Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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comfort his wife and lighten her heavy burden, my father accepted the post of sub-editor of the newspaper. The Citizen, edited by Prince Mestchersky, an absurd person who was the laughing-stock of all the other journalists. Mestchersky, who had been brought up by English nurses and French tutors, could not even speak Russian correctly; my father had to be always on the watch to prevent him from publishing something ridiculous in the paper. His journalistic work exhausted him terribly, and directly the most pressing of the debts were paid, my father hastened to leave The Citizen and its fantastic editor to their fate.
My mother, for her part, did not spend all her time in weeping. She prepared my father's novels which had appeared in reviews for publication in book form, which brought in a little money. Moreover, it gave her experience ; she became an excellent editor in time, and after my father's death published several complete editions of his works. She was the first Russian woman to undertake work of this nature. Her example was followed by Countess Tolstoy, who came to Petersburg to make my mother's acquaintance and ask her advice. She gave all the necessary information, and thenceforward all Tolstoy's works were published by his wife. Long afterwards, when at Moscow, my mother showed the Coimtess the musuem she had organised in memory of her husband in one of the towers of the Historical Museum at Moscow. The idea appealed to Countess Tolstoy, and she asked the directors of the Museum to let her have a similar tower for a Tolstoy Museum. These two Europeans 67 were not content to be merely wives and mothers; they aspired to help their husbands to propagate their ideas, and they were anxious to place all relics of their great men in safe custody. Another friend of my mother's, Madame Shestakov, asked her advice in the organisation of a museum in memory of her brother, the famous composer. Glinka. My mother helped her considerably, and thus was the founder of one museum, and the inspirer of two others.
67 Countess Tolstoy was the daughter of Dr. Bers, a native of the Baltic Provinces.
My father Kved a very retired Hfe during the first years of his return to Russia; he went out very little, and received only a few intimate friends. He made few appearances in public; the Petersburg students kept up their grudge against him, and rarely invited him to their literary gatherings. They had scarcely begun to forget that Dostoyevsky had insulted them in the person of Raskolnikov, when he offended them still more deeply. In his novel, The Possessed, he had plainly shown them the folly and madness of revolutionary propaganda. Our young men were stupefied; they had looked upon the anarchists as Plutarchian heroes. This Russian admiration for incendiaries, which is so amazing to Europeans, is easily accounted for by the Oriental sloth of my compatriots. It is much easier to throw a bomb and run away to a foreign country than to devote one's life to the service of one's fatherland, after the fashion of patriots elsewhere.
Dostoyevsky attached no importance to the displeasure of the students, and wasted no regrets on his lost popularity with them. He looked upon them as misguided boys, and a man of his caUbre has no need of youthful adulation. The joy he felt in the creation of his masterpieces richly rewarded his toil; popular applause could add nothing to it. I think my father was happier in these early years of his return to Petersburg than later, in the agitated period of his great successes. His wife loved him, his children amused him with their infantine prattle and laughter; old friends often visited him, and he could exchange ideas with them. His health had improved, his attacks of epilepsy were no longer frequent, and the mortal disease which was to close his career had not yet declared itself.
XX
LITTLE ALEXEY
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