Читать книгу The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Страница 9

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When he had completed his studies at the Castle of the Engineers, Dostoyevsky obtained an appointment in the Department of Military Engineering. He did not keep it long and hastened to resign. His father was no longer there to force him to serve the State; he had no taste for military service, and longed more than ever to be a novelist. Young Grigorovitch followed his example. They determined to live together, set up in bachelors' quarters, and engaged a servant. Grigorovitch received money from his mother, who lived in the provinces. My father had an allowance from his guardian at Moscow, who sent him enough to live modestly. Unfortunately, my father always had very fantastic ideas concerning economy. All his life he was a Lithuanian Schliahtitch, who spent the money that was in his pocket without ever asking himself how he was to live the next day. Age failed to correct this. I remember a journey we made all together towards the end of his life, going to the Ukraine to spend the summer with my uncle Jean. We had to stay at Moscow a few days en route, and here, to the great indignation of my mother, Dostoyevsky insisted on putting up at the best hotel in the town, and took a suite of rooms on the first floor, whereas at Petersburg we had a very modest domicile. My mother protested in vain; she never succeeded in curing her husband of his prodigality. When we had relations coming to dinner on some family festival, my father always offered to go and buy the hors d'oeuvre, which play such an important part in a Russian dinner, the fruit, and the dessert. If my mother were imprudent enough to consent, Dos-toyevsky went to the best shops in the town and bought of all the good things he foimd there. I always smile when I read how Dmitri Karamazov bought provisions at Plotnikov's, before starting for Mokroe. I seem to see myself at Staraya-Russa, in that selfsame shop, where I sometimes went with my father, and observed with all the interest of a greedy child his original manner of providing for himself. When I went with my mother, she would come out carrying a modest parcel in her hand. When I accompanied my father, we left the shop empty-handed, but several small boys preceded or followed us to our house, gaily bearing big baskets and reckoning on a good tip. Like a true Schliahtitch, my father never asked himself whether he was rich or poor. Formerly, in Poland and in Lithuania, the native nobility starved at home, and arrived at all public gatherings in gilt coaches and magnificent velvet coats. They Uved crippled by debts, paying back only a tithe of what they had borrowed, never thinking of their financial position, amusing themselves, laughing and dancing. These racial defects take centuries to eradicate; many a descendant of Dostoyevsky's wiU yet have to suffer for the mad prodigality of their ancestors. There was, however, one important difference between my father and the Lithuanian Schliahtitchi. They thought only of living merrily, and cared little for others. He gave alms to all the poor he encountered, and was never able to refuse money to those who came to tell him of their misfortunes and beg him to help them. The tips he gave to servants for the smallest services were fabulous and exasperated my poor mother.

It is obvious that living in this manner my father spent more than his guardian could send him from Moscow. He got into debt, and, wishing to escape from the importunities of his creditors, he proposed to his guardian to barter his birthright for a comparatively small sum of ready money. Knowing nothing of newspapers or of publishers, Dostoyevsky ingenuously hoped to make a living by his pen. His guardian agreed to the bargain, which he ought never to have entertained. My aunts argued that their brother Fyodor knew nothing of business, and that he could be made to accept the most disadvantageous terms. They tried to repeat the process later on, when the Dostoyevsky family inherited some further property, and the struggle on which my father was forced to enter with his sisters darkened the close of his life. I shall speak of this business more fully in the final chapters of my book.

Having paid his debts, Dostoyevsky soon spent the little money he had left. He tried to make translations,28 but of course this brought in very little. At this juncture his aunt Kumanin came to his assistance and made him an allowance. She was a sister of his mother's, who had made a rich marriage, and hved in a fine house in Moscow, surrounded by a horde of devoted servants, and waited on and amused by a number of lady companions, poor women who trembled before her, and gave way to all the caprices of their wealthy despot. She patronised her nephews and nieces, and was particularly well disposed to my father, who was always her favourite. She alone of all the family appreciated his powers, and was always ready to come to his aid. My father was very fond of his old aunt Kumanin, though he made fun of her a little, like all her young nephews. He painted her in The Gambler, in the person of the old Moscow grandmother, who arrives in Germany, plays roulette, loses half her fortune and goes back to Moscow as suddenly as she came. At the time when roulette was flourishing in Germany, my great-aunt was too old to travel. It may be, however, that she played cards at Moscow, and lost large sums of money. When he depicted her as coming to Germany and playing roulette at his side, Dostoyevsky perhaps meant to show us whence came his passion for gaming.

28 It was at this time that he made an excellent translation of Eugenie Grandet.

It must not be supposed, however, that because my father spent a good deal of money he was leading a profligate life. Dostoyevsky's youth was studious and industrious. He went out very Uttle, and would sit all day at his writing-table, talking to his heroes, laughing, crying, and suffering with them. His friend Grigoro-vitch, more practical than he, while working at his writing, tried to make acquaintances useful to his future career, got himself introduced into literary society, and then introduced his friend Dostoyevsky. Grigorovitch was handsome, gay and elegant; he made love to the ladies, and charmed every one. My father was awkward, shy, taciturn, rather ugly; he spoke little, and hstened much. In the drawing-rooms they frequented the two friends met the young Turgenev, who had also come to embark upon the career of a novelist at Petersburg. My father admired him greatly. " I am in love with Turgenev," he wrote ingenuously to his brother Mihail, who, having completed his military studies was serving at Reval as an officer. " He is so handsome, so graceful, so elegant! " Turgenev accepted my father's homage with an air of condescension. He considered Dostoyevsky a nonentity.

Grigorovitch succeeded in making the acquaintance of the poet Nekrassov, who proposed to start a literary review. Grigorovitch was eager to be connected with this review in one way or another. His first works were not quite finished—he was rather too fond of society— but he knew that my father had written a novel and was perpetually correcting it, fearing he had not been very successful. Grigorovitch persuaded him to entrust the manuscript to him and took it to Nekrassov. The latter asked Grigorovitch if he were famihar with the work of his comrade, and hearing that he had not yet foimd time to read it, proposed that they should go through two or three chapters together, to see if it were worth anything. They read this first novel of my father's through at a sitting.29 Dawn was stealing in at the windows when they finished it. Nekrassov was astounded. "Let us go and see Dostoyevsky," he proposed; "I want to tell him what I think of his work." " But he is asleep, it is not yet morning," objected Grigorovitch. " What does it matter? This is more important than sleep ! " And the enthusiast set off, followed by Grigorovitch, to rouse my father at five o'clock in the morning, and inform him that he had an extraordinary talent.

29 It was called Poor Folks. Before writing it my father began a tragedy, Mary Stuart, which he laid aside in order to write a drama, Boris Godunov. The choice of these subjects is very significant. It is probable that in Dostoyevsky's early youth, the Norman blood of his paternal ancestors was at war in his heart with the MongoUan blood of his Moscow ancestors. But the Slav strain was the strongest and overcame the Norman and Mongolian atavisms. Dostoyevsky abandoned Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov, and gave us Poor Folks, which is fuU of the charming Slav sentiment of pity.

Later on the manuscript was submitted to the famous critic Belinsky, who, after reading it, desired to see the young author. Dostoyevsky entered his presence trembling with emotion. Belinsky received him with a severe expression. " Young man," he said, " do you know what you have just written? No, you do not. You cannot understand it yet."

Nekrassov published Poor Folks in his Review, and it had a great success. My father found himself famous in a day. Everybody wished to know him. " Who is this Dostoyevsky ? " people were asking on every side. My father had only recently began to frequent literary society, and no one had noticed him particularly. The timid Lithuanian was always retiring into a corner, or the embrasure of a window, or lurking behind a screen. But he was no longer allowed to hide himself. He was surrounded and complimented; he was induced to talk, and people found him charming. In addition to the literary salons, where those who aspired to be novelists, or those who were interested in literature were received, there were other more interesting salons in Petersburg where only famous writers, painters and musicians were admitted. Such were the salons of Prince Odoevsky, a distinguished poet, of Count SoUohub, a novelist of much taste, who has left us very penetrating descriptions of Russian life in the first half of the nineteenth century, and of his brother-in-law. Count Vieillegorsky, a russian-ised Pole. All these gentlemen hastened to make Dostoyevsky's acquaintance, invited him to their houses and received him cordially. My father enjoyed himself more especially with the Vieillegorsky, where there was excellent music. Dostoyevsky adored music. I do not think, however, that he had a musical ear, for he distrusted new compositions, and preferred to hear the pieces he knew already. The more he heard them, the more they delighted him.

Count Vieillegorsky was a passionate lover of music; he patronised musicians, and was accustomed to hunt them out in the most obscure corners of the capital. It is probable that some strange type, some poor, drunken, ambitious, jealous violinist, discovered by Count Vieillegorsky in a garret, and induced to play at his receptions, struck my father's imagination, for Count Vieillegorsky's house is the scene of his novel Netotchka Nesvanova. In this Dostoyevsky achieved a true masterpiece of feminine psychology, though, in his youthful inexperience, he may not have sufficiently explained it to his public. It is said that Countess Vieillegorsky was born Princess Biron. Now the Princes Biron, natives of Courland, always claimed to belong to the sovereigns, rather than to the aristocracy of Europe. If we read Netotchka Nesvanova attentively, we shall soon see that Prince S., who had offered hospitality to the poor orphan girl, is merely a man of good education and good society, whereas his wife is very haughty, and gives the air of a palace to her home. All those around her speak of her as of a sovereign. Her daughter Katia is a regular little " Highness," spoilt and capricious, now terrorising her subjects, now making them her favourites. Her affection for Netotchka becomes at once very passionate, even slightly erotic. The Russian critics rebuked Dostoyevsky very severely for this suggestion of eroticism. Now my father was perfectly truthful, for these poor German princesses, who can never marry for love, and are always sacrificed to interests of State, often suffer from such passionate and even erotic feminine friendships. The disease is hereditary among them, and might well have declared itself in their descendant, the little Katia, a precocious child. The Vieillegorsky had no daughter; the type of Katia was entirely created by my father, who depicted it after studying the princely household. In the portrait of this little neurotic Highness Dostoyevsky shows a knowledge of feminine psychology very remarkable in a shy young man, who scarcely dared to approach women. His talent was already very great at this period. Unfortunately, he lacked models. Nothing could have been paler or less distinctive than the unhappy natives of Petersburg, born and bred in a swamp. They are mere copies and caricatures of Europe. "These folks have all been dead for a long time," said the Russian writer, Mihail Saltikov. " They only continue to live because the police have forgotten to bury them."

Dostoyevsky's friends, the young novelists who were beginning their Hterary careers, had not the strength of mind to accept his unexpected success. They became jealous, and were irritated by the idea that the timid and modest young man was received in the salons of celebrities, to which aspirants were not yet admitted. They would not appreciate his novel. Poor Folks seemed to them wearisome and absurd. They parodied it in prose and verse, and ridiculed the young author unmercifully.30 To injure him in public opinion they invented grotesque anecdotes about him. They asserted that success had turned his head, that he had insisted that each page of his second novel, which was about to appear in Nekrassov's Review, should be enframed in a border to distinguish it from the other works in the Review. This was, of course, a lie. The Double appeared without any frame. They scoffed at his timidity in the society of women, and described how he had fainted with emotion at the feet of a young beauty to whom he had been presented in some drawing-room. My father suffered greatly as he lost his illusions concerning friendship. He had had a very different idea of it; he imagined artlessly that his friends would rejoice at his success, as he would certainly have rejoiced at theirs. The maUce of Turgenev, who, exasperated at the success of Poor Folks did his utmost to injure Dostoyevsky, was particularly wounding to my father. He was so much attached to Turgenev, and admired him so sincerely. This was the beginning of the long animosity between them, which lasted all their hves, and was so much discussed in Russia.

30 Turgenev wrote a burlesque poem, in which he made my father cut a ridiculous figure.

When we pass in review all the friends my father had during his hfe we shall see that those of his early manhood differ very markedly from those of his maturity. Until the age of forty Dostoyevsky's relations were almost exclusively with Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Poles and natives of the Baltic Provinces. Grigorovitch, half Ukrainian, half French, was his earliest friend, and found a publisher for his first novel. Nekrassov, whose mother was a Pole, gave him his first success; Belinsky, Polish or Lithuanian by origin, revealed his genius to the Russian public. It was Count SoUohub, the descendant of a great Lithuanian family, and Count Vieillegorsky, a Pole, who received him cordially in their salons. Later, in Siberia, we shall find Dostoyevsky protected by a Swede and natives of the Baltic Provinces. It seems that all these people recognised in him a European, a man of Western culture, a writer who shared their Slavo-Norman ideas. At the same time, all the Russians were hostile to him. His comrades in the School of Engineers ridiculed him cruelly; his young hterary friends hated him, despised him, tried to make him a laughing-stock. It was as if they recognised in him something opposed to their Russian ideals.

After the age of forty, when Dostoyevsky had definitively adopted the Russian attitude, the nationality of his friends changed. The Slavo-Normans disappeared from his life. The Russians sought his friendship and formed a body-guard around him. After his death they continued to guard him as jealously as in the past. Whenever I mention the Lithuanian origin of our family, my compatriots frown, and say: " Do forget that wretched Lithuania! Your family left it ages ago. Your father was Russian, the most Russian of Russians. No one ever understood the real Russia as he did."

I smile when I note this jealousy, which is, in its essence, love. I think that after all the Russians are right, for it was they who gave Dostoyevsky his magnificent talent. Lithuania formed his character and civilised his mind; Ukrainia awoke poetry in the hearts of his ancestors; but all this fuel, gathered together throughout the ages, kindled only when Holy Russia fired it with the spark of her great genius.

My father's first novel was certainly very well written, but it was not original. It was an imitation of a novel of Gogol's, who in his turn had imitated the French literature of his day. Les Miserdbles, with its marvellous Jean Valjean, is at the bottom of this new literary movement. It is true that Les Misirables was written later; but the type of Valjean, a convict of great nobility of mind, had begun to appear in Europe. The democratic ideas awakened by the French Revolution, led writers to raise poor folks, peasants, and small tradespeople to the rank occupied by the nobles and the intellectuals of the upper middle class. This new trend in literature was very pleasing to the Russians, who, having never had any feudal aristocracy, were always attracted by democratic ideas. Russian writers, who at this period were pohshed and highly educated persons, would no longer describe the drawing-room; they sought their heroes in the garret. They had not the least idea what such people were really like, and instead of describing them as they were in reality, illiterate and brutalised by poverty, they endowed their new heroes with chivalrous sentiments, and made them write letters worthy of Madame de S^vigne. It was false and absurd, nevertheless, these novels were the origin of that magnificent nineteenth-century literature which is the glory of our country. Writers gradually perceived that before describing a new world, one must study it. They set to work to observe the peasants, the clergy, the merchants, the townsfolk; they gave excellent descriptions of Russian life, which was very little known. But this was much later. At the period of which I am writing, Russian novelists drew on their imagination, and have left us works full of absurdities.

My father no doubt realised how false these novels were, for he tried to break away from this new Uterary genre in his second work. The Double is a book of far higher quality than Poor Folks. It is original, it is already " Dostoyevsky." Our alienists admire this little masterpiece greatly, and are surprised that a young novelist should have been able to describe the last days of a madman so graphically, without having previously studied medicine.31

31 Dostoyevsky thought very highly of The Double. In a letter to his brother Mihail, written after his return from Siberia, my father said : " It was a magnificent idea; a type of great social importance which I was the first to create and present."

Yet this second novel was not so successful as the first. It was too new; people did not understand that minute analysis of the human heart, which was so much appreciated later. Madmen were not fashionable; this novel without hero or heroine was considered uninteresting. The critics did not conceal their disappointment. " We were mistaken," they wrote; " Dostoyevsky's talent is. not so great as we thought." If my father had been older, he would have disregarded the critics, he would have persisted in his new genre, would have imposed it on the public, and would have produced very fine psychological studies even then. But he was too young; criticism distressed him. He was afraid of losing the success he had achieved with his first novel, and he went back to the false Gogol manner.

But this time he was not content to draw on his imagination. He studied the new heroes of Russian literature, went to observe the inhabitants of garrets in the little caf&s and drinking shops of the capital. He entered into conversation with them, watched them, and noted their manners and customs carefully. Feeling shy and uncertain how to approach them, Dostoyevsky invited them to play billiards with him. He was unfamiliar with the game, and not at all interested in it, and he naturally lost a good deal of money. He did not regret this, for he was able to make curious observations as he played, and to note many original expressions.32

32 My father's friends relate in tlieir reminiscences that he often invited strangers to visit him among those he met in the cafds, and that he would spend whole days listening to their conversation and stories. My father's friends could not imderstand what pleasure he could take in talking to such uneducated people; later, when they read his novels, they recognised the types they had encoimtered. It is evident that, like all young men of talent, he could only paint from nature at this period. Later he did not need models, and created his types himself.

After studying this curious society, of which he had known nothing, for some months, Dostoyevsky began to describe the lower orders as they really were, thinking this would interest the public. Alas ! he was even less successful than before. The Russian pubUc was ready to take an interest in the wretched, if they were served up d la Jean Valjean. Their real life, in all its sordid meanness, interested no one.

Dostoyevsky began to lose confidence in his powers. His health gave way, he became nervous and hysterical. Epilepsy was latent in him, and before declaring itself in epileptic seizures, it oppressed him terribly.33 He now avoided society, would spend long hours shut up in his own room, or wandering about in the darkest and most deserted streets of Petersburg. He talked to himself as he walked, gesticulating, and causing passers-by to turn and look at him. Friends who met him thought he had gone mad. The colourless, stupid city quenched his talent. The upper classes were mere caricatures of Europeans; the populace belonged to the Finno-Turkisk tribe, an inferior race, who could not give Dostoyevsky any idea of the great Russian people. He had not enough money to go to Europe, the Caucasus or the Crimea; travelling was very costly at this period. My father languished in Petersburg and was only happy with his brother Mihail, who had resigned his commission and settled in the capital, meaning to devote himself to literature. He had married a German of Reval, Emihe Dibmar, and had several children. My father was fond of his nephews; their childish laughter banished his melancholy.

33 Dr. Janovsky, whom my father liked very much, and consulted about his health, says that long before his convict-life Dostoyevsky already suffered from a nervous complaint, which was very like epilepsy. As I have mentioned above, my father's family declared that he had had his first attack when he heard of the tragic death of my grandfather. It is evident that he was already suffering from epilepsy at the age of eighteen, although it did not assmne its more violent form imtU after his imprisonment.

It is astonishing to find no woman in the life of Dostoyevsky at this period of early youth, which is the age of love for most men. No betrothed, no mistress, not even a flirtation ! This extraordinary virtue can only be explained by the tardy development of his organism, which is not rare in Northern Russia. Russian law allows women to marry at the age of sixteen; but quite recently, a few years before the war, Russian savants had begun to protest against this barbarous custom. According to their observations the Northern Russian woman is not completely developed until the age of twenty-three. If she marries before this, child-bearing may do her great harm and ruin her health permanently. It is to this evil custom that our doctors attribute the hysteria and nervous complaints that ravage so many Russian homes. If the savants are right, we must place the complete development of the Northern Russian male organism in the twenty-fifth year, as men always come to maturity later than women. As to abnormal organisms, those of epileptics, for instance, they must mature even more slowly. It is possible that at this age, Dostoyevsky's senses were not yet awakened. He was like a schoolboy who admires women from afar, is very much afraid of them, and does not yet need them. My father's friends, as we have seen, ridiculed his timidity in the society of women.34 His romantic period began after his imprisonment, and he showed no timidity then.

34 Dr. Riesenkampf, who loiew my father well at this period of his hfe, wrote in his reminiscences : " At the age of twenty young men generally seek a feminine ideal, and run after all young beauties. I never noticed anything of the sort with Dostoyevsky. He was indifferent to women, had even an antipathy to them." Riesenkampf adds, however, that Dostoyevsky was much interested in the love-affairs of his comrades, and was fond of singing sentimental songs. This habit of singing songs that pleased him he retained to the end of his life. He generally sang in a low voice when he was alone in his room.

The heroines of Dostoyevsky's first novels are pale, nebulous, and lacking in vitality. He painted only two good feminine portraits at this period—those of Netotchka Nesvanova and the little Katia, children of from ten to twelve years old. This novel is, if we except The Double, his best work of this period. It has but one fault, which is common to all the novels written by Dostoyevsky before his imprisonment: the heroes are too international. They can live under any skies, speak all tongues, bear all climates. They have no fatherland, and, like all cosmopolitans, are pale, vague and ill-defined. To make them live, it was necessary to create a nationaUty for them. This Dostoyevsky was about to do in Siberia.