The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

130 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

This was not an easy task, and Dostoevsky had few means of support. In 1865, at age forty-four, Dostoevsky fled Russia to write and evade his creditors (he had taken on his deceased brother’s debts); he gambled everything away. After marrying his stenographer in 1867, he remained abroad for four more years, fleeing debtors’ prison. Of their four cherished children, two died: their first, Sonya, as an infant in 1868, and ten years later the youngest, Alyosha, of epilepsy at age three. Through all these evictions, migrations, compulsions, crises and tragedies of his post-prison life, Dostoevsky wrote constantly and with great discipline: every night, from eleven o’clock to five in the morning, by candlelight, sustained by tea and cigarettes. In Petersburg, Dresden, then the Russian provinces, he steadily produced and then serially published his four great novels: Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Not until the mid-1870s did Dostoevsky, already famous, enjoy anything like financial security. Even then, husband and wife continued scrupulously to observe the same ascetic work ritual. The writer had a passion for order and cleanliness. Their daughter Lyubov recalls never seeing her father in slippers or dressing-gown at home, only in starched collars and a tie. Stains on his clothing prevented him from

concentrating.5

Dostoevsky’s whole external biography, in fact, can be seen as a series of unexpected “little deaths” followed by disciplined resurrections, from night to morning. These tribulations were imposed, by and large, by external agents and conditions: by a police state in 1849, by nagging poverty, and by his own dysfunctional body, which flung him down and required him to rise on his own. To tell the story of this life, it is enough to point to its events. Dostoevsky did this himself. Working as editor and journalist during the 1870s, he was known to display – like stigmata – the scars from his leg fetters and insist that they gave him the right to speak on behalf of the suffering Russian people. And yet for all the traces of victimization in his life, Dostoevsky never tolerated theories (or lawyers, or juries) that blame a crime on the environment. Criminals are free and make choices. Responsibility accrues and repentance is required. Among Dostoevsky’s many complaints against socialism, both the secular utopian sort and its demonic apotheosis in Ivan Karamazov’s “Grand Inquisitor,” was its promise to replace this radical freedom with material and mental security. Hence one of Dostoevsky’s great paradoxes: the healthy, free mind demands continual destabilization and doubt if it is to exercise acts of faith, but our deeds are stable, answerable, and belong to us alone. In his Diary of a Writer, issued sporadically beginning in 1873 to a rapt readership, Dos-toevsky mixed creative fiction with personal memoir and (often reactionary) political commentary on current events, delivered in the comically unreliable