Dostoevsky (86 page)
Authors: Joseph Frank
The fluctuations of Dostoevsky’s affair with Suslova seemed to have reached a new phase in Rome, and her diary entries, which reveal the strange duel in which the pair now engaged, already prefigure some of the situations of
The Gambler
. Dostoevsky now openly begins to protest against Suslova’s attitude toward him, and bluntly accuses her of moral sadism. “Yesterday F. M. was importunate again,” she writes during their Roman stay. “ ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that you can’t torture a man this long, for he will eventually quit trying.’ ” A little while later, he dropped the game of jocosity and admitted “I am unhappy”—at which, she writes, “I embraced him with ardor,” and the merry-go-round began once again. That evening, leaving Suslova’s room at one in the morning, with his temptress lying fetchingly undressed in bed, Dostoevsky said “that it was humiliating for him to leave in this fashion. . . . ‘For the Russians never did retreat.’ ”
30
The serio-comic flavor of the contest between the two is close to the tonality of
The Gambler
.
It was in the midst of such scenes that
The Gambler
was originally conceived, and its first mention occurs in a letter to Strakhov from Rome. Dostoevsky remained critically short of funds, and tried to raise some by asking his friend to offer magazine editors a new story idea in return for an advance.
What Dostoevsky outlines is the first version of
The Gambler
, which at this stage was more ambitious thematically than the final redaction:
The subject of this story is the following: a type of Russian man living abroad. . . . It will be the mirror of the national reality, so far as possible. . . . I imagine an impulsive character, but a man very cultivated nonetheless, incomplete in all things, having lost his faith
but not daring not to believe
, in revolt against the authorities and fearing them. . . . The essential is that all his vital powers of life, his violences, his audacity are devoted to
roulette
. He is a gambler, but not an ordinary gambler—just as the Covetous Knight of Pushkin is not a simple merchant. . . . He is a poet in his fashion, but he is ashamed of that poetry because he profoundly feels its
baseness
, although the need of risk ennobles him in his own eyes. The story retraces how, for three years, he drags himself through the gambling houses and plays
roulette
.
31
The outline contains a motif manifestly pointing toward
Notes from Underground
that will be appropriated for this earlier work. The conception of a character who has lost his faith but does not dare
not
to believe recalls the Golyadkin type of
The Double
, terrified at his own audacity in stepping over the divinely sanctioned boundaries of the Russian caste system. Dostoevsky had continued to make notes for a revised version of this text all through 1860–1864, and a year after his letter to Strakhov about
The Gambler
he turned this Golyadkin type into the underground man, who also suffers from not daring
not
to believe in certain ideas that he finds incompatible with his moral sensibility. These ideas are no longer those that prop up the Russian bureaucratic system but rather the essential tenets of the Western European ideologies that have invaded and reshaped the Russian moral-social psyche. What remained then for
The Gambler
was the national theme, the delights and dangers of the “poetry of risk,” and the emotional difficulties of Dostoevsky’s tortuous involvement with Suslova.
The peregrinations of the pair next took them to Naples. By this time he was becoming thoroughly sick of the whole escapade, and longed to be back in Russia. Apologizing for not having provided a forwarding address to which
Phantoms
could be mailed, Dostoevsky explains to Turgenev that “I remained everywhere only for a brief time, and it generally happened that, leaving one city, I scarcely knew in the evening where I would be the following day. Certain circumstances caused all these movements not always to depend on me; it was rather I who depended on circumstances.”
32
Dostoevsky probably felt himself to have become a plaything of Suslova’s whims, since the couple’s destination was
decided by her changing moods. He thus decided in Rome that Naples was to be the last stop on their swing southward; from there he planned to go north again and return home via Turin and Geneva. While no longer under any illusion as to her character, Dostoevsky’s passion for Suslova had not abated, and it was painful for him to give her up entirely. The two travelers parted on a note of reconciliation, and the alluring image of the tempting Apollinaria, who had never
completely
excluded the possibility of a resumption of their love affair—who always seemed to remain just ever so slightly, but not entirely, beyond his grasp—haunted Dostoevsky for several more years to come.
By the time he reached Turin, Dostoevsky’s thoughts were fortunately preoccupied with other concerns, and he sketches for the benefit of Turgenev the discouraging prospect that he foresees awaiting him but that, all the same, he is eager to rejoin: “A difficult task awaits me in Petersburg. Although my health has infinitely improved, in two or three months it will, without doubt, be entirely destroyed. Nothing can be done about it. The journal has to be remade from scratch. It must be more up-to-date, more interesting, and at the same time it must respect literature—incompatible aims according to a number of Petersburg thinkers. But we have the intention of fighting fiercely against this contempt leveled at literature. . . . Support us I beg of you [by sending
Phantoms
], join us.”
33
Phantoms
did appear in the first number of
Epoch
, thus testifying to the good will Turgenev nourished for the defenders of
Fathers and Children
.
The same letter also contains an apology for Dostoevsky’s impossible behavior at their last meeting in Baden, which he vaguely attributes to “the tumult of passions” in which he was then caught. “If I had not the hope of doing something more intelligent in the future,” he writes wryly, “really, I would be very ashamed now. But after all! Am I going to ask pardon of myself?”
34
Far from doing so, Dostoevsky gambled once more in Hamburg, once more was stranded without a penny, and was forced to appeal to Suslova in Paris for help. A loyal friend, she raised three hundred francs. Dostoevsky limped home in early November to find matters still undecided so far as the journal was concerned, and his personal affairs in more disarray than he had anticipated.
Passing through Petersburg very rapidly, by November 10 Dostoevsky was in Vladimir with Marya Dimitrievna, whose condition gave him a shock. “The health of Marya Dimitrievna is
very
bad,” he wrote her sister in Petersburg. “She has been terribly ill for two months now. . . . She has been particularly worn out, for these past two months, by a continual fever.”
35
Her situation was so grave that Dostoevsky decided not to return with her to the harsh climate of
Petersburg and planned to live in Moscow, renting a small apartment in the northern capital where he could stay when looking after the affairs of the journal. Dostoevsky punctiliously introduced his wife to his Moscow relatives, hoping they would look after her during his absences, and the financial pressures on him eased for the moment because his wealthy Moscow uncle, who had recently died, left him a bequest in his will. But this windfall provided the only bright spot in a situation that rapidly became more and more tormenting.
1
Pis’ma
, 1: 318; June 17, 1863.
2
Biografiya
, 173.
3
F. M. Dostoevsky,
The Gambler, with Polina Suslova’s Diary
, trans. Victor Terras, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1972), 365. The Russian source for Suslova’s diary and letters is A. S. Dolinin,
Gody blizosti s Dostoevskim
(Moscow, 1928).
4
Ibid., 364.
5
L. P. Grossman,
Put’ Dostoevskogo
(Leningrad, 1929), 154.
6
The Gambler
,
with Polina Suslova’s Diary
, 257.
7
Pis’ma
, 1: 323–326; September 1 (new style), 1863.
8
Ibid., 330; September 8/20, 1863.
9
Ibid., 324; September 1 (new style), 1863.
10
Ibid.
11
The Gambler
,
with Polina Suslova’s Diary
, 202.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., 203.
14
Ibid., 206.
15
Ibid., 207.
16
Ibid., 209–210.
17
Ibid., 211.
18
Ibid., 211–212.
19
Ibid., 213.
20
Ibid., 214.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., 215.
23
Pis’ma
, 1: 330; September 8/20, 1863.
24
Ibid., 331.
25
DMI
, 543.
26
Pis’ma
, 1: 329–331; September 8/20, 1863.
27
Ibid., 335.
28
Ibid., 331.
29
In an article that has had a major influence on the history of Russian thought, Ivan Kireevsky declared that “the classical world of ancient paganism, which Russia lacked in her inheritance, represented in its essence a triumph of formal human reason,” which led, among other disasters, to “the pope [becoming] the head of the church instead of Jesus Christ . . . the whole totality of faith was supported by syllogistic scholasticism; the Inquisition, Jesuitry, in one word, all the peculiarities of Catholicism developed through the power of the same formal process of reasoning, so that Protestantism itself, which the Catholics reproach with rationalism, developed directly out of the rationalism of Catholicism. A perspicacious mind could see in advance, in this final triumph of formal reason over faith and tradition, the entire present fate of Europe, as a result of a fallacious principle: Strauss and the new philosophy in all of its aspects; industrialism as the mainspring of social life; philanthropy based on calculated self-interest; the system of education accelerated by the power of aroused jealousy; Goethe, the crown of German poesy, the literary Tallyrand, who changes his beauty as the other changes his governments; Napoleon, the hero of our time, the ideal of soulless calculation; the numerical majority, a fruit of rationalistic politics; and Louis Philippe, the latest result of such hopes and such expensive experiments!” These words illustrate the suggestive sweep of Slavophil thought, which coincides with Dostoevsky’s ideas. See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky,
Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophils
(rpt. Gloucester, MA, 1965), 96.
30
The Gambler
,
with Polina Suslova’s Diary
, 218–220.
31
Pis’ma
, 1: 333.
32
Ibid., 337; October 18, 1863.
33
Ibid., 338.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., 339; November 10, 1863.
The Prison of Utopia
All during the summer and fall, Mikhail had been writing endless petitions to the authorities for permission to resume publication, and in mid-November permission was given, not to revive
Time
, but to publish a new journal—on condition that it maintain an “irreproachable tendency.”
1
The loss of the previous name of the journal meant that the new publication could not benefit from the prestige already acquired by
Time
in the past two years and would have to begin anew to establish itself. Dostoevsky took as active a part as he could in the preparations, and there was a steady flow of correspondence between the two cities. The title
Epoch
was finally hit upon, and the first announcement asking for subscriptions was placed at the end of January 1864, which meant that most potential subscribers had already sent their money elsewhere. Also, the first issue (a double one) came off the presses only in April, creating an impression of editorial disorganization and unreliability. Strakhov uncharitably blames Mikhail Dostoevsky for lacking energy at this crucial moment, forgetting to mention that Mikhail’s youngest daughter Varya died of scarlet fever in February and that the poor father was prostrate with grief.
Dostoevsky mentions to Mikhail that he would write a lead article establishing the position of the journal, and he mentions two others as well: “A critique of the novel of Chernyshevsky and the one of Pisemsky would create a considerable effect. . . . Two opposed ideas and both demolished. As a result, the truth.”
2
Pisemsky’s
The Unruly Sea
(1863), which had been published in
The Russian Messenger
, was among the first of the important so-called anti-Nihilist novels that form a subcategory in Russian prose fiction of the nineteenth century. Such books differ from Turgenev’s
Fathers and Children
, or Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, by depicting the Nihilists as outright scoundrels moved only by the basest personal motives. On the opposing side, Chernyshevsky’s Utopian novel,
What Is To Be Done?
(1863), gave a glowing picture of the extraordinary moral virtues of the “new people” whom Turgenev had maligned with the label of Nihilist, and it also includes an enticing tableau of their future Utopian Socialist
paradise. Just as he had done in the past, Dostoevsky wished to steer a middle ideological course between the slanders of the reactionaries and the daydreams of the radicals, aiming at a “truth” independent of both while doing justice to each at the same time.