Dostoevsky (84 page)

All the same, Dostoevsky had been attracted to Marya Dimitrievna not only physically but also because of her qualities of mind and the nobility of her character, and he sought a similar combination in other women. A story by Suslova was published in the tenth issue of
Time
(October 1861), and she would hardly have missed the chance to visit the editorial bureau of the journal: the intrepid Miss Suslova, then all of twenty-one, was not someone to hesitate taking a step then considered bold for a respectable young lady. Her story, “For the Time Being,” depicts a young woman who runs away from an unloved husband and earns her own meager living by giving lessons. The story is a typical product of the Russian movement for female emancipation in the 1860s, and Suslova intended her own life to be a living incarnation of such a protest.

What little we know about Apollinaria Suslova—Dostoevsky’s beloved Polina—is due largely to her remarkable younger sister Nadezhda, who became the first Russian woman to obtain a medical degree and whose life has thus been investigated as a pioneer of women’s liberation. Both girls came from a family of peasant serf stock, and their history illustrates the rise of the
raznochintsy
intelligentsia. Their father, an enterprising serf of Count Sheremetev, had bought his freedom even before the liberation, and then became one of the managers of the count’s estates. Apollinaria spent her early years in the countryside growing up among the peasantry, and prideful references to her closeness to the
muzhiki
appear in her diary. The family moved to Petersburg when she was fifteen, and the sisters were sent to a private school, where they learned foreign languages but apparently little else. They soon took advantage of the opening of the University of St. Petersburg to the public and attended the lecture courses offered there by various noted professors. Both girls also tried their hand at literary composition, Apollinaria leading the way by her contributions to
Time
.

Most likely she and Dostoevsky became lovers during the winter of 1862–1863. Nothing reliable is known about the intimate details of their relationship, but there is ample evidence that the Dostoevsky-Suslova liaison did not go smoothly after the first excitement of possession and novelty had worn off. There was a twenty-year difference of age between the two; and Dostoevsky was weighed down by worry over Marya Dimitrievna, drained by his crushing editorial and literary obligations, and compelled to cope with the depressing and enervating effects of epileptic attacks recurring at this time with shorter intervals of respite. It is difficult to imagine that he could have made a satisfactory lover for an ardent and inexperienced young girl, and one suspects that he aroused Suslova’s sensuality without being able to satisfy it entirely. When she was offhandedly seduced a few months later by a young and handsome Spanish medical student seeking some diversion in the Latin Quarter, she responded to his caresses with a rapturous intensity that argues a previous sense of dissatisfaction.

20. Apollinaria Suslova. From Dominique Arban et al.,
Dostoïevski
(Paris, 1971)

Another source of conflict between the two soon cast a pall over the idyll of their romance. Suslova was a young Russian feminist of the 1860s who despised conventional public opinion regarding the relations between the sexes. “All my
friends are kind people,” she notes in her diary, “but weak and poor in spirit; they are abundant in their words, but poor in their deeds. I haven’t met a single one among them who would not be afraid of the truth, or who wouldn’t have retreated before the conventions of life. . . . I cannot respect such people. I consider it a crime to talk one way and act another.”
³

These words are contained in the draft of a letter to her Spanish lover, Salvador, and Dostoevsky is certainly included among the “friends” that Suslova mentions here with such disdain. Dostoevsky’s romance was no secret from his brother Mikhail, but he made strenuous efforts to keep it hidden from others. He was terrified that gossip might get back to Marya Dimitrievna and make their common life together even stormier than it was. More generously, we may also assume that he did not wish to cause the consumptive invalid any extra suffering. He was thus forced to meet Suslova on the sly and to hide their love affair from the prying eyes of the world—exactly the sort of kowtowing to social bigotry that would have revolted her to the core. Inevitably too, with all his other pressing duties and responsibilities, he was compelled to see her only during those brief periods he could snatch from more urgent concerns. Such a demeaning situation would have upset even an ordinary young girl involved in the first great love affair of her life. With the high-spirited and mettlesome Suslova, the result could only have been to create a sense of resentment against the man she had surrendered to and idolized, and who, she could not help feeling, had betrayed her trust.

Among her papers was found the undated draft of a letter intended for Dostoevsky but never sent: “I was never ashamed of my love for you: it was beautiful, even grandiose. . . . You behaved like a serious, busy man [who] understood his obligations after his own [fashion], but would not miss his pleasures either; on the contrary, perhaps even found it necessary to have some pleasure, on the grounds that some great doctor or philosopher once said that it was necessary to get drunk every month.”
⁴
Such words surely suggest a malaise deriving from a sense of occupying a distinctly secondary place in Dostoevsky’s life—of having become part of a routine that included the physical release provided by their liaison. What inspires her sarcasm is a suspicion of being “used” for Dostoevsky’s convenience, his failure to reciprocate her own “beautiful” and “grandiose” sentiments in an appropriate manner.

Twenty years later, Suslova’s second husband, the noted philosophical essayist V. V. Rozanov (whose first important book was a classic study of Dostoevsky), once asked her why she and Dostoevsky had become estranged. He reports their conversation in a letter to a third party: “Because he would not get a divorce. . . . I
gave myself to him, out of love, without asking anything. He should have behaved in the same way! He behaved otherwise and I left him.”
⁵
To make matters worse, when quarrels began to break out between them, Dostoevsky could do little more than wring his hands in anguish and guilt. In an entry in her diary made a year later, while mulling over her previous relations with her ex-lover Salvador, she writes, “And what is it I want of him now? That he should confess his guilt, be remorseful, that is, be a Feodor Mikhailovich?”
⁶
Dostoevsky’s name took on the deprecating stamp of someone who can do nothing but cravenly acknowledge his contrition.

Such was the mood in which Suslova preceded Dostoevsky to Paris in the early spring of 1863, there to await his arrival. Dostoevsky attempted to raise funds by offering his next work to another journal (
The Library for Reading
) and, when this failed, obtaining a loan of fifteen hundred rubles from the Literary Fund. In return, and as guarantee, he offered the rights to all his already published works in perpetuity if he failed to repay his debt by February 1864. The risks involved in such a guarantee were of course enormous and indicate how determined he was, at whatever price, to manage what would be a honeymoon trip with his adored Polina through France and Italy.

When Dostoevsky finally left Petersburg in August, one might have thought he would hasten to Paris by the fastest route. Instead, he delayed his trip to make a four-day stopover in Wiesbaden for a fling at the gaming tables. He began by winning 10,400 francs, and he had enough self-control to take his windfall away, put the money in his suitcase, and make a vow not to return to the casino. But, as was so often to happen in the future, he returned to the hypnotic lure of the spinning wheel and lost half his winnings. In a letter to his wife’s sister, V. D. Constant, written shortly thereafter from Paris, Dostoevsky explains that he is keeping part of what is left for himself, sending part to Mikhail for safekeeping, and enclosing another part to her for the expenses of Marya Dimitrievna.
⁷
The latter was spending the summer in Vladimir and taking a cure that might call for extra outlays.

This pause at Wiesbaden may be considered the true beginning of the gambling mania that invariably swept over Dostoevsky whenever he came to Europe during the 1860s. The immediate cause of Dostoevsky’s gambling, as he explained it to his intimates, was always the hope of winning enough money to rescue him, and though he usually ended by losing every penny it cannot be said that his aim was entirely unreasonable. He frequently did win large sums, which
he then proceeded to lose because he could never stop in time. All the same, his winnings always convinced him that success—and a solution to all his material worries—lay within tantalizing reach. Telling Mikhail how he had quickly racked up gains of three thousand francs at Wiesbaden, he writes: “Tell me: after that how is it possible not to be carried away, why should I not believe that happiness is in my grasp if I stick rigorously to my system? And I need money, for myself, for you, for my wife, to write a novel. . . . Yes, I have come here in order to save you all and to save myself.”
⁸

Whatever the psychic origins of Dostoevsky’s gambling mania, its most interesting feature was the theory he developed about it. What Dostoevsky calls his “system,” in the letter to Mikhail, is merely the conviction that, if he could impose an iron self-control on his feelings—if he could suppress the whole irrational part of his psyche—why, then he would certainly win! “This secret,” he tells V. D. Constant, “I really know it; it’s terribly stupid and simple and consists in holding oneself in at every moment and not to get excited, no matter what the play. And that’s all; it’s then absolutely impossible to lose, and one is sure of winning.”
⁹

As Dostoevsky above all should have been in a position to know, human beings are not exclusively creatures of reason and self-control; to dominate oneself to the extent demanded by his theory is an extremely arduous task. The letter to Constant goes on, “however clever you may be, with a will of iron, you will succumb all the same. Even Strakhov the philosopher would succumb.”
¹⁰
Gambling for Dostoevsky thus implicitly involved an attempt to raise himself above the level of human fallibility, and in these unpretentious and apologetic remarks Dostoevsky approaches one of the great themes of Western literature that will soon appear in his own creations. For one cannot help thinking here of Marlowe’s
Dr. Faustus
, as well as of the Machiavellian villains of Elizabethan tragedy, who pit a cold and calculating reason against all the moral dictates of conscience standing in the way of an unbridled pursuit of self-interest. In the tradition of European literature, such attempts to put into practice this dream of the icy self-domination of reason have invariably been depicted as a source of sacrilege and of monstrous moral disorder. They signify mankind’s attempt to set itself up as a rival of the will of the Christian God, who had endowed the human species with a middling rank and an ambiguous status in that great chain of being that ruled the imagination of Western man for so many centuries. Something of this traditional view still persists in Dostoevsky, and in
Crime and Punishment
he will soon portray the consequences of a similar belief in the supremacy of the power of naked human reason to replace the workings of conscience.

In the long run, as Dostoevsky learned to his cost, he was doomed to gamble away his winnings in uncontrollable excitement. For by doing so he was paradoxically affirming his acceptance of the proper order of the universe as he conceived of it, and learning the same lesson as the underground man and all of his great negative heroes, beginning with Raskolnikov, who deludedly believe they can master and suppress the irrational promptings of their inherited Christian values. After each such episode, in any case, Dostoevsky always returned to his writing desk with renewed vigor and a sense of deliverance.