The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (122 page)

In these
Notes
he includes symbolically his dominant ideas. London’s Crystal Palace, the triumph of Western materialism (it burned down in 1936), suggests halcyon days that will never be. The undergroundling encounters a prostitute who tries to give him wholehearted love, which somehow he cannot accept. Instead he asserts himself and humiliates her by trying to pay for her affection.

Notes from the Underground
in 1864 opened the creative years of Dostoyevsky’s four great novels, along with new chapters of sufferings. From the gaming tables of Bad Hamburg where his gambling obsession kept him in futile pursuit of fortune, he was recalled to the deathbed of the wife to whom he had been unhappily married since his military service in Siberia. On the day after her death he reflected:

That year too his beloved brother Mikhail died.

To ward off debtor’s prison, he tried to sell his idea for a novel to be called
The Drunkard
, but publishers were not interested. Instead he sold the rights to a new three-volume edition of his work to an unscrupulous speculator, Fyodor Stellovsky. To this agreement was added the outrageous condition that if Dostoyevsky did not submit a new novel by November 1 of the following year, Stellovsky would acquire the rights to publish all his work for the next nine years free of charge. In late July 1865 Dostoyevsky left to
try his luck at the roulette tables. “But in the course of five days in Wiesbaden,” he wrote to Turgenev, “I have lost everything. I am completely broke—I even gambled away my watch, and I owe money at the hotel.” When a small loan from Turgenev was not enough to pay his way home, the city’s Russian priest advanced him enough to escape debtor’s prison in Wiesbaden and travel back to St. Petersburg in October 1865.

The plan for
The Drunkard
was developing into the story for
Crime and Punishment
, but that writing would take time. Meanwhile the deadline for his bondage to Stellovsky was approaching. To meet it he decided to write a shorter piece, originally titled “Roulettenburg,” which became
The Gambler
. And to speed it along, fortunately he engaged a twenty-year-old stenographer recommended by a friend to take his dictation. This Anna Snitkina had wept over his
House of the Dead
. As a schoolgirl she had been so devoted to his books that she became known as Netochka, after one of his heroines. Although Dostoyevsky was irritable and difficult, she was submissive, and wonderfully efficient. With her help he managed to complete the whole novel in sixteen days. Meanwhile the unscrupulous Stellovsky had left town to prevent the manuscript from being delivered on time and so trap Dostoyevsky into bondage. Still Dostoyevsky managed to secure a receipt from a district police officer for its delivery on October 31.

Only a week later, when the devoted Anna came to take dictation for the conclusion of
Crime and Punishment
, he was uncharacteristically cheerful. He surprised and delighted her when he proposed marriage by recounting his dream of finding a tiny sparkling diamond. He told the plot of a new novel in which a poor sick artist falls in love with a much younger girl who happened to have the name of Anya. The celebration of their marriage brought on a double attack of epilepsy, which made her fear “that my beloved husband was in the process of going insane.” But by accepting this novelized proposal Anna began fourteen years of a happy stenographic marriage. Her shorthand would record his life’s work. Despite the twenty-five years’ difference in their ages, they found a way, based on her patience with his epilepsy, her tolerance of his gambling obsession, her adoration and submission, to what she called “my life’s sun.”

Crime and Punishment
, which drew on his prison experience to create the story of a struggling soul, was the result of endless labor and revision. Dostoyevsky had first cast it as a confession, then as a diary, before its final form, which appeared serially for a year beginning in January 1866. Fortunately, since the magazine never came out on time, he could come up with the next installment at the last minute. The hero, Raskolnikov, a nihilist governed by “reason,” makes his own definition of good and evil and commits murder to serve a “better” end. Dostoyevsky summarized in his
notebooks the “Idea of the Novel”: “There is. no happiness in comfort; happiness is brought by suffering. Man is not born for happiness.” Finally Raskolnikov too discovers that the soul is satisfied only by confession and accepting punishment. The public reception of the book was sensational, but somehow did not relieve Dostoyevsky’s personal agonies. The seven thousand rubles from it soon disappeared into the pockets of unsatisfied creditors.

Fleeing abroad with the money secured by Anna’s sale of her dowry of furniture, piano, and silver, they departed in April 1867. The next four years brought excruciating poverty, frequent removals to avoid debtor’s prison, and humiliating pleas to friends and relatives for loans to keep them alive. Dostoyevsky’s epileptic seizures came as regularly as his disastrous plunges at the gaming tables, which unaccountably ceased in 1870. Nowhere did Dostoyevsky find ease or peace of mind—not in Berlin or Dresden, or Baden-Baden, nor in Geneva, Vevey, Milan, or Florence, or other way stations back to St. Petersburg in July 1871. He could hardly have survived without the bottomless sympathy, warmth, and encouragement of his “little diamond.”

Despite or perhaps because of all this, in transit he wrote doggedly. To keep up with life at home he devoured the Russian newspapers, selecting sensational items as subjects for his own writing. Trial by jury, newly introduced in Russia, made the details of criminal cases more public. Dostoyevsky’s interest was captured by the story of a family in the provinces who treated their daughter Olga so cruelly that she tried to burn down their house, and finally was driven out of her mind. This became the nucleus of
The Idiot
(1868–69) and Olga was the model for the heroine Mignon. The story slowly developed around “my old favourite idea, but so difficult that for a long time I did not dare to cope with it.”

His hero, Prince Myshkin, unlike Don Quixote, is not a crusader but a gentle Russian Orthodox believer, set against his sensual antagonist Rogozhin.

While writing this novel he was awaiting the birth of his first child, a girl who arrived to his exuberant delight in March 1868. And when the baby died three months later, Dostoyevsky was plunged into the deepest despond of his whole unhappy life. He kept his sanity by working at
The Idiot
, which he completed the next January. It was hardly a subject of good cheer, for the heroine is murdered, the anti-hero becomes a murderer and goes mad, and the hero relapses into idiocy. Even before
The Idiot
was delivered, Dostoyevsky was deep in debt to his publisher Katkov for another novel still unwritten. And
The Idiot
was not a publishing success.

More than ever Dostoyevsky now envied the prosperity of his popular contemporaries Turgenev, Goncharov, and Tolstoy. He continually begged friends and relatives for money, repeating his plea that “it is only once in a lifetime that money can possibly be so cruelly needed.” Still he kept insisting that he was the most unmercenary of men. “I have never invented a theme for money’s sake, to meet the obligation of writing up to a previously agreed time-limit. I always made an agreement … and sold myself into bondage beforehand … only when I already had my theme in mind prepared for writing, and when it was one that I felt it necessary to develop.” At the outset of his career he had promised himself, “Even if driven to the extreme limit of privation, I shall stand firm and never compose to order. Constraint is pernicious and soul-destroying. I want each of my works to be good in itself.”

While reading Russian newspapers in the Dresden library in late 1869 Dostoyevsky noted the story of a young man found drowned on the grounds of the Moscow Agricultural Academy with stones tied to his head and feet. The trial revealed that he was the victim of fellow members of a secret revolutionary society, which aimed at a popular uprising and the public execution of the czar. With slogans hardly distinguishable from those of the revolutionists of 1917 they sought the emancipation of mankind. Dostoyevsky seized this story as the framework for
The Possessed
, which would dramatize the evils of Western nihilism and materialism. He returned to St. Petersburg in July 1871 with Anna and his daughter, born in Dresden. The first published installments of
The Possessed
attracted great interest and established him as the darling of the reactionary government.

Dostoyevsky saw the book as “almost a historical study” of the consequences of the separation of Russian intellectuals from the Russian masses. In Shatov, he projected Russia’s world mission against the West. “To be with the soil, to be with your own people, signifies to believe that precisely through this people all humanity will be saved, and finally the idea will be
born into the world and a heavenly kingdom with it.” After finishing
The Possessed
in 1872, he developed the theme “of our national spiritual independence” in his
Diary of a Writer
. This miscellany of trials and crimes and popular fads became the source for his last and greatest novel.

The Brothers Karamazov
was Dostoyevsky’s creation from the accumulated thoughts and impressions of his life—from the Siberian prison, countless news stories, voluminous notebooks, and his grandiose plan for the “Life of a Great Sinner.” Early in 1878 he received an advance from his publisher Katkov. Encouraged by Anna and with the companionship of a young philosopher who shared his faith in the Church, Dostoyevsky made a long-postponed arduous pilgrimage to the monastery Optina Pustyn. It was celebrated for the piety and wisdom of its elders, especially its charismatic Father Amvrosy. In only two days at Optina Pustyn he noted everything he saw and that Father Amvrosy told him, for chapters of the novel. The installments of
The Brothers Karamazov
began appearing in Katkov’s magazine,
The Russian Messenger
, in January 1879. The enthusiasm of readers grew with each installment. He finished the last chapter in November 1880. Then Dostoyevsky began a series of public readings from his own works and from Pushkin, Gogol, and others. Without Dickens’s histrionic flair, he still had his own solemn charm, always encouraged by the presence of Anna. Finally, when he was nearing sixty, he had paid off his creditors and was making money from the sale of his novels. Anna added to their income by selling books by mail.

The longest of Dostoyevsky’s novels,
The Brothers Karamazov
was also the most explicit and elaborate in dealing with theology and the Russian soul. Of the varied characters and their separate doubts in search of God Dostoyevsky makes violent scenes. At the same time he explains why no theology is adequate to the needs of life. Alyosha, like the “entirely good man,” Prince Myshkin in
The Idiot
, insists to his brother Ivan, “I think every one should love life above everything in the world.” “Love life more than the meaning of it?” asks Ivan. “Certainly,” replies Alyosha, “love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it’s only then one will understand the meaning of it.”

A passionate Eastern Orthodox Christian, Dostoyevsky still resists the temptations of dogma. “But the greatness of it,” says Father Zosima, “lies just in the fact that it is a mystery—that the passing earthly show and the eternal verity are brought together in it. In the face of the earthly truth, the eternal truth is accomplished.” When the Grand Inquisitor denies Christ for having left man freedom of choice between good and evil, the answer is not in reason but in the heart, and in suffering for the sins of others. In his notebook Dostoyevsky explained that this “whole novel” was an answer
to those who accused him of a naive and retrograde “faith in God.” “I do not believe in God like a fool (a fanatic). And they wished to teach me, and laughed over my backwardness! But their stupid natures did not dream of such a powerful negation as I have lived through.”