NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism

Thomas Gaiton Marullo

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781609092061
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

More than a century after his death in 1881, Fyodor Dostoevsky continues to fascinate readers and reviewers. Countless studies of his writing have been published—more than a dozen in the past few years alone. In this important new work, Thomas Marullo provides a diary-portrait of Dostoevsky's early years drawn from the letters, memoirs, and criticism of the writer, as well as from the testimony and witness of family and friends, readers and reviewers, and observers and participants in his life. Marullo's exhaustive search of published materials on Dostoevsky sheds light on many unexplored corners of Dostoevsky's childhood, adolescence, and youth. Speakers of excerpts are given maximum freedom: Anything they said about the writer—the good and the bad, the truth and the lies—are included, with extensive footnotes providing correctives, counter-arguments, and other pertinent information.

The first part of this volume, "All in the Family, " focuses on Dostoevsky's early formation and schooling, i.e., his time in city and country, and his ties to his family, particularly his parents. The second section, "To Petersburg!, " features Dostoevsky's early days in Russia's imperial city, his years at the Main Engineering Academy, and the death of his father. The third part, "Darkness before Dawn, " deals with the writer's youthful struggles and strivings, culminating in the success of his work, Poor Folk. This clear and comprehensive portrait of one of the world's greatest writers will appeal to students, teachers, and scholars of Dostoevsky's early life, as well as general readers interested in Dostoevsky, literature, and history.

PART ONE

All in the Family

MIKHAIL ANDREEVICH DOSTOEVSKY

One of the most controversial aspects of Dostoevsky’s early years is his father, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky. Courtesy of Dostoevsky’s daughter, Lyubov; his first biographer, Orest Miller; Dostoevskian scholars Konstantin Mochulsky and Joseph Frank; and most notably (and notoriously) Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Andreevich has long been seen as Fyodor Karamazov come to life: a dark and evil figure whom the young Dostoevsky, supposedly from oedipal motives, wanted out of his life, if not dead.¹ Although such a portrait of Mikhail Andreevich has been discounted by most scholars, suspicions and misgivings about the man remain. For his famous son, father Mikhail is still deemed a bane, not a boon.

The evidence is that Mikhail Andreevich was not a saint but also that he was not a sinner. Indeed, he was quite unlike the steady stream of failed fathers and other sadomasochistic losers, dreamers, and perverts that people Dostoevsky’s early and mature fiction. Rather, Mikhail Andreevich was a loving husband and devoted father who, though beleaguered and eventually defeated by life, did everything he could to ensure that his children would have a better existence than he.

From his earliest years, Mikhail Andreevich made his own way in the world. Energetic and determined, he triumphed over all obstacles. Resisting familial pressures to enter the priesthood, the fifteen-year-old Mikhail left Kamenets-Podolsk in western Ukraine for Moscow. Six years later, in 1809, he entered the medical school there. During Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Mikhail served as a staff physician in the military, working in a field hospital at the Battle of Borodino, the largest and bloodiest single-day action in the French assault on the homeland. (Of the 250,000 troops in the struggle, at least 70,000 became casualties.) Two days before Napoleon entered Moscow, Mikhail moved more than 30,000 wounded men to safety. Later, he helped to stem a typhoid epidemic in the provinces.

Steadily, Mikhail climbed the ladder of success. In 1813, he gained official status as a doctor. Five years later, he became the chief medical director of the Military Hospital in Moscow; and in 1821, he was named junior house surgeon at the already noted Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor.

On January 14, 1819, Mikhail Dostoevsky married Maria Nechaeva, the daughter of a well-to-do Muscovite merchant-manufacturer who had lost most of his fortune in the 1812 evacuation of Moscow. (The story goes that the family, fleeing the city, lost all their money in a river crossing.) Mikhail was thirty years old; she was nineteen. Most likely, the union was a matter of convenience, Maria being married off to the first available suitor.

Unlike the tortured marriages in Dostoevsky’s fiction, the union between Mikhail and Maria was founded on enduring love and respect. He was the model husband; she, the dutiful wife. In Maria, Mikhail found what the writer could not achieve in his heroines—a woman whose head may have been in the clouds but whose feet were planted firmly on earth. From Maria, Mikhail knew unconditional love, staunch applause, and enduring patience and forgiveness. From her, Mikhail also had the comforting knowledge that whatever the challenge or obstacle, she and God (in that order) would see him through.

He responded in kind. Letters between the two read like an impassioned romance. They are filled with concerns over health, wishes to know even trifles, and most importantly, affirmations of love to the grave and beyond.

With Maria at his side, Mikhail moved higher in life. On April 2, 1825, he was named holder of the order of St. Anne of the third rank. Other honors followed. In January 1829, Mikhail was granted the order of St. Vladimir of the fourth rank; and on April 21, 1832, the order of St. Anne of the second rank. Most importantly, on April 7, 1827, Mikhail became a Collegiate Assessor, thereby investing him and his offspring with noble status. Finally, on April 18, 1837, Mikhail was inducted into the ranks of senior external councilors.

The high expectations Mikhail had for himself he extended to his family, relatives, peasants, and everyone else in his purview. Under his watchful eye, everyone toed the line. Infractions met immediate responses. Mikhail once slapped Maria’s brother in the face for rudeness to the women in a confrontation over the man’s affair with a maid.

The goodwill and cheer Mikhail enjoyed from Maria he also encountered with his children. Young Fyodor was a case in point. From his earliest years to his final days, the lad had only love and respect for the man. The collective wish of Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei Karamazov for the death of father Fyodor, be it in oedipal competition or socially engineered anger at evil, was for the writer the stuff of fiction. Untrue also are claims by memoirists that Maria, Alyona Kryukova, and others shielded the young Fyodor and his siblings from Mikhail’s wrath. Rather, alone or with others, privately in letters or publicly in gatherings, the young Fyodor honored Mikhail as the paterfamilias; wished him happiness and health; grieved over his sorrows; and thanked him for his care and concern, sacrifice and support. True, the kudos and gratitude were often template-like: formal, routine, cloying, and as Frank notes, “somewhat exalté.”² Beyond a doubt, though, fils was quite comfortable with père. Indeed, son was sufficiently open and trusting with father to pour forth ramblings about life, to vent anger at obstacles, injustices, and crises, and, most poignantly, to beat his breast for dashing the man’s hopes for him. Any breakdowns between the two rested with young Fyodor alone, son being too busy or preoccupied to write to father; or when he did, filling his missives to the man with endless requests for money and sundries, as well as describing the deprivations he suffered from lack thereof. Adding to the gap between the two was what young Fyodor pinpointed as Mikhail’s key weakness: his inability or unwillingness to move with the times, to remain in “blissful ignorance” of everything about him.

With Maria and his children, Mikhail gave as good as he got. He was always teaching his children. Cracked pavements were lessons in geometry. Long walks and talks were common, if not everyday, occurrences. Just as Maria insisted that Mikhail tell her the trivia of his life, so did he demand that his brood tell him theirs. Mikhail also put his money where his mouth was. Claims by memoirists that Mikhail was miserly with his family are false. For Maria and his children, he did whatever he could to keep his family safe and sound.

Periodically, most often when he was alone, Mikhail did go off the deep end. He could be “gloomy, nervous, and suspicious.” Things, major and minor, general and specific, real and imagined, lacerated his soul with anger, frustration, and fear. Periodic depression and premonitions of disaster rose to the fore in the alleged injustice of God, as well as in loneliness, finances, bad weather, the indifference of colleagues, the success of others, even the inability of Fyodor and Mikhail to learn Latin. Such lumps and bumps caused the man to curse his life, to upbraid his household, to withdraw into his shell, even, unjustly, to accuse his pregnant wife of hiding money and of having an affair. (He was forgiven on both counts.)

By and large, though, Mikhail’s distress was not unlike that of any man worrying about family and future amid mounting bills, growing children, and other challenges and vicissitudes of life. Further, outbursts were frequent but fleeting, ending in renewed avowals of loyalty and love.³

The loss of Maria in their twentieth year of marriage dealt the forty-eight-year-old Mikhail a blow from which he never recovered. Initially, he sought refuge in work. Soon, though, he abandoned the strict discipline he had set for himself and others. Less than four months after Maria’s death, Mikhail retired from state service and withdrew into the home at Darovoe. There he moaned, groaned, and even beat his head against the wall. Like Svidrigailov and Marfa Petrovna in Crime and Punishment, he even conversed with the dead Maria. Even more seriously, perhaps, Mikhail began to abuse alcohol and took up with a sixteen-year-old servant named Katerina, possibly even giving her a son.

The grief and suffering that consumed Mikhail after Maria’s death he did not inflict upon his sons. Indeed, it was the strongest measure not only of the man’s belief in education but also of his determination that Fyodor and Mikhail find their path in life that he did not keep the two at home. Although Mikhail knew that he was signing his death warrant, he took his sons to St. Petersburg to continue their schooling there. (He never saw them again.) As already noted, his choice of vocation for his two boys could not have b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: All in the Family
• Part Two: To Petersburg
• Part Three: Darkness before Dawn
• Conclusion
• Directory of Prominent Names
• Notes
• Source Notes
• Index