LITMIR.BIZ

       X

      A PASSIONATE EPISODE

       Table of Contents

       On his return from Siberia my father found his brother Mihail surrounded by a group of remarkable young writers. My uncle had distinguished himself in Russian literature by his excellent translations of Goethe and Schiller, and he loved to gather the authors of the period round him in his house. Seeing this, my father proposed that he should edit a newspaper. He was burning to reveal to our intellectuals the great Russian Idea which he had discovered in prison, but to which Russian society was deaf and blind. The paper was christened Vremya (Time), and the work was divided between the two brothers; my uncle undertook the editorial and financial business, my father the literary interests. He published his novels and his critical articles in Vremya. The paper was very successful; the new idea pleased its readers. The brothers invited the collaboration of very good writers, earnest men who appreciated my father. Instead of jeering at him, like his youthful literary associates of old, they became his friends and admirers. Two among them deserve special mention : the poet Apollo Maikov (whom Dostoyevsky had known shortly before his imprisonment), and the philosopher Nicolai Strahoff. Both remained faithful to Dostoyevsky all his life and were with him at his death.

      After The House of the Dead my father published The Insulted and Injured, his first long novel, which also had a great success. Dostoyevsky was much courted and complimented in the literary salons of Petersburg, which he again began to frequent. He also appeared in public. During his sojourn in Siberia, the Petersburg students, male and female, began to play an important part in Russian hterature. In order to help their 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

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