The Idiot (2 page)

1855 Alexander II succeeds Nicholas I as Tsar: some relaxation of state censorship.

Promoted to non-commissioned officer.

1856 Promoted to lieutenant. Still forbidden to leave Siberia.

1857 Marries the widowed Marya Dmitriyevna.

1858 Works on
The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants
and ‘Uncle’s Dream’.

1859 Allowed to return to live in European Russia; in December, the Dostoyevskys return to St Petersburg. First chapters of
The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants
(the serialized novella is released between 1859 and 1861) and ‘Uncle’s Dream’ published.

1860 Vladivostok is founded. Mikhail starts a new literary journal,
Vremya (Time).
Dostoyevsky is not officially an editor, because of his convict status. First two chapters of
The House of the Dead
published.

1861 Emancipation of serfs. Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons.

Vremya
begins publication.
The Insulted and the Injured
and A
Silly Story
published in
Vremya.
First part of
The House of the Dead
published.

1862 Second part of
The House of the Dead
and
A Nasty Tale
published in
Vremya.
Makes first trip abroad, to Europe, including England, France and Switzerland. Meets Alexander Herzen in London.

1863
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
published in
Vremya.
After Marya Dmitriyevna is taken seriously ill, travels abroad again. Begins liaison with Apollinaria Suslova.

1864 First part of Tolstoy’s War
and Peace.

In March with Mikhail founds the journal
Epokha (Epoch)
as successor to
Vremya,
now banned by the Russian authorities.
Notes from Underground
published in
Epokha.
In April death of Marya Dmitriyevna. In July death of Mikhail.

1865
Epokha
ceases publication because of lack of funds.
An Unusual Happening
published. Suslova rejects his proposal of marriage. Gambles in Wiesbaden. Works on
Crime and Punishment.

1866 Dmitry Karakozov attempts to assassinate Tsar Alexander II.
The Gambler
and
Crime and Punishment
published.

1867 Alaska is sold by Russia to the United States for $7,200,000.

Marries his twenty-year-old stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snit
kina, and they settle in Dresden.

1868 Birth of daughter, Sofia, who dies only three months old.
The Idiot
published in serial form.

1869 Birth of daughter, Lyubov.

1870 V. I. Lenin is born in the town of Simbirsk, on the banks of the Volga.

The Eternal Husband
published.

1871 Moves back to St Petersburg with his wife and family. Birth of son, Fyodor.

1871-2 Serial publication of
The Devils.

1873 First
khozdenie v narod
(‘To the People’ movement). Becomes contributing editor of conservative weekly journal
Grazhdanin (The Citizen),
where his
Diary of a Writer
is published as a regular column. ‘Bobok’ published.

1874 Arrested and imprisoned again, for offences against the political censorship regulations.

1875 A
Raw Youth
published. Birth of son, Aleksey.

1877 ‘The Gentle Creature’ and ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ published in
Grazhdanin.

1878 Death of Aleksey. Works on
The Brothers Karamazov.

1879 Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (later known as Stalin) born in Gori, Georgia.

First part of
The Brothers Karamazov
published.

1880
The Brothers Karamazov
published (in complete form). Anna starts a book service, where her husband’s works may be ordered by mail. Speech in Moscow at the unveiling of a monument to Pushkin is greeted with wild enthusiasm.

1881 Assassination of Tsar Alexander II (1 March).

Dostoyevsky dies in St Petersburg (28 January). Buried in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

One of Dostoyevsky’s favourite words, often used ironically, was ‘fact’
(fakt,
a harsh-sounding foreign loan word in the Russian language), and it figures prominently in the characters’ rumour-mongering, through which readers must attempt to make sense of
The Idiot.
The novelist’s own life has entered public mythology with a dazzling series of such ‘facts’: the brutal father murdered by his serfs (perhaps not so brutal, perhaps not murdered), the molestation of a young girl (a vicious rumour utterly without proof), temporal lobe epilepsy, extraordinary poverty, flight from creditors, arrest and near-execution for ‘seditious conspiracy’, penal servitude and Siberian exile, a six-year intoxication with gambling. These events and situations have been the stuff of many biographies and psychoanalytic accounts, of which Freud’s is the most notorious and Joseph Frank’s the most judicious and comprehensive.

These facts, most of them registered in this volume’s Chronology, blend in the popular imagination with material from Dostoyevsky’s fiction (the murder of Fyodor Karamazov, numerous scenes of violated innocence, Prince Myshkin’s seizures in
The Idiot,
Makar Devyushkin’s hand-to-mouth existence in
Poor Folk,
hellish scenes from
The House of the Dead
and from
The Gambler).
Dostoyevsky’s Russian critics processed his fiction in these terms, and ‘scientific criticism’ of foreign scholars was quick to build upon this shaky foundation. The most reckless diagnosis no doubt belongs to Emile Hennequin:

As a description of Dostoyevsky’s characters in their most desperate moments, this has some plausibility; and the narrator of
The Idiot -
by no means equal in intelligence and understanding to its author - seems often at a loss when dealing with the development of plot and character. And to be sure Dostoyevsky himself could be irascible, unreasonable and, in polite society, notoriously ‘unpolished’. Recent novels by John Coetzee
(The Master of StPetersburg)
and Leonid Tsypkin
(Summer in Baden-
Baden)
²
have imagined these aspects of the author’s personality more successfully than the scholars and psychologists. Dostoyevsky’s was, indeed, a life lived on the edge of physical breakdown, financial ruin and mental depression. By his own estimate he endured, beginning at the age of twenty-six, an epileptic seizure every three weeks.
³

All of these sensational details of his life and work are, however, subject to qualification. James Rice, in a thorough and insightful study of Dostoyevsky’s illness, notes that unlike the hero of
The Idiot,
Dostoyevsky could generally anticipate his seizures and rarely suffered them in public.
⁴
He was able, ultimately, to control and terminate his obsession with gambling, and to write his way out of debt. The madness, violence and irrationality of his characters - denigrated by his contemporary Russian critics and celebrated by his first foreign ones - were more often than not creative transformations of his childhood reading of early nineteenth-century European literature. In ways unrecognized by his first European readers, he was returning them the themes, plots and characters of their own Romantic fiction, drama and poetry.

By studying Dostoyevsky’s letters, notebooks and revisions - most fully collected in the thirty-volume Soviet collection of his works (1972-90) - later twentieth-century scholars began to show the extent to which his choices were the products of a deep understanding of literary art. Unlike Henry James, who famously undervalued Russian craftsmanship (except Turgenev’s), Dostoyevsky did not publish prefaces to his works, nor did he author an essay on the art of the novel. But the notebooks show that he had a nuanced understanding of the rhetorical and aesthetic consequences of his choices of narrative viewpoint, archetype, plot sequence and mode (comic, tragic, satiric, ironic). Robin Miller’s magisterial reading of the notebooks for
The Idiot,
in particular, opened new perspectives on Dostoyevsky’s art.

By countering the initial response to Dostoyevsky as an untutored savage, such detailed studies of his texts and writing process enable us to understand him as a gambler in a new and different sense. While he is famous for his compulsive gambling sprees at a game of chance, roulette, his greatest gamble was one that he indulged not for six years, but for nearly four decades: that he could support himself exclusively by his writing, by becoming one of Russia’s first truly professional writers.

To appreciate this risk one must understand the circumstances in which Dostoyevsky worked. Secular Russian literature was scarcely a century older than Dostoyevsky himself. And the first tentative steps toward a viable, prestigious literature that was not a matter of salon play or court patronage had been taken by writers but a generation or two older than Dostoyevsky: Nikolai Novikov (1744-1818), Nikolai Karamzin (1766- 1826), Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), Nikolai Gogol (1809- 52) and Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41) among them. These writers contended with conditions far from conducive to the development of a literary marketplace. For a start, the autocracy was inconsistent in dealing with what the Emperor Alexander II would call ‘the ungovernability and excesses of the printed word’.
⁵
During the period 1750-1854 private presses were permitted, banned and re-established; ambiguous passages in a text were held against the author, then discarded, and -
de facto
- held against him; the importation of foreign books was banned, permitted, then severely curtailed. And agencies with censorship powers proliferated, often contradicting one another. The imperial government had so little respect for the laws it promulgated that one of the censors would justly complain that ‘there is no legality in Russia’.
⁶
With Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War and the accession of a new emperor in 1855, the situation became better, but still far from ideal. Dostoyevsky would feel the lash on his own back in 1863, when
Vremya (Time),
the very successful journal that he and his brother Mikhail had founded, was shut down over an innocuous article on the Polish Uprising of that year. That Dostoyevsky, an ardent Russian nationalist who sprinkled unsympathetic Polish characters across his novels, should have suffered this disaster indicates the continuing capriciousness of the government, which, even as it was banning
Vremya,
was allowing the publication of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel,
What Is to Be Done?,
which would become gospel for radical youth, including, later, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

So high were the barriers to successful professional authorship that few of Dostoyevsky’s fellow writers risked hurdling them; a contemporary survey by S. S. Shashkov argued that few writers earned the 2,000 roubles a year necessary to support a family and that the situation in the 1870s was little better than it had been four decades earlier.
⁷
Even prominent writers relied on independent means or hedged their bets with official positions. Leo Tolstoy inherited a large estate (approximately 800 taxable serfs), Ivan Turgenev divided an estate of 4,000with his brother. These grand holdings considerably dwarfed the small debt-ridden property of Dostoyevsky’s father. Both Ivan Goncharov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin came from families that enjoyed noble status and merchant wealth, and both made significant careers in state service, from which Dostoyevsky had quickly resigned upon graduating from the Academy of Military Engineers. Dostoyevsky’s family background was decidedly modest - his mother came from the merchant estate and his father had worked his w
ay into the lower nobility from the even less prosperous parish clergy. Once Dostoyevsky had surrendered his ensign’s pay and exchanged his share of his father’s insignificant estate for 1,000 roubles, he had no other sources of support than small loans from friends and relations and income from his writing.

To count on finding a readership was no less a gamble than was braving the Russian legal system. Five years before beginning
The Idiot
Dostoyevsky estimated that only one Russian in 500 was sufficiently educated to read the literature that he and his fellow writers were publishing in a handful of journals, in an increasing number of newspapers and in small editions of individual volumes.
⁸
Eight years of penal servitude and Siberian exile, most of them spent in the company of non-intellectuals, had made him acutely conscious of the cultural schism between the empire’s minuscule Westernized elite and the illiterate masses which preserved Russia’s traditional Orthodox culture. He had come to deplore this schism; he sought enduring value in the people’s way of life, and he dedicated his post-exile career to reconciling intellectuals who looked to the modern West (‘Westernizers’) and to the Russian past (‘Slavophiles’) through a policy of
pochvennichestvo
(a term derived from the Russian word for soil) in his short-lived journal
Vremya.
But Dostoyevsky attempted to do this as a professional author, not as a gentleman-pamphleteer or salon debater, and, as a professional, he knew that he not only had to argue with the cultured elite, but also entertain it and seize its imagination.