The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (8 page)

… All the transactions with the printing plant, with the paper factory, with the binders, with the booksellers and newspaper distributors and also with the packaging and shipping of the publications through the mail, were undertaken by Anna Grigorievna, who had earlier received an excellent preparation for the activity by supervising the publication of individual works of Fyodor Mikhailovich.
122

In 1873, Dostoevsky became editor-in-chief of a conservative magazine,
The Citizen
, which provided a modest but steady income of three thousand rubles (five thousand with his regular contributions). It was a demanding job requiring him to read piles of manuscripts and galley proofs, which took time from his creative work. But it was even more difficult for Dostoevsky, given his irritability and explosive nature, to maintain good relationships with the staff and authors. He could not avoid conflicts even with some of the most loyal contributors and, by all accounts, was unpopular. Anna managed to save some of his relationships by “forgetting” to dispatch Dostoevskys’ angry letters. His editorship led to a major blunder in 1874 when in violation of censorship rules he published a direct quotation from the Emperor’s address. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to forty-eight hours’ arrest. While he served this sentence in a guardhouse, Anna came to visit him with his favorite
fresh rolls. In excellent spirits after his imprisonment, Dostoevsky joked that it was good they had put him away, for in jail he reread
Les Misérables
.

Although Dostoevskys’ editorship lasted just over a year (he resigned his position in April of 1874), his health noticeably declined during this term. He developed a cough, and his breathing problems deteriorated into an early stage of emphysema, which would kill him seven years later. For several years he traveled without his family for rest cures in Ems, Germany.

While apart from Anna, Dostoevsky suffered from anxiety and “from all sorts of doubts” and had difficulty writing.
123
His letters from Ems were filled with requests that she write more often, “even just 12 lines, like a telegram about the children’s health and your own. You wouldn’t believe how I worry about the children and suffer because of that.”
124
If her reply was delayed (Dostoevsky was under surveillance until 1875 and censors still read his correspondence although he was a loyalist), he imagined every conceivable trouble. Dostoevsky would tell Anna, expecting officials to read his letter, that he did not mind if the censors knew how much he loved his wife. “I can hardly wait for a letter from you, my darling.… You’re a little nasty in that regard, but still you’re my only joy, and it’s very hard for me alone here without you … I have complete loneliness now and in addition nothing but trouble. Write me in detail about the children.… Details about their conversations and their gestures.”
125
Her stories about the children “revived” Dostoevsky.
126
According to Anna, he had a great capacity for relating to children, entering their world; he played games with them, danced, and carried on “the most animated conversations with them.”
127

While the couple’s apprehension over their children’s health was shared, Dostoevsky took his to extremes. He could be alarmed by small occurrences at home and scrutinized Anna’s letters for any sign of trouble. Once, he wrote her of his exasperating nightmare, that their son, Fedya, climbed onto the windowsill and fell from the fourth floor. Anna replied with irony, which had a sobering effect on Dostoevsky: “Please calm yourself, my darling! The children are in
good health and Fedya, from Saturday to Sunday night, was not falling from the fourth floor, but peacefully sleeping in bed.”
128

Anna’s cheerful nature had begun to change: she complained of bad nerves and was now prone to anxiety and mood swings. During Dostoevskys’ absences, she feared he would have an epileptic attack, leaving him helpless among strangers. In 1873, upon receiving a telegram from him, she screamed and burst into tears in front of the postman, imagining that her husband was ill. Her hands shook so badly that she could not open the telegram, and she continued to scream, drawing a small crowd. “When I finally read it, I became insanely happy, and cried and laughed a long time.”
129
At Dostoevskys’ remark, Anna “merged” with him “into a single body and single soul.”
130
In a photograph taken eleven years into their marriage, she stares unsmilingly, with grave expression: her face and posture betray the tension and stress she has absorbed while handling Dostoevskys’ heightened emotional states.

Her happiest memories were of winter 1874–75 in Staraya Russa, a place south of Petersburg, which the family initially chose as their summer retreat. They kept returning over the years, but to Anna, their first trip was the most memorable, when from the boat taking them across Lake Ilmen, she and Dostoevsky admired the white stone walls of ancient Novgorod with its church cupolas. “It was a long time since we had felt so happy and so much at peace!”
131

At Staraya Russa, Dostoevsky wrote his novel
A Raw Youth
, to be published in
Notes of the Fatherland
, a prominent populist magazine. Katkov was publishing
Anna Karenina
and his magazine was paying top royalties to Tolstoy, so he could not afford advances to Dostoevsky. But in 1874, he received a profitable offer from Nikolai Nekrasov, the editor of
Notes of the Fatherland
, a magazine of the political camp opposite to the extremely conservative
The Citizen
, which Dostoevsky had edited. (The first to recognize Dostoevskys’ literary talent, Nekrasov became his friend; later, they were “literary enemies” representing different political camps.) Nekrasov was also a great poet, so when he visited their apartment a curious Anna would stay by the closed door listening to their conversation.
Dostoevsky replied to Nekrasov’s offer that he did not make any decisions without his wife and had to consult her. Nekrasov was appalled that he was so much under his wife’s heel, to which Dostoevsky responded that he trusted Anna’s intelligence and business sense. As Dostoevsky walked out of the room, Anna told him to accept Nekrasov’s offer immediately. Nekrasov would pay more than Katkov’s magazine, but Dostoevsky doubted whether his novel would fit into the populist magazine and whether he would be required to make changes he could not accept; he would then have to return the advance. His fears were unjustified, but because of financial uncertainty Anna decided to spend the winter in Staraya Russa where life was much cheaper than in Petersburg.

In this retreat, they were just as isolated as during their years abroad, while maintaining an exact schedule to accommodate Dostoevskys’ work. “After midday he would call me to his study and dictate what he had written during the night. Working with him was always a joy for me, and I privately took great pride in helping him and in being the first of his readers to hear the author’s work from his own lips.” He would dictate from two to three in the afternoon and, when finished, would always ask her opinion.

“I say it’s fine,” I would reply. But my “fine” meant to Fyodor Mikhailovich that perhaps the just-dictated scene, though successful from his point of view, had not produced any particular effect on me. And my husband placed great importance on my spontaneous reactions. Somehow it always happened that those pages of the novel which had a moving or shattering effect on me had the same effect on most of his readers as well.…
132

When Dostoevsky had doubts about certain chapters, he would read them to Anna and watch her reaction. A chapter describing a young girl’s suicide in
A Raw Youth
produced an overwhelming impression on her, as it later would on Nekrasov. When Dostoevsky took the first installment of the novel to his editor, Nekrasov stayed
up reading all night; as he remarked, the suicide scene was “the peak of perfection.”
133
Upon learning about this observation from Dostoevsky, Anna wrote back to him that she was the first to use those very words.
134
Dostoevsky not only accepted her business advice, but also heeded her suggestions about his work. Back in 1874, she was asking him not to begin writing
A Raw Youth
until he worked out a detailed plan for the novel: “Haste will only spoil it. I remember how it was with
The Idiot
and
The Devils
.”
135
Dostoevskys’ notebooks for
A Raw Youth
where he detailed a plan for the novel were the most extensive he ever made.

Frequent fires in the community’s wooden houses were part of the monotony in Staraya Russa. At the sound of the bell Anna would habitually dress the sleeping children and carry them outside. The bundles with Dostoevskys’ notebooks and manuscripts of
A Raw Youth
were prepared every evening, to be rescued next. When the danger passed, Dostoevskys’ papers had to be unpacked and returned to where they belonged, since he was fussy about order.

These manuscripts and notebooks nearly perished in 1875, when at the end of summer the family—along with their newly born son, Alyosha, and his nanny—journeyed from Staraya Russa to Petersburg. (After Alyosha was born on August 10, Anna quickly regained her strength and was back taking Dostoevskys’ final dictations of the novel.) In Novgorod, after they crossed Lake Ilmen, Anna discovered that a black leather suitcase with Dostoevskys’ belongings, notebooks, and the manuscript of
A Raw Youth
, had disappeared. Without the notebooks, it would be impossible for Dostoevsky to reconstruct the final parts of the novel, which he was to take to the magazine the following day. When Anna reported the incident to Dostoevsky, “he turned white and said softly, ‘Yes, that is a great loss. What in the world will we do now?” Without telling him, Anna took a cab to the desolate neighborhood of the steamship dock, assuming correctly that the suitcase had been left there. The office was locked for the night, so she banged on the door, found a guard, and obtained the suitcase, weighing over seventy kilos. The guard vanished into the warehouse and the cabby refused to leave
his coachbox out of fear of thugs, so she dragged the suitcase herself, stopping at every step. She rode home sitting on the precious cargo, “resolving not to give it up if we should be attacked by the hoodlums.”
136
When she noticed that Dostoevsky had come out on the porch to look for her, she yelled to him from a distance, “Fyodor Mikhailovich, it’s me, and I have the suitcase!”

Almost ten years into their marriage, Anna wrote Dostoevsky that they were “one in a thousand families” where husband and wife understood each other “so deeply and lastingly.”
137
She revered him as an artist and man, and assured him that “I would not have been so happy with anyone else as I am happy with you.…”
138
Their love and appreciation of each other was only growing: Dostoevsky told her that after ten years, he was more in love with her than on the eve of their wedding.
139
She kept wondering whether she deserved to be loved by such a brilliant man, writing him with a near-religious ecstasy, that she was just “an ordinary woman, the golden mean.… As I’ve always told you, ‘You are my sun, you are up the mountain, and I am lying at its foot, praying.’”
140
Dostoevsky responded in tune with her chanting, “You’re my idol, my god … I fall to my knees before you and kiss both your feet endlessly.”
141
Anna was his “only friend,” he wrote her, and he felt grateful to her for many things. He believed she was capable of much more than assisting him and managing their publishing enterprise.

My dear joy, where did you get the idea that you are “the golden mean”? You are a rare woman.… You manage not only the entire household, not only my affairs, but you pilot all of us capricious and bothersome people, beginning with me and ending with Lyosha.
142
But in my affairs you have really just squandered your gifts. You stay up nights managing the sale and “office” of
Diary [of a Writer
].… If you were made a queen and given a whole kingdom, I swear to you that you would rule it like no one—so much intelligence, common sense, heart and ability to manage do you have.
143

The year 1876 brought success for their periodical,
Diary of a Writer
, and overall it was a happy year with no major worries for Anna over the children’s and Dostoevskys’ health. As her natural high spirits returned, she was even up to a prank. To taunt Dostoevsky, who always told her of his love, she sent him an anonymous, clichéd letter she had copied from a trash novel they had recently read together. She thought he would recognize it but, if not, was prepared to risk his reaction. The letter said that “a certain person close to you is deceiving you basely,” and it suggested that Dostoevsky look for the proof in his wife’s locket, “which she carries next to her heart.”

Anna’s prank nearly ended in tragedy: when he read the letter, an enraged Dostoevsky ripped the chain off her neck, injuring her. He did not recall it from the trash novel: anonymous letters are so alike. Anna watched as with trembling hands he unsuccessfully tried to open the locket. When he finally succeeded, he was stunned to discover two portraits—his own and their daughter Lyuba’s. It took him a while to understand why Anna herself had sent the anonymous letter; when he came to his senses, Dostoevsky told her, “I might have strangled you in my rage! … I beg you, don’t ever joke about such things—I can’t answer for myself when I’m in a fury!”
144
Learning “what a frenzied, almost irresponsible state” Dostoevsky was capable of reaching, Anna did not tease him again.

She had few amusements (collecting stamps was one
145
) and practically never went out, while Dostoevskys’ growing popularity required him to accept invitations. Anna did not accompany him to fashionable salons and literary evenings partly because she could not afford to dress for these occasions: “Our financial affairs were always in such a state that it was impossible to think about fancy clothes.”
146
There were three small children, Dostoevsky took annual treatments in Germany, and they had debts, so she gave up entertainment. It was at Dostoevskys’ insistence that in 1873 she bought a seasonal pass for herself to the Italian opera, which she loved. (Established by Tsar Nicholas I, the permanent Italian opera in Petersburg was regarded as equal to that in Paris or London.)
But since she wanted to save, she purchased a seat in the gallery, opposite an enormous chandelier that obstructed the stage; still, she was able to enjoy the singing of the great artists of their time, Mme. Patti, Sofia Scalchi, and Camille Everardi.