Dostoevsky: a life in letters
Dostoevsky- a life in letters
There is an inexpressible but irresistibly clear divide between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, perhaps the two greatest and most renowned Russian authors. At Liden and Denz, I’ve noticed that most students lean one way or another. Tolstoy’s writing really does carry the careful concern of Anna Karenina’s Levin- the human condition as understood from the countryside, removed, though perhaps remembering, the torments and anxiousness inherent to city-life. It is a more classical, romantic literature. Tolstoy also focuses more on events to portray the movement of his characters, their internal states revealed in decision-making, an odd glance, a betrayal… and who could forget those sweeping panoramas at Borodino in War and Peace, or of Nikolay hunting the she-wolf with his dogs. The scenes— that is, the decor, the environment (other than an oblique ray)— in Dostoevsky’s masterworks, on the other hand, are dark and devoid of much detail, that space filled with dialogue and outpourings which, at every moment, seek to comprehend the divide between, or the sameness of, beauty and suffering.
There is likewise a difference to be observed in personal writings. We’ve already looked at Tolstoy’s diaries on this blog. In this post, we’ll search for three of Dostoevsky’s characters- Myshkin (The Idiot), the Underground Man (Notes from the Underground) and Dmitry (Brothers Karamazov) in his letters to and from friends and family. All of the quotes, by the way, are taken from this excellent resource– the pdf of the book “Letters of Dostoevsky”.
Russian author Dmitry Grigorovich (1822-1900)
Having established himself among Russia’s emerging literary elite with the publication of The Village, a depiction of life in rural Russia praised by many for it’s realism, the writer Dmitry Grigorovich (1822-1900) found himself lodging with a very peculiar young man in St Petersburg. This man was exceedingly introverted, irritable, and epileptic. He spent whole days and nights writing, “and when he was not writing, he would sit crouched over a book.”
While Grigorovich regularly shared his drafts with his housemate, that housemate, for all his obsession with literature, scarcely ever said a word about what he was working on. Until one morning. The story is quiet famous. “Sit down here a while Grigorovich,” the young man said with unusual vivacity, having extended an invitation to his room, “I only wrote it out fair yesterday and I want to read it to you; but don’t interrupt me.”
The work which the young man read ‘in one breath with no pauses at all’, soon afterwards appeared in print. The title; Poor Folk. How that came about Grigorovich himself reflected on some years later;
“I always had a very high opinion of Dostoevsky,” Grigorovich wrote some years later, “But within the first few pages it was borne in on me that this work was incomparably greater than anything that I had so far written.” Grigorovich forcibly took the manuscript off Dostoevsky, and hurried ‘along the back roads’, to the poet and publisher Nekrassov, to whom he read Dostoevsky’s manuscript out loud. At the last scene, the men could bare it no more. They both broke into sobs and, embracing one another for the glory of this discovery, determined to hurry back to Dostoevsky despite the late hour to proclaim a prophet. “I must confess that I acted rashly,” Grigorovich continues the story, “For I knew the character of my housemate, his morbid sensibility… I ought to have told him quite quietly the next morning, instead of waking him in the middle of the night, and, moreover bringing a strange man to visit him.”
When the men arrived to him, Dostoevsky refused to speak from nervousness, turned pale and listened as Nekrassov (a quite famous man of literature at the time) issued various ‘eulogiums’. It was determined, quite without the writer’s full consideration, that the manuscript must be taken to Bielinsky, the most famous publisher in Russia. Bielinsky, Grigorovich recounts, ‘prostrated’ himself and “loudly proclaimed that a new star had risen in Russian literature… (Belinsky) sat opposite the author, listening greedily to every word, and now and then expressed his delight— saying over and over again that nobody but Dostoevsky was capable of such psychological subtleties.”
Dostoevsky. We know where he lived, what he wrote, some of the opinions he held. But who was he? As a person? Short of meeting the man, or being him, that is, of course, impossible to answer. But his letters get us somewhat closer, I believe. And they show us that all of his characters, in some way, were extensions of himself. That explains why they are so real.
Ilya Repin. Tolstoy in his study, c 1891.
The Underground Man
The opening lines to Notes from the Underground are, in the truest sense, shocking;
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” The Russian is, even more-so; “Я человек больной… Я злой человек. Hепривлекательный я человек. Я думаю, что у меня болит печень.”
And the desperation of that character- having hidden himself, out of ‘spite’, from the rest of the world- he whose rejection is, of course, testament to a profound faith- we find also in one letter Dostoevsky penned to his brother Michael in 1838:
What a lot of crazy systems have been born of late in the cleverest and most ardent brains! To get a right result from this motley troop one would have to subject them all to a mathematical formula. And yet they are the ‘laws’ of our contemporary philosophy!… Brother, it is so sad to live without hope ! When I look forward I shudder at the future. I move in a cold arctic atmosphere, wherein no sunlight ever pierces. For a long time I have not had a single out… Hence I feel as the Prisoner of Chillon felt after his brother’s death. The Paradise-bird of poetry will never, never visit me again never again warm my frozen soul.
We find, too, the underground man’s paranoia;
I can’t help thinking perpetually how moody and edgy I was when with you at Reval. I was ill then. I remember still how you once said to me that my behaviour towards you excluded all sense of equality between us. My dear brother, that was unjust…even when my heart is warm with love, people often can’t get so much as one friendly word out of me. At times I appear to have lost control of my nerves. I appear ludicrous, repellant, and have to suffer inexpressibly from the misunderstanding of my fellow-creatures. People call me arid and heartless… I can show myself to be a man of feeling and humour only when external circumstances lift me high above the external daily round. When that is not my state, I am always repellant.
(Letter to his brother Michael, 1847).
And something of the dark and damp lodgings from which the underground man composes his ‘notes’;
Dostoevsky lived in a wretched hovel… he had a quite large, but very low and badly lit room. The mud-walls had once been white… on the walls hung fly-spotted picture sheets… Walls and ceiling were blackened by smoke, and it was so dark in the room that in the evenings one could scarcely read by the tallow candle. I can’t even imagine how Dostoevsky contrived to write for whole nights by such illumination.
(From “the reminisces of Baron Alexander Vrangel”, Dostoevsky’s acquaintance, (1854-1865))
“The Prisoner”, 1878 oil painting by Nikolai Alexandrovich Yaroshenko
Myshkin, the Holy Fool
The Christ like hero in The Idiot, Myshkin, and his parent, Dostoevsky, were both epileptic. Dostoevsky suspected that this ‘disease’ was, in fact, miraculous and could offer its subjects ‘the highest synthesis of life’ (The Idiot, Part 2 ch 5).
In Dostoevsky’s letters we find Myshkin’s honesty and tender vulnerability:
I never looked upon ours as an ordinary acquaintanceship and now, when I no longer have you near me, I begin to understand many things. You are a wonderful woman; you have a heart of rare child-like kindliness, and you were a sister to me. The mere fact that a woman should treat me in so friendly a way was a great event in my life. For even the best man is often, if I may so, a block. even the best man is often, if I may say so, a block. Woman’s heart, woman’s compassion, woman’s sympathy, the endless kindness of which we have no clear perception, and which, in our obtuseness, we often do not even notice these are irreplaceable…am convinced that neither of you has the least idea of all you did for me, and how very necessary to me were just such people as you. If I had not had you, I should most likely have turned into a block of wood; but now I am a human being again. I curse this letter, because it reminds me of our parting… once for all, my heart is so constituted that everything it loves and treasures grows deeply rooted in it, and when uptown, causes wounds and suffering
(Letter to Maria Issayev, 1855. Maria, at the time married to civil servant Alexander Isaev, a drunkard, would later become Dostoevsky’s first wife)
And, of course, there is the moment Dostoevsky announces his intention to write The Idiot, in a letter to his niece Sofia Alexandrovna, 1868;
The basic idea is the representation of a truly perfect and noble man. And this is more difficult than anything else in the world, particularly nowadays. All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one.
Maria Issayev, later Maria Dostoevskaya
Cover to the current Penguin edition of The Idiot. Ignace Henri Jean Fantin-Latour. A self portrait. 1860
The blood of a Karamazov
Numerous are the descriptions of Dostoevsky’s gambling exploits. Dostoevsky was chronically in debt, and his letters often reveal the extent to which the urgency of his literary output was a product of his immediate need for money. “I have an evil and exaggeratedly passionate nature,” Dostoevsky writes to a friend in 1867, having just received a large sum-500 rubles- from a friend on loan. “I was tortured by a seductive thought; 10 louis-d’or to risk, and perhaps 2000 francs to win”, he continues. This letter is one of the most remarkable. Dostoevsky describes how, while in Germany, he lost the entire sum gambling, and then proceeded to pawn his own garments, and then his wife’s “last, her very last, possession.” One cannot overlook the similarity between Dostoevsky’s abandonment to circumstance, and the descriptions which, 13 years later, would invest Dmitri with anguish;
That thought, that venomous thought, so possessed my heart that it almost swooned with suspense. It seemed as if there could be no resisting it; as though I should act like a bug, like a venomous spider, without a spark of pity… I am a man of base desires. I’m honest!”
(Dmitri Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov)
One cannot help but read something autobiographical in these lines, also:
I’m a Karamazov. For when I do leap into the pit, I go headlong with my heels up, and am please to be falling in that degrading attitude, and pride myself upon it. And in the very depths of that degradation I begun a hymn of praise. Let me be vile and base…
(Dmitri Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov)
Final thoughts
I’ve read the letters through, and, for anyone interested in the author, I cannot recommend them more. In themselves, the letters read like a novel. As mentioned, you can access a translation here.
Увидимся скорo!
Laef, currently studying Russian at Liden & Denz Riga
