Читать книгу The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Страница 25

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We used to spend the four summer months at Staraja Russa, a little watering-place in the Government of Novgorod, not far from the great Lake of Ilmen. The doctors advised my parents to go there for the sake of my health the first year after our return to Russia. The baths of Staraja Russa did me a great deal of good, and my parents returned yearly. The quiet, sleepy little town pleased Dostoyevsky; he was able to work in peace there. We rented a little villa belonging to Colonel Gribbe, a native of the Baltic Provinces, serving in the Russian army. With the savings he had made during his military life, the old officer had built a small house in the German style of the Baltic Provinces, a house full of surprises : cupboards concealed in the walls; planks which when lifted up revealed corkscrew staircases, dark and dusty. Everything in this house was on a small scale : the low rooms were furnished with old Empire furniture; the green mirrors distorted the faces of those who had the courage to look into them. Paper scrolls, pasted on linen, hung on the walls, presenting to our childish eyes monstrous Chinese ladies with claw-like nails and feet squeezed into tiny shoes. A covered verandah with coloured glass panes was our delight, and the Chinese billiard-table, with its glass balls and little bells, amused us on the long rainy days so frequent during our northern summers. Behind the house was a garden with comical little flower-beds. All sorts of fruits grew in this garden, which was intersected by tiny canals. The Colonel had constructed these himself to protect his raspberries and currants from the spring inundations of the treacherous Pereritza river, on the banks of which his villa stood. In summer the Colonel retired into two rooms on the ground-floor, and let the rest of the house to visitors. This was the custom at Staraja Russa in those days, when there were no villas to be let for the summer season. Later, after the Colonel's death, my parents bought the little house for a song from his heirs.68 My father spent all his svunmers there, except that of 1877, when we paid a visit to my uncle Jean in the Government of Kursk. The scene of The Brothers Karamazov is laid in the little town; when I read it in later years I recognised the topography of Staraja Russa. Old Karamazov's house is the villa, with slight modifications; the beautiful Grushenka is a young provincial whom my parents knew at Staraja Russa; the Plotnikov establishment was my father's favourite shop. The drivers of the troikas, Andrey and Timofey, were our favom-ite drivers, who took us every summer to the shores of the Lake of Ilmen, to the point where the steamers stopped. Sometimes one had to wait there several days, and the sojourn in a big village on the lake is described by Dostoyevsky in the last chapters of The Possessed.

68 Colonel Gribbe possessed foiir miniatures which he had bought from a soldier in his regiment, who had no doubt looted them in some PoUsh palace, on the occasion of one of the numerous Polish revolts. They represented four princes and a princess of the Lithuanian dynasty of the Jagellons. My father admired these miniatures greatly; he bought them from the heirs of the old Colonel and hung them in his bedroom. He said that the young princess reminded him of his mother.

My father led a very secluded life at Staraja Russa. He rarely went to the Park and the Casino, the resort and rendezvous of the visitors. He preferred to walk on the banks of the river, in the more retired places. He invariably took the same road, and passed along with downcast eyes, lost in thought. As he always went out at the same houf, the beggars lay in wait for him, knowing that he never refused alms. Absorbed in his own meditations, he distributed these mechanically, without noticing that he repeatedly gave to the same persons. My mother, however, saw through the tricks of the beggars, and was much amused by her husband's absent-minded ways. She was young and fond of practical jokes. One evening, seeing him returning from his walk, she threw a shawl over her head, took me by the hand, and stood by the roadside. When he approached, she began to whine plaintively : " Kind gentleman, have pity on me. I have a sick husband and two children to support." Dostoyevsky stopped, glanced at my mother, and handed her some coins. He was very angry when she biu-st out laughing. "How could you play me such a trick—before the child, too? " he said bitterly.

This eternal dreaminess, so characteristic of writers and men of science, was a great annoyance to my father, who considered it humiliating and ridiculous. He wished intensely to be hke others. But great minds cannot manifest themselves after the fashion of commonplace men. Dostoyevsky could not live like his fellows. All his life, as at the Engineers' School, he stood apart in the embrasure of a window, dreaming, reading and admiring Nature, while the rest of humanity laughed, wept, played, ran, and amused itself in crowds. A great writer hardly hves on this earth; he spends his days in the imaginary world of his characters. He eats mechanically, without noticing of what his dinner consists. He is astonished when the night comes; he had supposed that the day was still young. He does not hear the trivial things that are said around him; he walks in the streets, talking to himself, laughing and gesticulating, till passers-by smile, taking him for a madman. Suddenly he will stop, struck by the look of an unknown person, which stamps itself on his brain. A word, a phrase he overhears reveals to him a whole life, an ideal which will eventually find expression in his works.

The little villa of Staraja Russa no longer exists. Built of poor wood bought at a low price by the old Colonel, it was unable to resist the annual inundations of the Pereritza, and at last fell to pieces, in spite of all efforts to save it. As long as it survived it attracted many visitors. All who came to Staraja Russa made a pilgrimage to the little house where Dostoyevsky spent the last summers of his life. They looked at the table on which he had written The Brothers Karamazov, the old arm-chairs in which he sat to read, the numerous souvenirs of him we had kept.69 Among these pious pilgrims was the Grand Duke Vladimir, who came one day when he was in the neighbourhood holding a review of young soldiers. He told my mother how greatly he admired Dostoyevsky. '' This is not the first domicile of his I have visited," he added. " Passing through Siberia, I stopped at Omsk to see the prison where he suffered so greatly. It is entirely changed now. The Memories of the House of the Dead effected a vast reform in all Siberian prisons. What a genius your husband was ! What a power of touching the heart he had!" The Grand Duke Vladimir was the grandson of Nicholas I, who had condemned my father to penal servitude. Ideas change quickly in Russia, and grandchildren are ready to recognise the misdeeds of their grandparents.

69 These relics were all placed in a little museum we made in our new villa.

My father liked Staraja Russa so well, that my mother proposed we should spend a winter there in order to economise and pay off the debts more rapidly. They took another villa in the centre of the town, a larger and warmer house, and we spent several months there. In the course of this winter my brother Alexey was born. There had been some discussion as to his name. My mother wished to call him after her beloved brother, Jean. Dostoyevsky suggested Stepan, in honour of that Bishop Stepan who, according to him, was the founder of our Orthodox family. My mother was somewhat surprised at this, as my father rarely spoke of his ancestors. I imagine that Dostoyevsky, who felt an ever-increasing interest in the Orthodox Church, wished to show his gratitude to the first of our Lithuanian ancestors who had adopted Orthodoxy. However, my mother disliked the name Stepan, and my parents finally agreed to call the child Alexey. My mother's health had improved so much that the birth of this child caused her little suffering. Little Alexey seemed strong and healthy, but he had a curious forehead. It was oval, almost angular. His little head was like an egg. This did not make him an ugly baby; it only gave him a quaint expression of astonishment. As he grew older, Alexey became my father's favourite. My brother Fyodor and I were forbidden to go into our father's room uninvited; but this rule did not apply to Alexey. As soon as his nurse's back was turned he would escape from his nursery, and run to his father, exclaiming : " Papa, zizi! " 70

70 i. e. tchassi, show.

Dostoyevsky would lay aside his work, take the child on his knee, and place his watch against the baby's ear, and Aliosha would clap his little hands, delighted at the ticking. He was very intelligent and lovable, and was deeply mourned by the whole family when he died, at the age of two and a half years, at Petersburg, in the month of May, just before our annual journey to Staraja Russa. Our boxes were packed, and the last purchases were being made, when Ahosha was suddenly seized with convulsions. The doctor reassured my mother, telling her that this often happened to children of his age. Ahosha slept well, awoke fresh and lively, and asked for toys to play with in his httle bed. Suddenly he fell back in another convulsion, and in an hour he was dead. It all happened so quickly that my brother and I were still in the room. Seeing my parents sobbing over the little lifeless body, I had a fit of hysterics. I was taken away to some friends, with whom I stayed for two days. I returned to my home for the funeral. My mother wished to bury her darhng beside her father in the cemetery of Ochta, on the other side of the Neva. As the bridge which now connects the banks did not then exist, we had to make a long detour. We drove in a landau, with the little cofiin between us. We all wept, caressing the poor httle white, flower-decked coffin, and recalling the baby's pretty sayings. After a short service in the church, we passed to the burial-ground. How well I remember that radiant May day! All the plants were in blossom, the birds were singing in the branches of the old trees, and the htanies of the priest and the choir sounded melodiously in the poetic surroundings. Tears ran down my father's cheeks; he supported his sobbing wife, whose eyes were fixed on the little coffin as it gradually disappeared under the earth.

The doctors explained to my parents that Alexey's death was due to the malformation of his skull, which had prevented his brain from expanding. For my part, I have always thought that Ahosha, who was very hke my father, had inherited his epilepsy. But God was good to him, and took him home at the first attack.

During the winter preceding the death of Alexey, a celebrated Parisian fortune-teller had visited Petersburg, and there was a great deal of talk about her predictions and her clairvoyance. My father, who was interested in all occult manifestations, went to see her with a friend, and was surprised at the accuracy with which she told him of events in his past life. Speaking of his future, she said : A great misfortune will befall you in the spring. Struck by these words, Dostoyevsky repeated them to his wife. My mother, who was superstitious, thought of them a good deal in March and April, but, absorbed in her preparations for our departure, she had entirely forgotten them in May. How often my parents recalled that prediction during the melancholy suDfimer after the death of Alexey !