Love and marriage Ronald Hingley Dost oyevskY:' Reminiscences Anna DostoyevskY, translated
and edited by Beatrice Stillman (Wildwood House £8.95) "The simple, glowing history of a great love." This is how Anna Dostoyevsky's memoirs of her husband are described in the introduction to this, the first English translation of the rvloscow, 1971, edition. One may deplore such gushy phraseology, but it is impossible to fault the sentiment expressed. Seldom has literary hiStory known an event more pregnant than the occasion on which, in October 1866, little Miss. Anna Grigoryevna Snitkin —an awestruck, trembling, modest, half-trained stenograPher—first walked into the study of the forty-five-year-old Dostoyevsky to carry out her virgin professional assignment. Here, she c_s°0n discovered, was a genius just coming to "uition, but also an unhappy individual almost comically unable to cope with his domestic Problems. Like many a lesser talent, the poor an was a great deal more adept at probing into the ultimate nature of reality than at getting his socks darned. Some of Dostoyevsky's problems stemmed fr°In sheer bad luck. He suffered from severe ePilePsY and chronic financial incompetence. Total strangers would claim without evidence that his deceased brother had owed them so ;I:larly hundred roubles; whereupon Dostoyevs'Y would meekly pacify these con-men by signing an IOU for the relevant amount. They roust have concluded that a Dostoyevsky is born every minute. One also senses that he courted disaster deliberately. Early literary success, and with a s.°Mevvhat mediocre novel, only depressed him into gratuitously offending his literary associates. He further sabotaged his early c. areer by challenging Nicholas I's police, thus landing himself in jail and Siberian exile for a note decade. No less self-destructive in love, e Pursued such women as his querulous, consumptive first wife Mariya Isayev and his Mistress Apollinariya Suslov, that beautiful stadist with a whim of iron. Each in her own way to 1St the wretched man nearly out of his Mind. Then there were his compulsive gambling and misconceived editorial adventures. He also comes over as so addicted, in lith, to strong sensations that he regularly eated for acute misery rather than mild
PPiness.
v_13. Y the middle 1860s, however, Dostoyevsky c'ehlog now in his middle forties, significant t, ariges were taking place in his outlook, and w slightly before his first meeting with Miss nitkin. His basic philosophy, hitherto volatile, his crystallising into the amalgam which all great novels (as yet unwritten) were to ,,I1113°(IY. It was less his newly-acquired `,_0.nservatism and religious nationalism than Lus hatred of contemporary 'progressives', and tarticularly of his chief bugbear Chernyshevswhich now began to hoist his muse to c eative heights inconceivable in the early ,ears when he had been a progressive himself. bewith Notes from Underground (1864) he first cairie a novelist of ideas, shortly afterwards
adding, in Crime and Punishment, the vital ingredient of murder: a theme which was to give strength to all his subsequent plots. At this time too he was phasing out those miserable introspective heroes, very largely distorted portraits of himself in youth, with which his early works abound. Anna Snitkin helped to complete this transformation from minor to major writer, arriving on the scene, when crime and Punishment was nearly completed and commencing her stenographic career by enabling the harassed author to meet a contract date with a masterpiece on a smaller scale, The Gambler, dictated in a mere twenty-six days. Before this race against the clock was over the author, who at first kept forgetting his quiet, self-effacing, secretary's name, was deeply in love with her. He married her in 1867.
Twenty-five years older than Anna, Dostoyevsky was already thinking of himself as an old gentleman by this time. He is repeatedly referred to as "old" in these memoirs by a wife who never regarded him as anything else. He was, to her, an object of reverence rather than of physical passion. "I loved Fyodor M ikhaylovich without limit, but this was not a physical love, not a passion which might have existed between persons of equal age." Since Dostoyevsky suffered agonies of jealousy whenever his young wife was so much as seen talking to a man in her own age group, she tried to shield him by dressing and comporting herself as if she was twice her age. As for Dostoyevsky's attitude to her, the evidence suggests that, old or not, he remained a virile, sexually active man whose attachment to his young wife was by no means as platonic as, she claims, hers was to him. Of this we should know more than we do if Anna Grigoryevna had not gone through his letters to her deleting those passages, and there were many of them, where he uses the intimate language of the bedroom. This peccadillo is outweighed by the tremendous rescue operation which she performed on Dostoyevsky, and without which so many masterpieces might never have seen the light of day. She cherished and protected him during his epileptic fits. She tolerated the compulsive gambling which so often left the two of them totally destitute. She detached him from his various parasitical relatives — his step-son Paul, his sister-in-law Emilia, and others — who felt that his sole purpose in life was to earn their living for them. She sold her furniture to enable them both to escape abroad, from creditors and relatives, shortly after their marriage. She took down his dictated masterpieces and wrote them up for him while he slept. She stood between him and his financial anxieties. Practical-minded and businesslike, she became his efficient publisher; and she continued to publish his work long after his death, surviving him by nearly four decades. She bore his children, endured his many bouts of despair, and she tactfully refrained from posting such occasional bad-tempered letters as she knew he would Anna Dostoyevsky might have done all these things and still have turned out tiresome company on paper. But that she assuredly is not. She would never have pretended to be a professional writer, of course. After all, such was her modesty that she never even claimed to understand her husband's writings, though he "idealised me and attributed to me a deeper understanding of his work than I actually had." Still, intelligence comes in many shapes and sizes, and there is nothing in the widow Dostoyevsky which would entitle us to patronise her. Though she was never a genius, she was no mediocrity either. To function for fourteen years as the effectively loving and working wife of a man as difficult and, however creatively, mixed-up as this: it is not as stupendous an achievement as writing The Brothers Karamazov, but it is a feat to command admiration and respect. Typically of Russian girls of the 1860s, Anna Dostoyevsky was very much a feminist by conviction. How fortunate, then, that she was sufficiently secure by nature, and sufficiently free from any innate paranoia, slave mentality etcetera, not to feel herself degraded by protecting and helping the husband who needed her so much.
The present work, long familiar to Dostoyevsky scholars as a primary source on his biography, may also appeal to general readers with no special interest in Russian literature. It has one deplorable feature, though, which it shares with innumerable other Russian memoirs of the period. This is an insistence on including long, fictionalised exchanges in direct speech: exchanges which were not taken down by the stenographically qualified Mrs Dostoyevsky at the time and which, in the nature of things, she could not possibly have recalled verbatim, as she here purports to do. Her acceptance of this irritating convention detracts from the value of her work; but less so than in the case of many another memoirist. We can at least accept that she caught the spirit and, if only in such memorable episodes as Dostoyevsky's proposal of marriage, some of the ipsissima verba.
Another defect of Russian memoir-writing, a tendency to wallow in emotionalism, is healthily absent here, though there is plenty of emotion of the non-jactitated variety. This is, then, a plain, straightforward book about a very uncommon man: a man childlike, profound, supremely unaware of much in his own personality, and yet somehow reaching out beyond the knowable into that peculiar territory which remains all his own. That he was a kind, decent person as well as a tricky, intractable phenomenon, is superbly and convincingly brought out here.
As for the delightful Anna Grigoryevna, when one compares her with Mesdames Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov, one suspects that, matrimonially speaking, no other major Russian author ever had it so good.
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