacrifice and self-mortification.”
¹⁶
It was impressions such as these, garnered in earliest childhood from the lips of humble peasant storytellers, that nourished Dostoevsky’s unshakable conviction that the soul of the Russian peasant was imbued with the Christian ethos of love and self-sacrifice.

Certain incidents vividly etched in Dostoevsky’s boyish imagination what he came to regard as this ethos in action. One involved the housekeeper and
nyanya
, Alyona Frolovna, whose tall and corpulent personage loomed large in the lives of all the children. Alyona was a free Moscow townswoman, but she brought
with her the pagan superstitions and the ritual formalism that the Russian lower classes blended so naturally with their Christianity. Alyona was charged with teaching the children manners; and she informed them solemnly that it would be a deadly sin to eat any food without first having taken a bite of bread, “for so God had ordained!” Suffering from frequent nightmares, she always attributed her outcries, which woke the entire family, to the nocturnal visits of the
domovoy
—the Russian house-demon or hobgoblin—who had been strangling her with his claws. Alyona had never been married, and called herself a “bride of Christ” (the phrase made a great impression on the children); her sister—a nun living in a cloister near Petersburg—came to visit her once a year, and always spent the day with the Dostoevsky family.
¹⁷

The figure of Alyona was thus surrounded for the children with a certain sublime nimbus of the sacred, and this must have made the incident on which Dostoevsky reports even more symbolically striking. It occurred shortly after the Dostoevskys had purchased their country property and was only the first of the misfortunes destined to become linked with this unhappy spot for the family. Most of the peasant huts had been destroyed in the fire of 1833, and the loss, as well as the cost of replacement, was a staggering financial blow for the hard-pressed family. While they were still reeling under the shock of the news, Alyona’s response was to offer the savings being accumulated for her old age: “Suddenly, she whispered to mother: ‘If you should need money, take mine; I have no use for it; I don’t need it.’ ”
¹⁸
This impulsive gesture remained in the memory of the twelve-year-old Feodor as typical of the capacity of the Russian people, in moments of moral stress, to live up to the Christian ideals they nominally revered but that, in the ordinary course of daily life, they so often violated or betrayed.

Dostoevsky’s family, rooted in its clerical and merchant origins, had remained relatively untouched by the skepticism and religious incredulity so prevalent among the Russian gentry. As a child, he never felt any separation between the sacred and the profane, between the ordinary and the miraculous; religion was never for him a matter of ritual occasions. The texture of his everyday life was controlled by much the same supernatural forces that, in a more naïvely superstitious form, also dominated the mentality of the Russian common people.

“Every Sunday and every religious holiday,” writes Andrey, “we unfailingly went to church for mass and, the evening before, to vespers.”
¹⁹
More important was that the entire mental world of the parents was religiously oriented, and that
God permeated every aspect of the young Dostoevsky’s quotidian existence—much as he would have done centuries earlier in an English Puritan or German Pietist household. Andrey tells us that, after the conclusion of the purchase of their estate, his parents immediately went off to utter a prayer of thanksgiving at the chapel of the Iversky Madonna—the most revered icon in Moscow, which the people, in 1812, had wished to carry into battle against the French. The same reflex occurred when the family suddenly heard the news of the fire on their country estate. “I remember that my parents fell on their knees before the icons in the living room,” writes Andrey, “and then left to pray to the Iversky Madonna.”
²⁰

One has only to glance at the letters of Dostoevsky’s parents to be struck by this piously devout aspect of their mentality and to observe them speaking of God with the same combination of sentimental unction and intense practicality that is so striking—and now seems so strange—in Defoe’s novels, or in the sermons of English Puritan divines. For all his medical degree and scientific education, Dr. Dostoevsky never lost the clerical stamp of his early training, and the style of his letters is full of Church Slavonic expressions that reveal his thorough acquaintance with ecclesiastical literature. “How great is the divine mercy!” he writes to his oldest son Mikhail. “How unworthy are we to give thanks to the great and bountiful God for His inexpressible mercy to us! How unjustly have we grumbled, yes, let this serve as an admonitory example for the remainder of our lives, since the All-Highest sent us this transitory trial for our own good and our own welfare!”
²¹
The occasion for this edifying outburst was the acceptance of Mikhail (who had been refused admittance to the Academy of Military Engineers in 1837) into another school of the same kind.

The letters of Dostoevsky’s mother are more personally expressive in tone, and influenced by the late eighteenth-century sentimental novel rather than by the lives of the saints. But here too the intermingling of the sublime and the trivial, the religious and the mundanely practical, is in evidence. Mme Dostoevsky writes her husband from the country: “I . . . have given thanks to God a hundredfold that He was gracious enough to hear my prayers and brought you safely to Moscow. Do not grumble against God, my friend, do not grieve for me. You know that we were punished by Him; but also granted His grace. With complete steadfastness and faith, let us rely on His sacred providence and He will not withhold His mercy from us.”
²²
What misfortune Mme Dostoevsky refers to here is unknown; in any case, the remainder of the letter is taken up with a lawsuit concerning Darovoe, and with other purely business matters relating to the crops and the peasants.

It may be taken for granted that the children were continually being admonished and instructed in much the same style. And for the most gifted of them all, young Feodor, this habit of mind began to stir reflections very early on the most profound and insoluble of religious enigmas—that of God’s relation to man, and the existence of evil, pain, and suffering in a world where the will of a beneficent God presumably prevails. Such reflections would surely have been stimulated by the continual discomfiture with life that his father never hesitated to voice and that, from time to time, take on a truly Job-like note. “True,” he writes his wife, “I will not hide from you that there are sometimes minutes in which I anger my Creator by grumbling against the briefness of the days given me by my lot in life; but do not think anything of it; it will pass.”
²³
It is improbable that Dr. Dostoevsky, like the father of Kierkegaard, ever rose in revolt against God and cursed him because of the harshness of his fate, but the temptation to do so was continually there and, given his explosive irritability, would scarcely have been concealed.