A NEW -STUDY OF DOSTOYEVSKY.* MLLE. DOSTOYEVSKY'S study of her
father makes strange reading, and tells the story of the great novelist from a curious point of view. For instance, the author attaches a fantastic importance to racial heredity, attributing a great many of the events of •her -father's life to the fact that he was a Lithuanian and not a true Russian by race, and therefore had a mixture of Norman blood in him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's father was an army doctor, the superintendent at a large State hospital in Moscow. They must have been an odd household—the mother very delicate, the father shutting himself up (as apparently is the habit of Lithua- nians) and mixing hardly at all in the society of Moscow. Every evening they formed a circle and in turn read aloud the works of Pushkin and passages from Russian history, or the children recited Russian poems they had learnt by heart. They were a large family, and Fyodor's gentle, rather colourless mother, exhausted by the constant succession of babies, often had to lie in bed for days together. She died when Fyodor was still a boy. After the death of the mother the father took to drink, and while Dostoyevsky and his brother were at the School of Engineers a frightful tragedy happened. They had a country estate, and to this estate the father went down alone one summer :-
" My grandfather had always been very severe to his serfs. His drunkenness made him savage. One summer day ho left his estate, Darovoye, to visit his other property, Tchermashnia, and never returned. He was found later half-way between the two, smothered under the cushions of his carriage. The coach- man had disappeared with the horses ; several of the peasants of the village disappeared about the same time. When interro- gated by tho court, other serfs of my grandfather admitted that the crime was one of vengeance."
The affair naturally made a profound impression upon the young writer. The next outstanding incident in Dostoyevsky's career was the Petrachevaky conspiracy and his banishment to Siberia. The writer does full justice to this part of her story, quoting from the memoirs and other sources the various legends of how the illiterate nwujiks—who did not know what a novel was—instinctively realized Dostoyevsky as some sort of
a prophet or seer, and how they protected him. The story of Dostoyevsky's first marriage is a painful one. •Maria Dinitrievna was the widow of an officer whom Dostoyevsky got to know during his military service in Siberia. When he first knew the family the husband was still living, though very ill, and Maria Dmitrievna managed to keep in play a lover, her husband and Dostoyevsky, whom she had already picked out as her next husband. She systematically deceived Dos- toyevsky, spending the night before her marriage to him with her lover. Her history was a curious one, for she was the daughter of one of Napoleon's Mamelukes who had married a girl of good family from the Caspian. By some freak Maria Dmitrievna was entirely Russian in type, but her son by the first marriage, Paul, was almost a mulatto ; this, however, was not apparent at the time of the marriage with Dostoyevsky, and it was not till several years afterwards that Dostoyevsky discovered either his wife's African origin or the fact that she had deceived him from the very beginning of their acquaintance.
From the time of this wretched first marriage till in later life he met Mlle. Dostoyevsky's mother Dostoyevsky's existence was one of extraordinary gloom and discomfort. He was beginning to make a name, but was very unbusinesslike in his arrangements with publishers and so forth. A host of relations settled and preyed upon him, and he lived in a perpetual round of anticipating money due to him for novels and of having to write against time.
At last, when he was about forty-five, and two or three years after the death of his first wife, things reached a climax. He had, contrary to Russian custom, made himself responsible for the debts of his favourite elder brother who had died and, yielding to the clamour of these creditors, had made a bargain with an iniquitous publisher. If he did not finish a novel— The Gambler—by a certain date, he was to forfeit his entire royalties and copyright on a complete edition of his works as they then existed, and these extant works then became the property
• Fyodor Dostoyeasky: a Study. By Aimee Doetoyevaky. .London : Heine- mann. [12a. Ed.] of the iniquitous Stellovsky. Poor Dostoyevsky, at-kis wit'aend, accepted the terms, and worked day and night upon The Gambler, until at last his sight became affected. An oculist warned him that he would go blind—it was the beginning of October and the pound of flesh was due on November 1st. The oculist suggested that he should employ a stenographer, but where to find one ? At this time shorthand was a new art hi Russia. A class had been recently started, but the pupils had been dispersed on their sununer holiday and had conic back, their teacher said, having forgotten the little they had learnt. There was only one of them who was. proficient. She was a young girl, well born and from a very strict family, who had taken up shorthand as a pastime, and it was very doubtful if she would be allowed to work, and especially for a man. In the end, Anna was allowed to work for Dostoyevsky, and the novel was triumphantly finished and the wicked publisher discomfited. It was with this good comrade that Dostoyevsky at last found happiness, though his relations and hers saw to it that the early part of their married life was by no means without incident.
The account—even though we suspect rose-coloured spectacles —of these last fourteen years of happy married life, clouded only by Dostoyevsky's ill-health, will reconcile the reader to what would otherwise be a story of predominating glcom.
Dostoyevsky holds out hopes of the forthcoming publica- tion of her mother's memoirs, which will give in more detail some incidents in the married life of this remarkable couple. Those who like the present writer have fallen under the spell of Mile. Dostoyevsky's study will greatly look forward to the book.
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