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

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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 !

       III

      ADOLESCENCE

       Table of Contents

       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 ideal. When they started for Petersburg they did not realise that their childhood was over, that they were entering a new world.19

      19 My uncle Andrey tells us in his remimscences that my grandfather never allowed his sons to go out alone and never gave them any money. He watched over their conduct most jealously; flirtation, even of the most innocent kind, was tolerated. The young Puritans never dared to speak of women save in ven Of course, their modesty must have been a source of great amusement to their comrades in the School of Engineers, for the amorous adventures of the young Russian begin early. Dostoyevsky, for his part, must have suffered a good deal from the cynicism of his young comrades. When in The Brothers Karamazov my father described Aliosha stopping his ears in ordeer not to hear the obscene talk of his schoolfellows, he was probaly drawing on his own experiences.

      During the journey from Moscow to Petersburg which lasted several days,20 the young Dostoyevsky continued to dream. " My brother and I," says father, " dreamed of the great and the beautiful. The words sounded magnificent to us. We used them without irony. How many fine words of the same order we repeated in those days ! We had a passionate belief in I know not what, and, although we knew all the difficulties of mathematical examinations, we could only think of poetry and poets. My brother wrote poems, and I was writing a Venetian romance."

      20 There were no railways in those days. Travellers went the stage-coach, or in a troika, which often took nearly a we to get from Moscow to Petersburg.

      A great misfortune awaited the young dreamers in Petersburg. Though he had obtained two nominations for his sons at the School of Engineers, my grandfather was only able to place his son Fyodor there. Mihail was pronounced too delicate to study in the capital and the authorities sent him with some other yout to Reval, where the School of Engineers had a kind of annexe. My father's despair at this separation from his adored brother was immeasurable. He suffered the more because, when his father had returned to Moscow he was left utterly alone, without friends relations. He was a boarder, and, as he knew no one in the city, he had to spend all his holidays at school.21 The School of Engineers was in the ancient palace of lul, where the unhappy Emperor had been murdered, is in the best quarter of the town, opposite the Summer arden, on the banks of the Fontanka river. The rooms are large and light, full of air and sunshine. One could have wished no better domicile for one's children; as a doctor my grandfather realised the important part played by space and light in the physical education of young people. Nevertheless, my father was not happy at the Engineers' Castle.22 He disliked the life in common with the other pupils, and the mathematical sciences he had to study were repellent to his poetic soul. Obedient to his father's wishes, he did his work conscientiously, but his heart was not in it. He spent his spare time seated in the embrasure of a window, watching the flowing river, admiring the trees of the ark, dreaming and reading.

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