Читать книгу The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Страница 15

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On his return from Siberia my father found his brother Mihail surrounded by a group of remarkable young writers. My uncle had distinguished himself in Russian literature by his excellent translations of Goethe and Schiller, and he loved to gather the authors of the period round him in his house. Seeing this, my father proposed that he should edit a newspaper. He was burning to reveal to our intellectuals the great Russian Idea which he had discovered in prison, but to which Russian society was deaf and blind. The paper was christened Vremya (Time), and the work was divided between the two brothers; my uncle undertook the editorial and financial business, my father the literary interests. He published his novels and his critical articles in Vremya. The paper was very successful; the new idea pleased its readers. The brothers invited the collaboration of very good writers, earnest men who appreciated my father. Instead of jeering at him, like his youthful literary associates of old, they became his friends and admirers. Two among them deserve special mention : the poet Apollo Maikov (whom Dostoyevsky had known shortly before his imprisonment), and the philosopher Nicolai Strahoff. Both remained faithful to Dostoyevsky all his life and were with him at his death.

After The House of the Dead my father published The Insulted and Injured, his first long novel, which also had a great success. Dostoyevsky was much courted and complimented in the literary salons of Petersburg, which he again began to frequent. He also appeared in public. During his sojourn in Siberia, the Petersburg students, male and female, began to play an important part in Russian hterature. In order to help their poorer comrades, they organised hterary evenings, at which famous writers read extracts from their own works. The students rewarded them with frantic applause, and advertised them enormously, a service the ambitious sought to obtain by flattering the young people. My father was not of the number; he never flattered the students; on the contrary, he never hesitated to teU them unpleasant truths. But the students respected him for it, and applauded him more than any of the other writers. Dostoyevsky's popularity was remarked by a young girl named Pauline N. She represented the curious type of the " eternal student," which exists only in Russia. Pauline N came from one of the Russian provinces, where she had rich relations; they allowed her enough money to hve comfortably in Petersburg. Every autumn regularly she enrolled herself as a student at the University,50 but she never presented herself for examination, and pursued no com-se of study. However, she frequented the University assiduously, flirting with the students, visiting them in their rooms, preventing them from working, inciting them to revolt, getting them to sign protests, and taking part in all pohtical manifestations, when she would march at the head of the students, carr5ang a red flag, singing the Marseillaise, abusing and provoking the Cossacks, and beating the horses of the police. She in her turn was beaten by the poUce, and would spend the night in a police ceU. On her return to the University she was borne aloft in triumph by the students, and acclaimed as the glorious victim of " Tsarism." Pauline attended all the balls and all the literary soirees given by the students, danced and applauded with them and shared all the new ideas which were agitating youthful minds. Free love was then fashionable. Young and attractive, Pauline adopted this new fashion ardently, passing from one student to another, and serving Venus in the belief that she was serving the cause of European civilisation. Seeing Dostoyevsky's success, she hastened to share this latest passion of the students. She hovered about my father, making advances which he did not notice. She then wrote him a declaration of love. Her letter was preserved among my father's papers; it is simple, naive and poetic. She might have been some timid young girl, dazzled by the genius of the great writer. Dostoyevsky read the letter with emotion. It came at a moment when he needed love most bitterly. His heart was torn by the treachery of his wife; he despised himself as a ridiculous dupe; and now a young girl, fresh and beautiful, offered him her heart. His wife had been wrong then 1 He might still be loved, even after having worked in prison with thieves and murderers. Dostoyevsky grasped at the consolation offered him by fate. He had no idea of PauUne's easy morals. My father knew the lives of the students only from the rostrum whence he addressed them. They surrounded him in a respectful throng, talking of God, of the fatherland, of civilisation. The idea of initiating this distinguished writer, revered by all, into the squahd details of their private conduct was never entertained. Later, if they noticed Dostoyevsky's love for Pauline they were careful not to enlighten him as to her character. He took Pauline for a young provincial, intoxicated by the exaggerated ideas of feminine hberty which were then reigning in Russia. He knew that Maria Dmitri-evna was given up by the doctors, and that in a few months he would be free to marry Pauline. He had not the strength to wait, to repulse this young love, which offered itself freely, careless of the world and its conventions. He was forty years old, and no woman had ever loved him . . .

50 At this period there were no higher courses for young girls in Russia. The Government allowed them provisionally to study at the University together with the male students.

The lovers decided to spend their honeymoon abroad. My father had long been dreaming of a journey in Europe. Ivan Karamazow, the portrait of my father at twenty, also dreams of foreign travel. According to him, Europe is merely a vast cemetery; but he wished to make obeisance at the tombs of the mighty dead. Now that Dostoyevsky had at last money enough, he hastened to realise this dream of long standing. The date of departure drew near; at the last moment my father was detained in Petersburg by business connected with the newspaper Vremya. My uncle Mihail's drinking bouts were becoming more and more frequent, and Dostoyevsky was obliged to look after the whole of the work. Pauline started alone, promising to await him in Paris. A fortnight later he received a letter from her, in which she informed him that she loved a Frenchman whose acquaintance she had just made in Paris. " All is over between you and me ! " she wrote to my father. "It is your fault: why did you leave me so long alone?" After reading this letter, Dostoyevsky rushed off to Paris like a madman. He, on this his first journey in Europe, passed through Berlin and Cologne without seeing them. Later, when he visited the banks of the Rhine again, he begged pardon of the Cathedral of Cologne for not having noticed its beauty, Pauline received him coldly; she declared that she had found her ideal, that she did not intend to return to Russia, that her French lover adored her and made her perfectly happy. My father always respected the liberty of others, and made no distinction on this point between men and women. Pauline was not his wife. She had made no vows; she had given herself freely and therefore was free to take back her gift. My father accepted her decision and made no further attempt to see her or speak to her. Feeling that there was nothing for him to do in Paris, he went to London to see Alexander Herzen. In those days people went to England to see Herzen just as later they went to Yasnaia Poliana to see Tolstoy. My father was far from sharing Herzen's revolutionary ideas. But he was interested in the man, and he took this opportunity of making his acquaintance. He found London much more absorbing than Paris. He stayed there some time, studying it thoroughly, and was enthusiastic over the beauty of young Englishwomen. Later, in his reminiscences of travel, he says that they represent the most perfect type of feminine beauty. This admiration of Dostoyevsky's for young Englishwomen is very significant. The Russians who visit Europe are, as a rule, more attracted by French, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian women. Englishwomen generally leave them cold; my countrymen consider them " too thin." Dostoyevsky's taste was evidently less Oriental, and the beauty of young Englishwomen touched some Norman chord in his Lithuanian heart.51

51 Dostoyevsky made a curious prediction as to the future of England. He thought the English would eventually abandon the island of Great Britain. " If our sons do not witness the exodus of the English from Europe, our grandsons will," he prophesied.

''My father at last went back to Paris, and having heard that his friend, Nicolas Strahoff, was also going abroad, he arranged to meet him at Geneva, and proposed that they should make a tour in Italy together. There is a curious phrase in this letter : " We will walk together in Rome, and, who knows, perhaps we may caress some young Venetian in a gondola." Such phrases are extremely rare in my father's letters. It is evident that at this period Dostoyevsky was longing for a romance of some sort with a woman to rehabilitate himself in his own eyes, to prove that he too could be loved. And yet there was no "young Venetian in a gondola" during this journey of the two friends; Dostoyevsky's heart was with Pauhne. Yet he refused to return with Strahoff to Paris, where he might have encountered her, and went back alone to Russia. He described his impressions of this first journey to Europe in Vremya.

Towards the spring, Pauline wrote to him from Paris, and confided her woes to him. Her French lover was unfaithful to her, but she had not the strength to leave him. She implored my father to come to her in Paris. Finding that Dostoyevsky hesitated to take this journey, Pauline threatened to conunit suicide, the favourite threat of Russian women. Much alarmed, he at last went to Paris and tried to make the forsaken fair one listen to reason. Finding Dostoyevsky too cold, Pauline had recourse to heroic measures. One morning she arrived at my father's bedside at seven o'clock, and brandishing an enormous knife she had just bought, she declared that her French lover was a scoundrel, and that she intended to punish him by plunging this knife into his breast; that she was on her way to him, but that she had wished to see my father first, to warn him of the crime she was about to conunit. I do not know whether he was deceived by this vulgar melodrama. In any case, he advised her to leave her big knife in Paris, and to go to Germany with him. Pauline agreed; this was just what she wanted. They went to the Rhineland, and established themselves at Wiesbaden. There my father played roulette with passionate absorption, was delighted when he won, and experienced a despair hardly less delicious when he lost.52 Later, they went on to Italy, which had fascinated my father before, and visited Rome and Naples. Pauline flirted with all the men they encountered, and caused her lover much anxiety. My father described this extraordinary journey later in The Gambler. He placed it in other surroundings, but gave the name of Pauline to the heroine of the novel.

52 Dostoyevsky had made acquaintance with roulette during his first journey to Europe, and even won a considerable sum of money. At first gambling did not attract him much. It was not until his second visit with Pauline that he developed a passion for roulette.

Considering this phase of Dostoyevsky's life, we ask ourselves in amazement how it was that a man who had lived so irreproachably at twenty could have committed such follies at forty. It can only be explained by his abnormal physical development. At twenty my father was a timid schoolboy; at forty he passed through that youthful phase of irresponsibility, which most men experience. " He who has committed no follies at twenty will commit them at forty," says the proverb, which proves that this curious transposition of ages is not so rare as we suppose. In this escapade of Dostoyevsky's there was the revolt of an honest man, of a husband who had been faithful to his wife, while she had been laughing at him with her lover. My father apparently wished to demonstrate to himself that he too could be unfaithful to his wife, lead the light Ufe of other men, play with love, and amuse himself with pretty girls. There are many indications that this was the case. In The Gambler, for instance, Dostoyevsky depicts himself in the character of a tutor. Rejected by the young girl he loves, this tutor goes at once in search of a courtesan whom he despises, and travels with her to Paris, in order to avenge himself on the young girl, whom he nevertheless continues to love. But apart from the vengeance of a deceived husband, there was also real passion in this romance of Dos-toyevsky's. Hear the hero of The Gambler speaking of Pauline : " There were moments when I would have given half my life to be able to strangle her, I swear that could I have plunged a knife into her breast I would have done so exultantly. And yet I swear, too, by all that is sacred to me, if, at the summit of the Schlangenberg she had said to me : ' Throw yourself over that precipice,' I would have obeyed her, and even obeyed her joyfully."

Yet while avenging himself with Pauline on Maria Dmitrievna, Dostoyevsky took all possible precautions to prevent his sick wife from hearing an5rthing of the matter. He wanted to restore his own self-respect, but he did not wish to inflict pain on the unhappy sufferer. His precautions were so effectual, that only his relations and a few intimate friends knew anything of this episode. But it explains the characters of many of Dostoyevsky's capricious and fantastic heroines. Aglae in The Idiot, Lisa in The Possessed, Grushenka in the Brothers Karamazov and several others are more or less Paulines. It is in this love-story of my father's, I think, that we shall find the explanation of the strange hatred-love of Rogogin for Nastasia Philipovna.

Dostoyevsky returned to Petersburg in the autumn and learned that his wife's illness had reached its final stage. Full of pity for the unhappy woman, 53 my father forgot his anger, started for Tver, and persuaded his wife to come with him to Moscow, where she could have the best medical care. Maria Dmitrievna's agony lasted all the winter. My father remained with her and tended her unceasingly. He went out very little, for he was engrossed by his novel, Crime and Punishment, which he was writing at this time. When Maria Dmitrievna died in the spring, Dostoyevsky wrote a few letters to his friends to announce her death, mentioning her with respect. He admitted that he had not been happy with her, but pretended that she had loved him in spite of their disagreements. The honour of his name was always dear to Dostoyevsky, and led him to conceal his wife's treachery from his friends. Only his relatives knew the truth of this sad story. My father was further anxious to hide the truth on account of his stepson Paul, whom he had brought up in sentiments of respect for his dead parents. I remember on one occasion at a family dinner Paul Issaieff spoke contemptuously of his father, declaring that he had been nothing but a " wet rag " in the hands of his wife. Dostoyevsky became very angry; he defended the memory of Captain Issaieff, and forbade his stepson ever to speak of his parents in such a manner.

53 Throughout his liaison with Pauline, Dostoyevsky never ceased to provide for his sick wife. When he was travelling in Italy, he often wrote to liis brother Mihail, requesting him to send her the money due to him for articles in Vremya.

As I have already said, Dostoyevsky had intended to marry Pauline on the death of his wife. But since their travels in Europe his ideas about his mistress had undergone a change. Moreover, Pauline was not at all inclined towards this marriage, and wished to keep her Uberty as a pretty girl. It was not my father she cared for, but his literary fame, and, above all, his success with the students. Directly Dostoyevsky ceased to be the fashion, Pauline abandoned him. My father soon began the pubUcation of Crime and Punishment. As before, the critics fell upon the first chapters of this masterpiece, and barked their loudest. One of them announced to the public that Dostoyevsky had insulted the Russian student in the person of Raskolnikov.54

54 In his celebrated work Dostoyevsky showed most striking clairvoyance. A few days before the publication of the first chapter of Crime and Punishment, a murder similar to Ras-kolnikov's crime was committed. A student killed a usurer, believing that "all is lawful." My father's friends were greatly struck by this coincidence, but his critics attached no importance to it. And yet Dostoyevsky's clairvoyance should have made them understand that, far from insulting our students, he merely showed what ravages the anarchist Utopias, with which Europe kept us abundantly supplied, wrought in their immature minds.

This absurdity, like most absurdities, had a great success in Petersburg. The students who had been Dostoyevsky's fervent admirers turned against him to man. Seeing that my father was no longer popular, Pauline did not want him any more. She declared that she could not forgive his outrage on the Russian student, a being sacred in her eyes, and she broke with him. My father did not remonstrate; he had no longer any illusions as to this light o' love.