Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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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.
XI
A LITERARY FRIENDSHIP