Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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СКАЧАТЬ poorer comrades, they organised hterary evenings, at which famous writers read extracts from their own works. The students rewarded them with frantic applause, and advertised them enormously, a service the ambitious sought to obtain by flattering the young people. My father was not of the number; he never flattered the students; on the contrary, he never hesitated to teU them unpleasant truths. But the students respected him for it, and applauded him more than any of the other writers. Dostoyevsky's popularity was remarked by a young girl named Pauline N. She represented the curious type of the " eternal student," which exists only in Russia. Pauline N came from one of the Russian provinces, where she had rich relations; they allowed her enough money to hve comfortably in Petersburg. Every autumn regularly she enrolled herself as a student at the University,50 but she never presented herself for examination, and pursued no com-se of study. However, she frequented the University assiduously, flirting with the students, visiting them in their rooms, preventing them from working, inciting them to revolt, getting them to sign protests, and taking part in all pohtical manifestations, when she would march at the head of the students, carr5ang a red flag, singing the Marseillaise, abusing and provoking the Cossacks, and beating the horses of the police. She in her turn was beaten by the poUce, and would spend the night in a police ceU. On her return to the University she was borne aloft in triumph by the students, and acclaimed as the glorious victim of " Tsarism." Pauline attended all the balls and all the literary soirees given by the students, danced and applauded with them and shared all the new ideas which were agitating youthful minds. Free love was then fashionable. Young and attractive, Pauline adopted this new fashion ardently, passing from one student to another, and serving Venus in the belief that she was serving the cause of European civilisation. Seeing Dostoyevsky's success, she hastened to share this latest passion of the students. She hovered about my father, making advances which he did not notice. She then wrote him a declaration of love. Her letter was preserved among my father's papers; it is simple, naive and poetic. She might have been some timid young girl, dazzled by the genius of the great writer. Dostoyevsky read the letter with emotion. It came at a moment when he needed love most bitterly. His heart was torn by the treachery of his wife; he despised himself as a ridiculous dupe; and now a young girl, fresh and beautiful, offered him her heart. His wife had been wrong then 1 He might still be loved, even after having worked in prison with thieves and murderers. Dostoyevsky grasped at the consolation offered him by fate. He had no idea of PauUne's easy morals. My father knew the lives of the students only from the rostrum whence he addressed them. They surrounded him in a respectful throng, talking of God, of the fatherland, of civilisation. The idea of initiating this distinguished writer, revered by all, into the squahd details of their private conduct was never entertained. Later, if they noticed Dostoyevsky's love for Pauline they were careful not to enlighten him as to her character. He took Pauline for a young provincial, intoxicated by the exaggerated ideas of feminine hberty which were then reigning in Russia. He knew that Maria Dmitri-evna was given up by the doctors, and that in a few months he would be free to marry Pauline. He had not the strength to wait, to repulse this young love, which offered itself freely, careless of the world and its conventions. He was forty years old, and no woman had ever loved him . . .

      50 At this period there were no higher courses for young girls in Russia. The Government allowed them provisionally to study at the University together with the male students.

      The lovers decided to spend their honeymoon abroad. My father had long been dreaming of a journey in Europe. Ivan Karamazow, the portrait of my father at twenty, also dreams of foreign travel. According to him, Europe is merely a vast cemetery; but he wished to make obeisance at the tombs of the mighty dead. Now that Dostoyevsky had at last money enough, he hastened to realise this dream of long standing. The date of departure drew near; at the last moment my father was detained in Petersburg by business connected with the newspaper Vremya. My uncle Mihail's drinking bouts were becoming more and more frequent, and Dostoyevsky was obliged to look after the whole of the work. Pauline started alone, promising to await him in Paris. A fortnight later he received a letter from her, in which she informed him that she loved a Frenchman whose acquaintance she had just made in Paris. " All is over between you and me ! " she wrote to my father. "It is your fault: why did you leave me so long alone?" After reading this letter, Dostoyevsky rushed off to Paris like a madman. He, on this his first journey in Europe, passed through Berlin and Cologne without seeing them. Later, when he visited the banks of the Rhine again, he begged pardon of the Cathedral of Cologne for not having noticed its beauty, Pauline received him coldly; she declared that she had found her ideal, that she did not intend to return to Russia, that her French lover adored her and made her perfectly happy. My father always respected the liberty of others, and made no distinction on this point between men and women. Pauline was not his wife. She had made no vows; she had given herself freely and therefore was free to take back her gift. My father accepted her decision and made no further attempt to see her or speak to her. Feeling that there was nothing for him to do in Paris, he went to London to see Alexander Herzen. In those days people went to England to see Herzen just as later they went to Yasnaia Poliana to see Tolstoy. My father was far from sharing Herzen's revolutionary ideas. But he was interested in the man, and he took this opportunity of making his acquaintance. He found London much more absorbing than Paris. He stayed there some time, studying it thoroughly, and was enthusiastic over the beauty of young Englishwomen. Later, in his reminiscences of travel, he says that they represent the most perfect type of feminine beauty. This admiration of Dostoyevsky's for young Englishwomen is very significant. The Russians who visit Europe are, as a rule, more attracted by French, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian women. Englishwomen generally leave them cold; my countrymen consider them " too thin." Dostoyevsky's taste was evidently less Oriental, and the beauty of young Englishwomen touched some Norman chord in his Lithuanian heart.51

      51 Dostoyevsky made a curious prediction as to the future of England. He thought the English would eventually abandon the island of Great Britain. " If our sons do not witness the exodus of the English from Europe, our grandsons will," he prophesied.

      ''My father at last went back to Paris, and having heard that his friend, Nicolas Strahoff, was also going abroad, he arranged to meet him at Geneva, and proposed that they should make a tour in Italy together. There is a curious phrase in this letter : " We will walk together in Rome, and, who knows, perhaps we may caress some young Venetian in a gondola." Such phrases are extremely rare in my father's letters. It is evident that at this period Dostoyevsky was longing for a romance of some sort with a woman to rehabilitate himself in his own eyes, to prove that he too could be loved. And yet there was no "young Venetian in a gondola" during this journey of the two friends; Dostoyevsky's heart was with Pauhne. Yet he refused to return with Strahoff to Paris, where he might have encountered her, and went back alone to Russia. He described his impressions of this first journey to Europe in Vremya.

      Towards the spring, Pauline wrote to him from Paris, and confided her woes to him. Her French lover was unfaithful to her, but she had not the strength to leave him. She implored my father to come to her in Paris. Finding that Dostoyevsky hesitated to take this journey, Pauline threatened to conunit suicide, the favourite threat of Russian women. Much alarmed, he at last went to Paris and tried to make the forsaken fair one listen to reason. Finding Dostoyevsky too cold, Pauline had recourse to heroic measures. One morning she arrived at my father's bedside at seven o'clock, and brandishing an enormous knife she had just bought, she declared that her French lover was a scoundrel, and that she intended to punish him by plunging this knife into his breast; that she was on her way to him, but that she had wished to see my father first, to warn him of the crime she was about to conunit. I do not know whether he was deceived by this vulgar melodrama. In any case, he advised her to leave her big knife in Paris, and to go to Germany with him. Pauline agreed; this was just what she wanted. They went to the Rhineland, and established themselves at Wiesbaden. There my father played roulette with passionate absorption, was delighted when he won, and experienced a despair hardly less delicious when he lost.52 Later, they went on to Italy, which had fascinated my father before, and visited Rome and Naples. Pauline flirted with all the men they encountered, and caused her lover much anxiety. My father described this extraordinary journey later in The Gambler. He placed it in other surroundings, but gave the name of Pauline to the heroine of the novel.

      52 Dostoyevsky СКАЧАТЬ