Authors: Joseph Frank
Dostoevsky (111 page)
Anna replied to the query with the full emotional force of her own passionate longings. “But why would it be impossible? . . . Where is the sacrifice on her part, anyway? If she really loves him she’ll be happy, too, and she’ll never have to regret anything!” These were the words he had used all his literary skill to bring to her lips; once having heard them, he came to the dénouement. “ ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘that the artist is—me; that I have confessed my love for you and asked you to be my wife. Tell me, what would you answer?’ ” Anna understood, from the inner torment manifest in Dostoevsky’s countenance, that “if I gave him an evasive answer I would deal a deathblow to his self-esteem and pride. I looked at his troubled face, which had become so dear to me, and said ‘I would answer that I love you and will love you all my life.’ ”
28
Anna’s refusal to hesitate even for a moment, to ask for a little time to reflect on what would be, after all, a momentous and risky decision, reveals both the firm resoluteness of her character and her overriding concern to spare Dostoevsky any further anguish. His welfare, under conditions that few other women would have borne so resiliently, would
always be her major preoccupation; and she remained unstintingly faithful to her pledge that she would love Dostoevsky for the remainder of her life.
The newly engaged couple, once the joyful excitement of the moment had passed, decided to keep their decision secret for a time, except from Anna’s mother. The pair had decided on secrecy ostensibly because Dostoevsky’s circumstances could not as yet allow them to fix a date for the wedding ceremony; but Dostoevsky also wished to keep the news from his various Petersburg relatives for as long as possible. If so, his purpose was foiled by his uncontrollable need to communicate his happiness to someone, anyone, in lieu of those who ordinarily should have shared his rejoicing. The cab driver who drove him to and from Anna’s house every day became his confidant, to whom he chattered about his future marriage, and this information quickly reached the ears of Fedosya, the servant in Dostoevsky’s home, before a week had gone by. The supposed secret was thus disclosed quickly and caused a great deal of displeasure among those who had become accustomed to counting on Dostoevsky’s earnings for their own support.
Anna had known that Dostoevsky was in dire financial straits, but it was only after their engagement that she fully realized to what extent his indigence was caused by the demands made on him by others. He wholly supported his stepson Pasha, then twenty-one years of age and content to allow this situation to continue indefinitely; he provided in good part for his brother Mikhail’s widow, Emilya Feodorovna, who had four grown children; and he also helped his younger brother Nikolay, a trained architect but a confirmed alcoholic who was often on his uppers.
29
The results of their combined extractions was vividly illustrated for Anna one cold evening in late November when Dostoevsky arrived at her home chilled to the bone and, after imbibing large quantities of tea, also took several glasses of sherry. He had worn his light fall overcoat instead of the fur greatcoat necessary for winter weather, and he confessed to having pawned his greatcoat for a few days when all three dependents converged with pleas for help at the same time. Anna was so outraged that she broke into tears “and talked like a madwoman, without choosing my words.”
30
Dostoevsky calmed her by promising not to leave his house until the greatcoat was redeemed. This was only the beginning of Anna’s struggle to wrest Dostoevsky free from those who, she believed, were unduly exploiting his generosity and sense of obligation.
Anna realized to her dismay that “the moment Feodor Mikhailovich got hold of any money, all his relatives . . . would instantly put forward their sudden but urgent needs; and out of the three or four hundred rubles received from Moscow for
Crime and Punishment
no more than thirty or forty would remain to Feodor Mikhailovich by the next day. Of this sum, moreover, nothing would be paid off on his promissory notes except the interest.”
31
It would be impossible, if this pattern continued, for Dostoevsky ever to discharge his debts, no matter how much he wrote and how successful his works might be. Once she became his wife, Anna decided, she would take their finances into her own hands and put a brake on this self-defeating beneficence, but for the moment there was little she could do except remonstrate.
For the marriage to take place, a considerable sum would be required over and above the payments accruing from
Crime and Punishment
. Since literature was Dostoevsky’s only source of income, he decided to travel to Moscow over Christmas and offer his next novel to Katkov in return for an advance sufficient to provide for the ceremony and a new establishment.
Crime and Punishment
, still in the course of publication, continued to hold readers riveted to the pages of
The Russian Messenger
, and Katkov readily acceded to Dostoevsky’s request and promised two thousand rubles, which would start arriving in installments in January. The date of the wedding was thus set for mid-February. But the first installment of seven hundred rubles instantly vanished in the usual fashion, and after estimating that the wedding would cost between four and five hundred rubles, Dostoevsky prudently entrusted this part of the second installment to Anna for safekeeping.
Dostoevsky’s first marriage had taken place in a miserable little Siberian village, in the most humble circumstances, among people he scarcely knew, and with the ex-lover of his bride as one of the witnesses. His second was celebrated amidst the splendors of the Izmailovsky Cathedral, brilliantly illuminated for the occasion and resounding with the voices of a superb choir, surrounded by his family and closest friends and, at his side, a radiant young bride who revered him as a man and as an artist. He could hardly believe his good fortune, and when introducing Anna to his friends at the wedding reception in her mother’s home, he kept repeating, “Look at that charming girl of mine! She’s a marvelous person, that girl of mine! She has a heart of gold!”
32
There are few moments in Dostoevsky’s life when we catch him enjoying unalloyed happiness, and this is certainly one of those rare occasions. But Anna, as perhaps Dostoevsky was even then uneasily aware, would indeed need “a heart of gold” to cope with and surmount what lay ahead for her.
1
The so-called memoirs of Anna Grigoryevna,
Vospominaniya
, were never completed by her, and a selection of the manuscript was first published in 1925 by L. P. Grossman. A revised version appeared in 1971, edited by S. V. Belov and V. A. Tunimanov, which was translated into English under the title of
Reminiscences
. In 1973, a volume of the literary-historical annual
Literaturnoe Nasledstvo
published a hitherto undeciphered portion of Anna’s shorthand diary of the courtship period. This account fills out, as well as sometimes diverges from, what she included in the memoirs written in the later years of her life.
2
Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 10.
3
Ibid., 4.
4
Ibid., 15.
5
Ibid., 16.
6
Ibid., 16–17.
7
Ibid., 18.
8
A. G. Dostoevskaya, “Dnevniki i vospominaniya,”
LN
86 (Moscow, 1973), 222.
9
Reminiscences
, 21.
10
Ibid., 19.
11
Ibid., 22.
12
Ibid., 24–26.
13
Ibid., 26.
14
“Dnevniki,” 225.
15
Reminiscences
, 27.
16
Ibid., 27, 28.
17
“Dnevniki,” 262.
18
Reminiscences
, 30.
19
Ibid.
20
“Dnevniki,” 243.
21
Reminiscences
, 32.
22
Ibid.
23
“Dnevniki,” 263.
24
Reminiscences
, 36.
25
Ibid., 40.
26
Ibid., 41–42.
27
Ibid., 44–45.
28
Ibid., 46.
29
Mikhail Dostoevsky had kept a mistress named Praskovya Petrovna Anikieva, by whom he had a son, and Dostoevsky contributed to their support as well. There is a reference to her in A. G. Dostoevsky,
Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi 1867 g
. (Moscow, 1923), 111.
30
Reminiscences
, 65.
31
Ibid., 69.
32
Ibid., 76.
The Gambler
The first mention of gambling as a theme for a novella, we know, goes back to the summer of 1863, when Dostoevsky was traveling in Europe with his erstwhile mistress Apollinaria Suslova. Dostoevsky was gambling furiously all during this trip, and he thought of recouping his losses by turning them into literature. While in Rome he wrote to Strakhov outlining a work for which he hoped Strakhov could obtain an advance. “I have in mind,” he wrote, “a man who is straightforward, highly cultured, and yet in every respect unfinished, a man who has lost his faith but
who does not dare not to believe
, and who rebels against the established order and yet fears it.” The letter then continues:
The main thing, though, is that all his vital sap, his energies, rebellion, daring, have been channeled into
roulette
. He is a gambler, and not merely an ordinary gambler, just as Pushkin’s Covetous Knight is not an ordinary miser. . . . He is a poet in his own way, but the fact is that he himself is ashamed of the poetic element in him, because deep down he feels it is despicable, although the need to take risks ennobles him in his own eyes. The whole story is the tale of his playing
roulette
in various gambling houses for over two years.
1
By the time Dostoevsky came around to using the idea outlined in his letter, the religious motif had dropped by the wayside, and instead he developed what had been mentioned only as an afterthought—that the gambling of Russian expatriates “has some (perhaps not unimportant) significance.” In the novella, this significance becomes linked to the remark about the gambler being “a poet in his own way.” Dostoevsky explains this idiosyncratic notion of “poetry” by a reference to Pushkin’s Covetous Knight, who amasses a fortune not for the sake of the money itself but solely for the psychological sense of power it enables him to acquire over others. “Poetry” in this Dostoevskian sense means acting not for immediate self-interest or for the gratification of any fleshly material desire, but solely to satisfy a powerful psychic craving of the human personality, whether for good or evil.
Dostoevsky believed that the Russian character was peculiarly susceptible to this kind of “poetry,” and much of the story—whose tone is jaunty, bouncy, and full of a certain youthful high spirits—is taken up with illustrating the contrasts between the Russian national character and others (French, English, German). It makes
The Gambler
(
Igrok
) the only work of Dostoevsky’s that is “international” in the sense of that word made familiar by, for example, the fiction of Henry James. It is a story in which the psychology and conflicts of the characters not only arise from their individual temperaments and personal qualities but also reflect an interiorization of various national values and ways of life. In Russian literature, there is the German-Russian contrast in
Oblomov
, the French-Russian contrast in
War and Peace
, and the Caucasian-Russian contrast in
The Cossacks
. Dostoevsky’s
The Gambler
belongs with such books as a spirited but by no means uncritical meditation on the waywardness of the Russian national temperament as manifested abroad.