The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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СКАЧАТЬ on the manuscript was submitted to the famous critic Belinsky, who, after reading it, desired to see the young author. Dostoyevsky entered his presence trembling with emotion. Belinsky received him with a severe expression. " Young man," he said, " do you know what you have just written? No, you do not. You cannot understand it yet."

      Nekrassov published Poor Folks in his Review, and it had a great success. My father found himself famous in a day. Everybody wished to know him. " Who is this Dostoyevsky ? " people were asking on every side. My father had only recently began to frequent literary society, and no one had noticed him particularly. The timid Lithuanian was always retiring into a corner, or the embrasure of a window, or lurking behind a screen. But he was no longer allowed to hide himself. He was surrounded and complimented; he was induced to talk, and people found him charming. In addition to the literary salons, where those who aspired to be novelists, or those who were interested in literature were received, there were other more interesting salons in Petersburg where only famous writers, painters and musicians were admitted. Such were the salons of Prince Odoevsky, a distinguished poet, of Count SoUohub, a novelist of much taste, who has left us very penetrating descriptions of Russian life in the first half of the nineteenth century, and of his brother-in-law. Count Vieillegorsky, a russian-ised Pole. All these gentlemen hastened to make Dostoyevsky's acquaintance, invited him to their houses and received him cordially. My father enjoyed himself more especially with the Vieillegorsky, where there was excellent music. Dostoyevsky adored music. I do not think, however, that he had a musical ear, for he distrusted new compositions, and preferred to hear the pieces he knew already. The more he heard them, the more they delighted him.

      Count Vieillegorsky was a passionate lover of music; he patronised musicians, and was accustomed to hunt them out in the most obscure corners of the capital. It is probable that some strange type, some poor, drunken, ambitious, jealous violinist, discovered by Count Vieillegorsky in a garret, and induced to play at his receptions, struck my father's imagination, for Count Vieillegorsky's house is the scene of his novel Netotchka Nesvanova. In this Dostoyevsky achieved a true masterpiece of feminine psychology, though, in his youthful inexperience, he may not have sufficiently explained it to his public. It is said that Countess Vieillegorsky was born Princess Biron. Now the Princes Biron, natives of Courland, always claimed to belong to the sovereigns, rather than to the aristocracy of Europe. If we read Netotchka Nesvanova attentively, we shall soon see that Prince S., who had offered hospitality to the poor orphan girl, is merely a man of good education and good society, whereas his wife is very haughty, and gives the air of a palace to her home. All those around her speak of her as of a sovereign. Her daughter Katia is a regular little " Highness," spoilt and capricious, now terrorising her subjects, now making them her favourites. Her affection for Netotchka becomes at once very passionate, even slightly erotic. The Russian critics rebuked Dostoyevsky very severely for this suggestion of eroticism. Now my father was perfectly truthful, for these poor German princesses, who can never marry for love, and are always sacrificed to interests of State, often suffer from such passionate and even erotic feminine friendships. The disease is hereditary among them, and might well have declared itself in their descendant, the little Katia, a precocious child. The Vieillegorsky had no daughter; the type of Katia was entirely created by my father, who depicted it after studying the princely household. In the portrait of this little neurotic Highness Dostoyevsky shows a knowledge of feminine psychology very remarkable in a shy young man, who scarcely dared to approach women. His talent was already very great at this period. Unfortunately, he lacked models. Nothing could have been paler or less distinctive than the unhappy natives of Petersburg, born and bred in a swamp. They are mere copies and caricatures of Europe. "These folks have all been dead for a long time," said the Russian writer, Mihail Saltikov. " They only continue to live because the police have forgotten to bury them."

      Dostoyevsky's friends, the young novelists who were beginning their Hterary careers, had not the strength of mind to accept his unexpected success. They became jealous, and were irritated by the idea that the timid and modest young man was received in the salons of celebrities, to which aspirants were not yet admitted. They would not appreciate his novel. Poor Folks seemed to them wearisome and absurd. They parodied it in prose and verse, and ridiculed the young author unmercifully.30 To injure him in public opinion they invented grotesque anecdotes about him. They asserted that success had turned his head, that he had insisted that each page of his second novel, which was about to appear in Nekrassov's Review, should be enframed in a border to distinguish it from the other works in the Review. This was, of course, a lie. The Double appeared without any frame. They scoffed at his timidity in the society of women, and described how he had fainted with emotion at the feet of a young beauty to whom he had been presented in some drawing-room. My father suffered greatly as he lost his illusions concerning friendship. He had had a very different idea of it; he imagined artlessly that his friends would rejoice at his success, as he would certainly have rejoiced at theirs. The maUce of Turgenev, who, exasperated at the success of Poor Folks did his utmost to injure Dostoyevsky, was particularly wounding to my father. He was so much attached to Turgenev, and admired him so sincerely. This was the beginning of the long animosity between them, which lasted all their hves, and was so much discussed in Russia.

      30 Turgenev wrote a burlesque poem, in which he made my father cut a ridiculous figure.

      When we pass in review all the friends my father had during his hfe we shall see that those of his early manhood differ very markedly from those of his maturity. Until the age of forty Dostoyevsky's relations were almost exclusively with Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Poles and natives of the Baltic Provinces. Grigorovitch, half Ukrainian, half French, was his earliest friend, and found a publisher for his first novel. Nekrassov, whose mother was a Pole, gave him his first success; Belinsky, Polish or Lithuanian by origin, revealed his genius to the Russian public. It was Count SoUohub, the descendant of a great Lithuanian family, and Count Vieillegorsky, a Pole, who received him cordially in their salons. Later, in Siberia, we shall find Dostoyevsky protected by a Swede and natives of the Baltic Provinces. It seems that all these people recognised in him a European, a man of Western culture, a writer who shared their Slavo-Norman ideas. At the same time, all the Russians were hostile to him. His comrades in the School of Engineers ridiculed him cruelly; his young hterary friends hated him, despised him, tried to make him a laughing-stock. It was as if they recognised in him something opposed to their Russian ideals.

      After the age of forty, when Dostoyevsky had definitively adopted the Russian attitude, the nationality of his friends changed. The Slavo-Normans disappeared from his life. The Russians sought his friendship and formed a body-guard around him. After his death they continued to guard him as jealously as in the past. Whenever I mention the Lithuanian origin of our family, my compatriots frown, and say: " Do forget that wretched Lithuania! Your family left it ages ago. Your father was Russian, the most Russian of Russians. No one ever understood the real Russia as he did."

      I smile when I note this jealousy, which is, in its essence, love. I think that after all the Russians are right, for it was they who gave Dostoyevsky his magnificent talent. Lithuania formed his character and civilised his mind; Ukrainia awoke poetry in the hearts of his ancestors; but all this fuel, gathered together throughout the ages, kindled only when Holy Russia fired it with the spark of her great genius.

      My father's first novel was certainly very well written, but it was not original. It was an imitation of a novel of Gogol's, who in his turn had imitated the French literature of his day. Les Miserdbles, with its marvellous Jean Valjean, is at the bottom of this new literary movement. It is true that Les Misirables was written later; but the type of Valjean, a convict of great nobility of mind, had begun to appear in Europe. The democratic ideas awakened by the French Revolution, led writers to raise poor folks, peasants, and small tradespeople to the rank occupied by the nobles and the intellectuals of the upper middle class. This new trend in literature was very pleasing to the Russians, who, having never had any feudal aristocracy, were always attracted by democratic ideas. Russian writers, who at this period were pohshed and highly educated persons, would no longer describe the drawing-room; they sought their heroes in the garret. They had not the least idea what such people were really like, and instead of describing them as they were in reality, illiterate and brutalised СКАЧАТЬ