Dostoyevsky

His Life and Work

Ronald Hingley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000386400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

This book, first published in 1978, demonstrates how Dostoyevsky's novels grew directly out of the pressures of their creator's tormented experience and personality. Ronald Hingley draws upon important fresh source material, which includes the definitive Soviet edition of Dostoyevsky's works with drafts and variants, Soviet research on the circumstances of his father's death, and a newly deciphered section of the diary of his second wife, Anna. Hingley considers with his analysis all Dostoyevsky's works, the ideas they contain, their varying artistic success, and their contemporary critical reception. He convincingly present's Dostoyevsky's genius at its most powerful when most on the attack.

1
Boy and Youth

Early in the morning of 22 December 1849 Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, officially described as ‘Lieutenant of Engineers, retired’, was ordered out of his cell in the Petropavlovsky Fortress in the Imperial Russian capital, St Petersburg. He was then taken across the River Neva, by carriage in a convoy flanked by mounted Cossacks, to the Semyonovsky Square in the south of the city. Blinking in the wintry sunshine, the twenty-eight-year-old former army officer—and, it seemed, unsuccessful novelist—was paraded on the snow with twenty friends and former associates. They were surrounded on all four sides of the huge square by troops.

Dostoyevsky and his friends had been arrested several months earlier for treason. Their conspiracy against the Russian state had consisted of little more than debating judicial reform, serf emancipation, socialism and revolution in informal discussion circles. But to discuss these subjects at all, however privately, in the Tsar-Emperor Nicholas I’s later reign had been to take a grave risk. Perhaps the spice of danger had been the chief attraction to the young author, gambler and hypochondriac who now waited, shivering on the snow after embracing the other accused. Dostoyevsky was fair-haired, freckled, with small, deep-sunk eyes under a high-domed forehead; shortish of stature, but broad-shouldered and of fairly strong build. He wore the rumpled civilian clothes in which the police had arrested him in the previous April. Paler even than usual after eight months in the dungeons, he formed with his friends a sharp contrast to the glittering battalions and squadrons massed on all sides. Orders cracked, drums rumbled ominously.

The presiding General stepped forward and began reading from a document. Only now did the twenty-one young men learn that they had been tried and condemned in their absence—to immediate death by firing squad! ‘Criminal conversations . . . reading a felonious missive . . . full of impudent expressions directed against Supreme Authority and the Orthodox Church . . . plotting to write antigovernment articles and to disseminate them by means of a home lithographic press’ : these were the main charges for which Dostoyevsky personally had to pay the penalty.¹

That the young men were to be executed three at a time, with Dostoyevsky himself in the second batch, soon became evident after they had been arrayed in the prescribed white ‘shrouds’ with long, trailing sleeves and hoods. The first victims were each secured to a post, their arms were bound behind their backs by the sleeves, and the hoods were pulled over their faces. At the word of command, three guards detachments took aim at almost point blank range and the order to fire was instantly expected. But then an aide-de-camp galloped across the square bearing a sealed packet. A drum roll halted the proceedings, and the condemned men heard the presiding General laboriously intone the last-minute commutation of their sentences: most to periods of katorga (Siberian hard labour and exile). Two days later the political criminal and future great novelist, his ankles secured by the customary fetters, had begun his two-thousand-mile journey to a new life as a convict at Omsk in Siberia.

The mock execution had been a cruel farce, deliberately staged to teach the culprits a lesson on the detailed instructions of the Emperor; he had, perhaps, even maliciously chosen the General, a notorious stutterer, who haltingly read out the sentences. Thus, at the whim of this crowned martinet, specialist in gallows humour and hounder of imaginative writers, did the young Dostoyevsky spend several minutes in full expectation of imminent death. During that time, as he later indicated, all his previous life passed in review through his mind.²

From the St Petersburg square Dostoyevsky’s thoughts must have gone back to his native Moscow, where he had been born as a hospital doctor’s second son and had lived until his sixteenth year.

By contrast with the regimented, tense and artificial St Petersburg, ‘Mother’ Moscow casually sprawled like a huge, haphazard village. Meandering lanes and broad untended avenues aimlessly led to waste plots or stagnant ponds. The gleaming white walls and gilded domes of many churches, by tradition numbering forty times forty, were glimpsed through the green foliage of lime trees, or melted into the monochrome background in winter. Alongside colonnaded official buildings, near the mansions of rich merchants, slumped the log cabins of the poor.

Of this mixture of pomp and squalor Dostoyevsky’s own birthplace provided an example. The area was a slum in the north of the city. It had its foundling home, its mad-house, its cemetery for suicides and unidentified corpses as well as the Maryinsky Hospital for the Poor where the future chronicler of orphans, lunatics, suicides and murderers first saw the light of day on 30 October 1821. The hospital’s imposing central block had a pediment and Doric colonnade. It was flanked by two substantial detached three-storeyed wings, and it was in one of these, in a modest ground-floor apartment, that Dostoyevsky lived from early infancy until the age of fifteen. The flat was a perquisite to which his father, Dr Mikhail Andreyevich Dostoyevsky, was entitled as a state-employed senior resident physician. Here he and his wife Mariya Fyodorovna reared four sons and three daughters born to them between 1820 and 1835.

The premises still stand, and the former family flat is now preserved as a museum. Here Dostoyevsky’s modern admirers may brood on the sinister vaulted staircase that confronts them as they enter the building: did it inspire the many crimes and other eccentric happenings so persistently located on stairways in the novels? Or the visitor may contemplate the large hall where, in a dark corner behind a screen, Fedya (as Fyodor was called) and his brother Mikhail, older by one year and the only intimate of his childhood, would read Walter Scott or recite Pushkin to each other by the light of a tallow candle. There is the kitchen where some of the family’s servants would spend the night on the traditional sleeping shelves ; the dining-room where the doctor and his wife entertained their few guests, mostly the wife’s relatives ; the living-room in which the master of the house would take his after-lunch nap while his terrified third son Andrey kept watch for two hours with a freshly picked lime switch, charged to prevent a single fly from alighting on the sleeper.³ Here too the eldest boys were taught Bible stories by a visiting deacon and elementary French by a Monsieur Souchard. Here Latin was instilled into them by their stern and unrelenting father.

We shall not delve far back into the genealogy of the Dostoyevskys. The family name occurs fairly frequently from the sixteenth century onwards, and Tatar, Lithuanian, Belorussian and Polish connections have been established or suspected. For all that, Dostoyevsky himself was ‘in every ordinary sense of the word ... as he always believed himself to be, a Russian of the Russians.’⁴ It is with slightly more interest that we note among his forbears or presumed forbears on both sides of the family a fair number of assassins, bandits, drunkards, lunatics and men of God. To this last category the novelist’s paternal grandfather belonged as a humble parish priest in Podolia on the south-western marches of the Russian Empire. Here Fedya’s father had learnt his Latin at the local seminary before running away from home at the age of fifteen to study medicine at Moscow.

The young doctor had served as military medical officer throughout the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812. Whether dour by nature, or rendered so by amputating hundreds of limbs without anaesthetics, he was rarely known to smile. He closely supervised his children and taught them to study from an early age. ‘At the age of four he [Fyodor] was set in front of a book and insistently told: “Study!” ’⁵ When the father drilled his two elder boys in Latin declensions they were not permitted to sit down, but stood trembling with apprehension. At the slightest mistake their father would abuse them as blockheads and idlers, or throw down Bantyshev’s primer in disgust. But though he was strict his nature was not cruel. His worst punishment was to lose his temper entirely and cut short the lesson. He never beat his children, never even made them kneel in penance or stood them in the corner. Nor would he send them to one of the state high schools, where corporal punishment was customary; but enrolled his two eldest sons, when Fedya was twelve years old, at one of Moscow’s best and most expensive private preparatory schools, Chermak’s.⁶ Here they boarded five days a week for three years, were never beaten, and received a liberal education from some of the city’s most respected teachers.

Humane and enlightened in his way, Fyodor’s father yet involuntarily oppressed his beloved wife and children because he easily lost his temper and because he imposed, from the best of motives, an excessively rigorous regimen. He was generous in paying school bills, but obsessively mean in other matters. For ever counting and recounting spoons, he suspected his coachman of drinking his vodka and accused his laundry maid of stealing his shirts. He often told his sons that he was a poor man, that they would be beggars when he died, that they must make their own way in the world.⁷ This was not idle talk. The doctor was indeed poor, and all the more so because he insisted on keeping up an establishment beyond his means: seven servants, a carriage, four horses and eventually a country estate.

Mikhail Andreyevich laid down many domestic restrictions. His children might sedately parade the hospital’s well-tended lime avenues under their nurse’s supervision. But they might not play ball games or converse with the patients who shuffled about in striped nightshirts, striped caps and buff dressing-gowns—a rule that Fedya was quick to break when his father’s back was turned. During family walks in the near-by Maryinsky Coppice the doctor himself would turn the conversation to such edifying subjects as the principles of mathematics. And when Mikhail and Fyodor went out of the house they must be escorted, usually by the family coachman who drove them in the doctor’s carriage. In this they proceeded to and from Chermak’s boarding school, returning home each week-end. No less restrictive was their father’s ban on handling money, even in the smallest amounts. Did this provision help to create in his second son the extreme perversity in matters financial that he was to develop as soon as he left home?

Rarely did the parents go out together in the evening. When they did the mother would whisper instructions before leaving to the children’s nurse, who was also the unofficial housekeeper, the grossly overweight, snuff-taking Alyona Frolovna: would she see that her charges enjoyed themselves as much as possible?⁸ Only in the doctor’s absence might his boys and girls laugh and play in this home where there were perhaps no toys; at any rate none are mentioned in the sources.

The mother, Mariya Fyodorovna, was devoted to her husband. As a good wife of the period she obediently submitted to him, but without allowing herself to be trampled on. It was fortunate that she had strength of character, for her husband had taken it into his head that she was unfaithful to him, and his unjust accusations sometimes led to painful scenes, as when he once reduced her to hysterical sobbing on being informed of one of her later pregnancies. His obsession can be followed in their correspondence between Moscow and the country estate that they acquired in the early 1830s. ‘I swear to you ...’ she wrote to him on 31 May 1835, ‘that my present pregnancy is the seventh and firmest bond in our love for each other. My love for you is pure, holy, chaste and passionate, and has never swerved since the day of our marriage. But will this oath satisfy you ? Never have I taken such an oath before: firstly because I feared to lower myself by swearing to my fidelity in the sixteenth year of our union; and secondly because your prejudices have disinclined you to listen to my assurances, let alone to believe them.’ In this and other touching appeals we sense the wife’s loving understanding of the husband whose fears were real, however fanciful the wounding suppositions on which they were based.⁹

So moving is the old-fashioned Russian in which the accused mother defends her honour that we sense in her, rather than in the harassed Mikhail Andreyevich, the parent from whom Dostoyevsky inherited his literary talent. But man and wife must also have unintentionally combined to provide a rich stock of literary copy as the growing boy watched and sought to understand the somewhat unbalanced father who, though profoundly attached to the mother, was yet impelled to torment her on occasion. Their son’s works abound in characters who cannot stop themselves persecuting those whom they most love.

Dostoyevsky’s mother was a cheerful spirit who made the best of life despite her husband’s occasional unkindness. She was an educated woman: well read, with a taste for poetry and novels. She sang, too, and played the guitar; as did her light-hearted and dissolute brother, Fyodor’s Uncle Mikhail. But the uncle’s visits ended abruptly when Dr Dostoyevsky slapped his face after the visitor had been det...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Boy and Youth
• 2 Cadet and Officer
• 3 Apprentice Author Poor Folk; The Double
• 4 Political Criminal
• 5 Convict and Exile Uncle’s Dream; The Village of Stepanchikovo
• 6 Memoirist and Journalist Insulted and Injured; Memoirs from the House of the Dead; Memoirs from Underground
• 7 Emerging Genius Crime and Punishment; The Gambler
• 8 Reluctant European The Idiot
• 9 Scourge of Socialism The Eternal Husband; Devils
• 10 Uneasy Compromiser A Raw Youth
• 11 Arbiter of Destiny The Diary of a Writer
• 12 Man of the Hour The Brothers Karamazov
• References
• Index of Sources
• Index of Dostoyevsky’s Works
• General Index