The Autobiographical Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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СКАЧАТЬ to live to himself. Solitude is a refuge to him." This curious shyness of the Lithuanians is probably a growth of their soil. The Russians and Ukrainians, inhabitants of vast plains, have been able to found large villages, to go to market in the neighbouring towns, to meet other villagers, to enter into relations with them and so to become sociable and hospitable. The great forests and wide marshes of Lithuania have prevented the development of large villages. The few houses it was possible to build on an oasis of firm ground formed but a single family, which, owing to the impracticable roads, was unable to visit the inhabitants of the adjacent oases. Living thus in isolation, the Lithuanians became unsociable. These temperamental defects, the growth of centuries, take centuries to correct, even in those who have long lived in a different country and under different conditions.16

      16 The Lithuanians never forget their forests; they continue to adore them even when they have quitted them for generations. In his Journal of the Writer Dostoyevsky says : " All my Ufe I have loved the forest, with its mushrooms, its fruits, its insects, its birds and its squirrels; I revelled in the scent of its damp leaves. Even at this moment as I write I can smell the aroma of theibirches."

      The Lithuanians are as a rule excellent husbands and fathers. They are only happy in their homes; but loving it so dearly, they are apt to become jealous of their wives and children, and to wish to withdraw them from outside influences. My grandfather, when he shut up his sons in a kind of artificial Lithuania in the heart of Moscow, did not reahse how difficult such an education would make life for the boys, who, after all, were Russians, and had to work among, their compatriots. Happily, my grandfather at least provided good companions for his children in their domestic prison; in the evenings of the festivals, all the family assembled in the drawing-room and read the works of the great Russian writers aloud in turns. At the age of fifteen my father was famihar with the majority of our masterpieces. The children were accustomed to recite the poems they had learnt. Sometimes competitions in recitation were arranged between the boys. My father and his brother Mihail learned Russian poems by heart, and the parents decided which of them had recited best. My grandmother took a great interest in her children's reading. She was a pretty, gentle creature, devoted to her family, and absolutely submissive to her husband. She was dehcate; her numerous confinements had greatly exhausted her.17 She had to lie in bed for days together, and loved then to hear her sons recite her favourite poems. The two elder boys, Mihail and Fyodor, worshipped her. When she died, while still a young woman, they mourned most bitterly, and composed her epitaph in verse. My grandfather had her effigy carved on the marble monument he erected to her memory.

      17 My grandparents had eight children, four sons and four daughters. One of these, twin-sister to my aunt Vera, was stillborn. My grandmother had only been able to nurse one of her children, her eldest son Mihail, whom she loved above all the rest. The remaining children were suckled by nurses chosen among the peasant-women of the country round Moscow.

      In accordance with the fashion of the day, my grandfather had portraits of himself and his wife painted by a Moscow artist. My grandmother is represented in the costume and head-dress of 1830, young, pretty and happy. Her father was a Russian of Moscow, yet she has the Ukrainian type. Possibly her mother was a Ukrainian.18 It was, perhaps, her origin which first attracted my grandfather and led to his marriage with this daughter of Moscow. His portrait shows him in a gala uniform, richly embroidered with gold. At this period, everything in Russia was militarised. Doctors in the service of the State were not allowed to dress in mufti, but had to wear uniform and a sword. In Dostoyevsky's memory, his father figured as a military man, the more so because my grandfather, who had begun life as an army surgeon, always retained the military bearing of an officer. He had the characteristic Lithuanian type; his four sons were all very like him. My father's eyes, however, were brown, true Ukrainian eyes, and he had the kindly smile of his Russian mother. He was livelier, more passionate and more enterprising than his brothers. His parents called him " the hothead." He was not proud, and had none of that disdain for the proletariat which is often shown by Poles and Lithuanians. He loved the poor, and felt a keen interest in their lives. There was an iron gate between my grandfather's private garden and the great garden of the hospital, where the convalescents were sent to walk. The little Dostoyevsky were strictly forbidden to go to this gate; my grandparents distrusted the manners and behaviour of the lower class Moscovites. All the children obeyed the injunction, with the exception of my father, who would steal up to the gate and enter into conversation with the convalescent peasants and small tradespeople, braving the wrath of his father. During the summer visits to Darovoye, my father made friends with the serfs belonging to his parents. According to my uncle Audrey, his brother Fyodor's greatest pleasure was to make himself useful to the poor peasant-women who were working in the fields.

      18 She belonged to the family of Kotelenitsky, a name which is often met with in Ukrainia. They were a fanuly of intellectuals; my grandmother's uncle, Vassil Kotelenitsky, was a professor at the University of Moscow. He had no children, was very fond of his great-nephews, and often invited my father and his brothers to spend long days in his house at Novinskoye.

      My grandparents were very religious. They often went to church, taking their children with them. My father recalls in his works the immense impression made upon him by the readings from the Bible which he heard in church. My grandfather's faith had little in common with the mystical, hysterical and tearful faith of the Russian intellectuals. My compatriots complain incessantly of the trials life brings to all; they accuse God of harshness, revile Him, and shake their fists at Heaven, like foolish children. The Lithuanian faith of my grandfather was that of a mature people which had suffered and struggled. The Jesuits, perhaps, and also the Teutonic KJaights taught the Lithuanians to respect God and bow to His will. Their descent from pious Ukrainians, who looked upon the ecclesiastical career as the noblest and most dignified of human callings, inclined the Dostoyevsky family to love God, and made them eager to draw near to Him. It was with such ideals as these that my grandfather brought up his young wife and his sons and daughters. A childish memory was deeply impressed on my father's mind. One spring evening at Moscow the door of the drawing-room where all the family was assembled was thrown open, and the bailiff of the Darovoye estate appeared on the threshold. " The domain has been burnt," he announced in a tragic voice. At the first moment my grandparents believed that they were entirely ruined; but instead of lamenting, they knelt down before the icons and prayed God to give them strength to bear the trial He had sent them. What an example of faith and resignation they gave their children, and how often my father must have remembered this scene during the course of his stormy and unhappy life !

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       When his elder sons had finished their term at Tchernack's preparatory school, my father took them to Petersburg. He did not intend to make doctors of them; he wished them to embark on a military career, which at this period had briliant possibilities for the intelligent. In Russia every official had a right to ask or free education for his sons at one of the State schools, My grandfather, a practical man, chose the School of Military Engineers, with a double end in view: on saving, a pupil might become an officer in a regiment f the Imperial Guard, and have a splendid career, or he might become a civil engineer and amass a considerable fortune. My grandfather Mihail was very ambitious for his sons, and perpetually reminded them that they must work incessantly. " You are poor," he would say; "I cannot leave you a fortune; you have only your own powers on which to rely; you must work hard, be strict in your conduct, and prudent in your words and deeds."

      At this time my father was sixteen, and my uncle Mihail seventeen. Brought up as they had been always under the paternal eye, knowing nothing of life, and possessing no friends of their own age, they were nothing but two big children, artless and romantic. There was a passionate affection between the two brothers. They lived in a world of dreams, reading a great deal, exchanging their literary impressions, and rdently admiring the works of Pushkin, their common СКАЧАТЬ