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

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СКАЧАТЬ during the war of 1812. We may assume that he was well skilled in his profession, for he was soon appointed superintendent of a large State hospital in Moscow. About this time he married a young Russian girl, Marie Netchaiev. She brought a sufficient dowry to her husband, but the marriage was primarily one of mutual love and esteem. The young couple, indeed, lacked nothing, for in those days government appointments were fairly lucrative. If salaries were not very high, the State made amends by providing its functionaries with all the requisites of a comfortable existence. Thus, in addition to his income, my grandfather Mihail was lodged in a Crown building, a small house of one storey, built in the bastard Empire style which was adopted for all our Crown buildings in the nineteenth century. This house was situated close to the hospital and was surrounded by a garden. In this little house Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born on October 30, 1821.

      My grandfather was allowed the services of the servants attached to the hospital, and a carriage to visit his patients in the town. He must have had a good practice, for he was soon able to buy two estates in the government of Tula, 150 versts from Moscow. One of these properties, called Darovoye, became the hoKday residence of the Dostoyevsky. The whole family, with the exception of the father, spent the summer there. My grandfather, who was kept in the city by his medical duties, only joined them for a few days in July. These annual journeys, which in those pre-railway days were made in a troika (a carriage with three horses), delighted my father, who was devoted to horses in his childhood.

      A few years after the birth of his elder sons, my grandfather had himself registered together with them in the book of the hereditary nobility of Moscow.12 My father was five years old at the time. It is strange that my grandfather, who had all his life held aloof from the Moscovites, should have wished to place his family under the protection of the Russian nobility. It is probable that he recognised in it the Lithuanian Schliahta of which the Russian Union of Nobles is, in fact, an imitation.13 As of old his ancestors had placed their sons under the banner of the united Lithuanian nobility, so my grandfather hastened to place his children under the protection of the united Russian nobility.

      12 No one could be registered in the books of the nobility unless they possessed titles of hereditary nobility. The Russian nobles willingly admitted to their unions Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Baltic and Caucasian nobles.

      13 In the eighteenth century the Russians still called their hereditary nobiUty Schliahetstvo. This word is no longer current, and the majority of the Russian nobles are imaware that their institution of hereditary nobility is of Lithuanian origin.

      As a Moscovite noble my grandfather remained morally a Lithuanian Schliahtiich —proud, ambitious, and very European in many of his ideas. He was economical almost to the verge of niggardliness; but in the matter of the education of his sons he did not grudge expense. He began by placing his two boys in the French school of Suchard. As Latin was not taught in this establishment, my grandfather undertook the Latin lessons himself. When they came home, his sons prepared their French lessons, and in the evening did Latin exercises with their father. They never ventured to sit down in his presence, and conjugated their verbs standing, trying not to make mistakes, and greatly in awe of their teacher. My grandfather was very severe; but his children never received corporal punishment. This is the more remarkable, as the little Moscovites of the period were very vigorously chastised. Tolstoy has told us in his recollections of childhood how he was beaten at the age of twelve. It is evident that my grandfather Mihail had European ideas of education. Thanks to their proximity to Poland and Austria, Lithuania and Ukrainia were much more civilised than Russia. In later years, when Dostoyevsky recalled his childhood, he would say to his younger brothers, Audrey and Nicolai, that their parents were remarkable people, more advanced in their ideas than the majority of their contemporaries.

      Like many Lithuanians whose ancestors were latinised by the Catholic clergy, my grandfather had an affection for the French tongue. He talked French with his wife, and encouraged his children to express themselves in that language. To please him, my grandmother made his sons and daughters write their good wishes on their father's birthday in French. She corrected their mistakes on the rough drafts, and the children then made fair copies on ornamental sheets of paper. On the day of the anniversary, they marched up to their father in turns, and blushingly presented the rolls of paper, tied up with a coloured ribbon. My grandfather unfolded them, read the artless congratulations aloud with emotion, and kissed the little writers. Later, his elder sons were not content with good wishes; to please their father they learned French poems by heart and recited them to their parents in the presence of their brothers and sisters. My father once recited a fragment of the Henriade at a family festivity.

      Dostoyevsky inherited his father's liking for French; French phrases occur frequently in his novels and newspaper articles.14 He read a great deal of French, and very little German, although he knew the language well. At that period, German was not fashionable in Russia. But my father did not forget it; German must have been retained intact in some cell of his brain, for as soon as he passed the Prussian frontier he at once began to speak German, and, according to my mother, he spoke it fluently.

      14 The writer Strahoff, a great friend of my father's, says in his reminiscences that he preferred talking of serious things to Dostoyevsky, and did not Mke to hear his jests, for, according to him, Dostoyevsky always jested d la francaise. The play of words and images which is the essence of French wit is not appreciated by my compatriots, who like more sohd pleasantries. Strahoff considered that Dostoyevsky jested d, la frangaise not only in conversation, but in his writings. This was, no doubt, the result of a certain hereditary latinisation of the mind in Dostoyevsky.

      When his elder sons had finished their course at the Suchard school, my grandfather placed them at the preparatory school of Tchermack, the best private school in Moscow, an expensive establishment frequented by the sons of the intellectuals of the city. In order that they might prepare their lessons under the superintendence of their teachers, my grandfather sent them as boarders, and they came home only on Sundays and festivals. The Moscovite nobles of this period preferred to send their children to private schools, for in the Crown institutions the most severe corporal punishment was inflicted. The school of Tchermack was of a patriarchal character, and the arrangements were modelled on those of family life. M. Tchermack dined with his pupils, and treated them kindly, as if they were his sons. He got the best masters in Moscow to give lessons in his school, and the work done there was of a high order.

      My grandfather dreaded the brutality of the Mos-covite lower orders, and never allowed his children to walk in the streets. " We were sent to school in our father's carriage, and fetched home in the same way," my uncle Andrey once told me. My father knew so little of his native city that there is not a single description of Moscow in any of his novels. Like many Poles and Lithuanians, my grandfather despised the Russians, and was prejudiced enough to look upon them as barbarians. The only Moscovites he received in his house were his wife's relations. Later, when my father went from' Petersburg to Moscow, he met only his relatives. There were no friends of childhood, no old comrades of his father's to visit.

      If my grandfather distrusted Russian civilisation, he was careful not to say so before his children. He brought them up after the European fashion; that is to say, he strove to awaken and foster patriotism in their hearts. In his Journal of the Writer, Dostoyevsky relates that when he was a child his father was fond of reading episodes of Karamzin's Russian history aloud in the evenings, and explaining them to his young sons.15 Sometimes he would take his children to visit the historic palaces of the Kremlin and the cathedrals of Moscow. These excursions had all the importance of great patriotic solemnities in the eyes of his sons.

      15 Karamzin's History of Russia was my father's favourite book. He read and re-read it in his childhood till he flnaUy knew it by heart. This was very remarkable, for in Russia not only the children but the grown-up persons know very Uttle of the history of their country.

      It is also possible that in thus holding aloof from the Moscovites, my grandfather gave way to that segregating instinct so characteristic of the Lithuanians. " The Lithuanian is attracted by solitude," wrote СКАЧАТЬ