Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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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,