The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (9 page)

During their evening conversations, Dostoevsky tried to compensate Anna for her lack of society by telling her what he saw and heard during the day—and “his tales were so enthralling and were told so expressively that they completely replaced social life for me.” Fascinated with his talk, losing track of time, she occasionally stayed up with Dostoevsky until five in the morning.

Dostoevskys’ “personal periodical” made him a public figure whose political and literary views and opinions were heeded.
Diary of a Writer
revealed some of the best and worst aspects of his talent and personality. In it, he displayed his progressive views on women and showed his compassion for the children of the underprivileged, such as the juvenile criminals of whom he wrote in the very first issue of the
Diary
for 1876. But this periodical also revealed his extreme nationalism, religious intolerance, and, primarily, his hatred of Jews, which exceeded the typical contemporary prejudice of his country. (Anna shared this prejudice, but to a lesser degree.)

The December issue for 1877 reported Nekrasov’s death. Anna attended the poet’s funeral with Dostoevsky, who was grieving the loss of his old friend and editor; the couple spent the evening reading Nekrasov’s poetry, which both admired. Walking in the cortege behind Nekrasov’s coffin, Dostoevsky contemplated his own death (with his emphysema progressing, he realized it would not be long). He asked Anna to promise that she would not bury him among his literary “enemies,” and, on the spur of the moment, she promised to bury him beside the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, whom he esteemed, in the most important cemetery of Petersburg, the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. When Dostoevsky died three years later, Anna, without expecting to, was actually able to keep her “fantastic” promise.

In May 1878, the Dostoevskys’ younger son, Alyosha, died of epilepsy he had inherited. The death of their beloved three-year-old
had a shattering effect on both. Anna grew apathetic, “impassive to everything: the management of the household, our business affairs, and even my own children.…” Dostoevskys’ plea that she submit to God’s will and accept their child’s death with humility had no effect. Later describing her grief in
The Brothers Karamazov
, Dostoevsky employed Anna’s experiences, doubts, and thoughts, which she shared with him, in the chapter “Women of Faith.” As he dictated the chapter to her, Anna “wrote with one hand and wiped my tears with the other. Fyodor Mikhailovich saw how excited I was, came over to me, and kissed me on the head without saying a word.”
The Brothers Karamazov
was Dostoevskys’ last and most important novel, which brought him wide recognition and which he dedicated to Anna.

In January 1879, when the first chapters of this novel appeared in
The Russian Herald
, it was an immediate success. Throughout this year and in the next, Dostoevsky was frequently invited to readings where audiences received him enthusiastically. Because of his fragile health, Anna accompanied him to these literary events, dressed in an elegant gown of black silk made for such occasions. She would be loaded with Dostoevskys’ books, cough medicine, extra handkerchiefs, and a plaid to wrap around his throat: he called her his “faithful armor-bearer.” Before going onstage, Dostoevsky would invariably ask her to give him her hand for luck; at the lectern he would not begin reading until he spotted her in the audience, so she would take out her white handkerchief to help him find her. When she asked what he would do if she were to leave, Dostoevsky replied that he would stop reading, quit the stage, and follow her.

Their finances improved and he was finally able to buy her expensive diamond earrings to replace his wedding present. (Dostoevsky consulted a connoisseur of precious stones on the purchase. Ever meticulous, Anna recorded, in an index of his gifts, the date of purchase, name of merchant, and price.) When at a literary evening she wore the earrings for the first time, Dostoevsky was jubilant.

While other writers were reading[,] my husband and I were sitting together along a wall decorated with mirrors. I suddenly noticed that he was looking to the side and smiling at somebody. Then he turned to me and whispered blissfully, “They sparkle, they have a gorgeous sparkle!” It turned out that the play of the stones was brilliant under the multiple lights, and my husband was as happy as a child.

A superb reader, Dostoevsky produced an overwhelming effect on his audience. His voice, usually thin and delicate, was penetratingly distinct in moments of excitement. A contemporary recalled that Dostoevskys’ audience was gripped by his emotion when he read a chapter from
The Brothers Karamazov:
“And never since have I felt such deathly stillness in an auditorium, such total absorption of the spiritual life of a crowd of a thousand people in the mood of one man.… When Dostoevsky read, the listener … fell utterly under the hypnotic power of this emaciated, unprepossessing, elderly man.…” Like other listeners, Anna often wept during the readings, although she knew these excerpts by heart.

As fans surrounded him afterward, she “used to stand aside, though never far away.” When at Easter Dostoevsky read at a benefit for the Bestuzhev Higher Courses for Women, a throng of female students separated the couple in the foyer. Although the crowd pushed her aside, Anna was sure Dostoevsky would not leave without her. Indeed, he soon addressed the girls: “Wherever is my wife? … Please, find her!”

Unlike Dostoevsky, who was jealous of the slightest attention paid Anna by their male acquaintances, she was relaxed even when female admirers followed him in throngs. Korvin-Krukovskaya, to whom Dostoevsky had briefly been engaged, visited the family in Staraya Russa and was welcome to stay for the summer. (She married a French revolutionary socialist and member of the Paris Commune, Charles Victor Jaclard. In 1887, when the Russian authorities wanted to deport Jaclard, Anna interceded through Dostoevskys’ government connection, and deportation was postponed.) Anna
rarely accompanied Dostoevsky to fashionable salons hosted by his women friends Elizabeth Naryshkin-Kurakina and Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, both ladies-in-waiting to grand duchesses. (The latter was also Leo Tolstoy’s relative and confidante.) Dostoevsky enjoyed conversations with these worldly and intelligent women and preferred their company to male society in which he was quickly exasperated by political arguments.

Although he had few male friends, Dostoevsky acquired a companion in the government official Konstantin Pobedonostsev, having met him during his editorship at
The Citizen
. Back then, Pobedonostsev was a highly placed official and a tutor of the future Alexander III. In 1880, Pobedonostsev became the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod and the secular head of the Orthodox Church. Dostoevsky thus maintained a relationship with one of the most influential men in the empire who would symbolize reactionary Russia, and who would become responsible for Tolstoy’s excommunication in 1901.

In 1880, Russia celebrated the Pushkin festival with the unveiling of his monument in Moscow. In a rare display of unity, the statue was funded by the public, making it a truly popular event. With political rivalry temporarily abandoned, the liberal Ivan Turgenev would share the podium with the conservative Dostoevsky. Their speeches were greatly anticipated: to rent a window or a balcony overlooking the square for the ceremony cost an exorbitant fifty rubles.

In the eyes of readers, Dostoevskys’ recently published
The Brothers Karamazov
, his best creation, made him an equal of Tolstoy. But after his religious conversion, Tolstoy believed such events futile and did not attend, so the festival was remembered for decades because of Dostoevskys’ participation. (The two writers never met, but had a high regard for each other’s work.
The Brothers Karamazov
was the last book Tolstoy read on the fateful night of his departure from home in 1910.) However, Anna would not witness Dostoevskys’ triumph, later considering this the greatest deprivation of her life.

She wanted to go along, but he objected: after Alyosha died of epilepsy, Dostoevsky doubled his anxieties over the children’s health and would not leave Lyuba and Fyodor in the care of a nurse, even for a single day. In addition, there was Dostoevskys’ pettiness, for which he was well known. They estimated that the family’s expenses of living in Moscow for a week would come to around three hundred rubles, and Anna would need to tailor a respectable light-colored dress. After much deliberation, the couple decided they could not afford it, even though their financial circumstances were no longer as shaky as before. By then, most of their debts had been paid, Dostoevsky was receiving higher royalties for his new novel, and in January 1880 Anna had launched a new profitable enterprise: a book service for out-of-town residents. During the very first year her business yielded a profit of eight hundred rubles, far more than what she needed for the trip.

Dostoevsky promised to write daily, describing the festival in the minutest detail, and to obtain signatures from distinguished Russians for Anna’s autograph collection. But all this could not replace a chance to be with her husband and see him at the height of his success, for which they both had worked indefatigably for fourteen years. Although he not only kept his word, but on occasions even wrote twice a day, Anna was tempted to attend and even dreamed of coming incognito to witness his speech. Concerned over Dostoevskys’ health, she feared the excitement would trigger an epileptic attack: “More than once I decided to make the trip to Moscow and stay there without showing myself to anyone but only watching over Fyodor Mikhailovich.” But throughout his exhausting twenty-two-day stay in Moscow, Dostoevsky remained surprisingly cheerful and in good health. (As with other speakers, his expenses were paid by the city government, the Moscow Duma, something neither he nor Anna knew at the start.)

On June 6, the date of the unveiling, public jubilation ran high: as Dostoevsky wrote Anna, “You couldn’t describe it even in 20 pages.…”
147
During the following days when speeches were presented, Dostoevsky delivered his address to a packed Hall
of Moscow Nobility, and was received with a roar of “rapture, enthusiasm (all because of
The Karamazovs!)
… I was stopped by thunderous applause on absolutely every page … I read loudly, with fire.” Dostoevsky expressed his cherished idea that Pushkin gave Russians faith in their individuality and special destiny, “hope in the strength of our people, and with it our faith in our future independent mission in the family of European peoples.”
148
He accurately guessed the mood of the crowd that had come to celebrate their national poet, unlike Turgenev, whose attitudes were Western. Dostoevsky stole the event; when he finished, there was a thirty-minute ovation. He described his triumph to Anna, “When I concluded—I won’t tell you about the roar, the outcry of rapture: strangers among the audience wept, sobbed, embraced each other.… The meeting’s order was violated: everyone rushed toward the platform to see me: highborn ladies, female students, state secretaries … they all hugged me and kissed me.”
149

Because Dostoevsky praised the spiritual strength of the Russian woman, a delegation of female students crowned him with a laurel wreath, which read, “On behalf of Russian women, about whom you said so many good things.” The speech appeared in several periodicals and in
Diary of a Writer;
six thousand copies were sold over a few days, with another press run required.

During his final year, the public treated Dostoevsky as an oracle; young people followed him in throngs, asking questions to which he responded almost in speeches. Anna tried to control the stream of visitors to their apartment, but Dostoevsky insisted it was his duty to see everyone. Often people came to argue over political issues, which exhausted him, and Anna would interrupt the meetings with various excuses, as Dostoevsy’s doctors had warned him that physical exertion or excitement could trigger a pulmonary hemorrhage.

Dostoevsky had to send the final installment of
The Brothers Karamazov
to
The Russian Herald
by early October. Some 320 pages remained to be written over the summer months, and Anna was helping him meet this deadline in their Staraya Russa cottage all
through the summer and in September; “the autumn was a beautiful one.”
150
Following its magazine publication, the couple issued
The Brothers Karamazov
in book form: three thousand copies sold out within a few days. In early 1881, their debts were settled and, for the first time in their marriage, they had a surplus of around five thousand rubles.

Dostoevsky, in high spirits, visited friends and even agreed to participate in a theatrical performance at Countess Tolstaya’s home; it was a play about Ivan the Terrible in which he had a role as a reclusive monk. Anna was now accompanying him to all these gatherings, aware that his emphysema was progressing: he was breathing heavily, as if through a cloth folded several times, and their ascent to the third floor (of the Nobility Assembly Hall, for example) could take twenty-five minutes.

Anna tells that on January 26, he moved a heavy bookcase to retrieve his penholder, which he also used for rolling his cigarettes.
151
The strain caused an artery in his lung to burst and he began spitting blood. She immediately called a doctor, who was late to arrive. In the meantime, Dostoevsky had had an exhausting visitor: his sister Vera Mikhailovna visited from Moscow and started a quarrel over some property. When his sister left, Dostoevsky suffered another, more forceful hemorrhage.

The news of his grave illness spread quickly and people, some unknown to the Dostoevskys, came to inquire about his health: “The doorbell kept ringing from two in the afternoon until late at night and had to be tied up.” Anna spent the night on a floor mattress next to Dostoevskys’ couch. He asked her to read an excerpt from the Gospel, given to him by the Decembrist wives in Siberia. It had helped him through the darkest days of his sentence and was now closing his life, at fifty-nine: “But Jesus said to him in answer, ‘Do not hold me back.…’” When Anna read this passage from Matthew, Dostoevsky told her, “That means I’m going to die.” Dostoevsky took communion and bid farewell to the children and to Anna, telling her that he had always loved her passionately “and was never unfaithful to you even in my thoughts.”