Life With Fyodor

Anna Snitkina, stenographer, stands across the street from a dingy building in the artisans' district of St. Petersburg, and thinks: This is the apartment house where Raskolnikov must have lived. Timidly she climbs the stairs and knocks on the door of the second floor apartment. A servant with a green shawl draped around her shoulders lets Anna in, and the stenographer thinks: this must be the shawl worn by Mrs. Marmeladov. Anna follows the servant down a dark hallway, into a dimly lit study and thinks: This is the desk where the great man must have written Crime and Punishment.

Anna enters Dostoevsky's apartment house as a stranger, and the world she encounters has a meaning only insofar as it has been infused with the life of Dostoevsky's art. As a young girl she had read his novels cloistered in the bushes outside her parents' home until they were snatched away by her older sister. She is in awe of the eminent writer, and at first he is equally uncomfortable in front of her. He must complete The Gambler in order to pay off debts left him by the death of his brother, and he has decided to dictate the novel rather than writing it himself. For two days he is immobilized by the new style of operation, but within a week he is at ease with Anna. Each night she tallies the number of pages they have completed and gleefully reports the progress they have made. Within a couple of weeks they have fallen in love. In four months they are married.

Dostoevsky was under especially heavy emotional strain when he met Anna. In addition to his brother's debts, his stepson made extravagant demands on his dwindling resources. His beloved first wife had died two years previously. A bitter conflict emerged between Anna and his late wife's family for control of Fyodor's time and money, a conflict which she wins by convincing him to travel abroad with her.

Anna was never able to understand the ideas on which Fyodor built his novels. He once sat her down for three hours and tried to explain "The Grand Inquisitor" (from The Brothers Karamazov) to her, but the chapter completely eluded her. His works are discussed only in passing in her reminiscences. But she did have a dazzling intuition of his character and behavior. It is to the personal, temperamental aspect of Dostoevsky that her recently translated memoirs are directed--and in the process, perhaps unwittingly, she reveals how she was able to keep him under her control.

In Baden, she learned of his more than academic interest in the roulette wheel. He would lapse into an irrational, compulsive fever and spend all their money on a system of betting for which. Anna observed, he lacked the sang froid to execute successfully. But Anna saw that any attempt to condemn his mania would be useless--instead, she used it to her own advantage. Whenever he was tense, distraught, or ill-humored, she would encourage him to go to the casino. Inevitably he would return, unhappy with his losses--emotionally drained and much easier to deal with.

Anna also learned to exploit his legendary jealousy to bind him closer to her. He went wild over the most innocuous attentions paid to her by other men. He regularly kissed the hands of other women upon being introduced to them, but if anyone did the same thing to Anna, he would become bitter for the rest of the evening, and sarcastically encourage her to return the attentions of her young admirer. Finally, she would berate him for being absurd and he would fall to his knees begging forgiveness for his suspicions.

Anna once left a letter on her husband's desk telling him his wife had taken a lover, and signed it "a well-wisher." Dostoevsky almost choked when he read it. She explained that it was a "practical joke" to test his trust in her, and the familiar scene re-enacted itself: a humiliating appeal for her pardon, her acceptance of his apologies, and a blissful reunion.

While Dostoevsky did not escape his debts until a year before his death, under Anna's financial management, his burden was eased somewhat. She published The Possessed and opened up a small bookstore. Anna felt that it was unfair to compare him to other writers who didn't operate under the same sorts of pressures--imagine, she said, what he could have done if his novels had been written without the threat of debtor's prison hanging over him.

In the last fourteen years of his life, Dostoevsky steadily grew more conservative. As a young man he had helped establish an underground socialist press, had been arrested by the Tsarist government and sentenced to death. At the very last moment before he was to face the firing squad, a messenger arrived with a commutation of his sentence to exile in Siberia. When he returned from Siberia, he espoused a mystical sort of slavophilism that stressed spiritual communion with "the Russian people."

His previous activities had alienated the Court; his new creed divorced him from the Russian literary circles, which remained primarily oriented towards utopian socialism and anarchism. Anna describes his love-hate relationship with both the political and literary establishments. He became ecstatic upon reading a favorable opinion of himself in comparison to Tolstoy, and constantly complained about literary "cliques" from which he felt excluded. He cut off relations with a life-long friend who had failed to introduce him to Tolstoy. Towards the end, Dostoevsky cultivated the friendship of Grand Dukes, and expressed his admiration for Tsar Alexander III. The last chapter of her reminiscences is devoted to a rebuttal of attacks made upon his character and his work after his death.

Not surprisingly, Anna's account of her life with Dostoevsky reads like one of his novels, perhaps A Gentle Creature. Both of them were sufferers--she the docile one, submissive to his rages and passions, he more volatile, constantly punishing himself for his weaknesses and indulgences. But in her docility she exerted a strange power over him. It wasn't a Machiavellian strategy she used, more an instinct that to directly confront his gambling and jealousy would be fruitless. She did not discourage his compulsive behavior, and in its repercussions--guilt and remorse--he was bound that much more closely to her.

[Anna Dostoevsky's Dostoevsky: Reminiscences has been translated into English for the first time and published by Liveright, $12.50.]