Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer`s Life
By Geir Kjetsaa
Translated from the Norwegian by Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff
Viking, 437 pages, $24.95
Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Edited by Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein
Translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew
Rutgers University Press, 543 pages, $29.95
The facts of Fyodor Dostoyevsky`s life as given to us in these volumes are (and were) the stuff that great and gloomy novels are made of.
While still in his 20s, Dostoyevsky was arrested in 1849 and condemned to death for his ”revolutionary” activities, a death-sentence commuted only at the last instant; thereafter he served four years` hard labor in Siberia and was hounded by authorities and censors for the rest of his life. His first marriage was an unhappy one. He was epileptic. He assumed, in addition to his own debts, the burden of his brother`s, and spent unhappy years in Europe trying to evade his creditors. He suffered the deaths of two young children. He was a compulsive gambler.
The story of his life does not make for light reading, and, as he wrote,
”I don`t like letters, in which it`s difficult. . .to speak about things that matter to one and be understood.”
It`s hard to believe that the life and letters of our most impassioned novelist could make for dull reading, but one must imagine the oppressive, almost stifling atmosphere of Dostoyevsky`s novels without the enlivening of the novelists`s art. The fault lies neither with his enthusiastic Norwegian biographer, Geir Kjetsaa nor with Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein, meticulous editors of the ”Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.” The facts of Dostoyevsky`s life are inherently lugubrious.
It`s nonetheless true that Kjetsaa`s one-volume biography does not read as fluidly as one would wish. The prose has a halting, clunky quality, like a car with a bad transmission. Discussions of Dostoyevsky`s work generally read more like book reports than like literary or biographical analyses.
Another problem is the book`s frequent use of the third-person limited point of view-a technique appropriate to fiction, but one that presumes to put words into Dostoyevsky`s mouth: ”Oh, how he hated these puffed-up Germans!”; and thoughts into his head: ”He must certainly have shaken his head at the sight of his elegantly dressed, cigar-smoking rival.”
Yet many of the facts presented in this biography are fascinating, as are the many myths dispelled: that Dostoyevsky was a city slicker (in his youth, and again late in life he had a house in the country); that he came from the working class (he came from low-level nobility); that he was cruel to this wives (his second wife, Anna wrote: ”It`s true that he is always gloomy and irritable, but if only people knew how much human warmth and goodness are concealed beneath all that. The better one comes to know him, the more attached to him one becomes.”); that he was unrecognized in his own time, and was strictly an intellectual`s writer, whereas Kjetsaa writes, ”Dostoyevsky was primarily a popular writer, and he was proud of it.”
The requisite material is here-accounts of Dostoyevsky`s desperate and unsuccessful gambling binges, his long-term feud with the writer Turgenev-as well as unexpected moments of humor.
”Whenever he set off for his afternoon walk, he had to have at least 10 rubles in his pocket. While he wandered pensively about the streets, most of the money would disappear into the hands of the beggars who knew his route and waited for him. On one occasion Anna put on an old kerchief and took up a beggar`s pose with their daughter. `When father drew near,` Lyubo tells us,
`Mother said in a whining tone: `Kind sir, have pity on us! I am a sick woman with two children to look after.` Dostoyevsky stopped, looked at Mother and gave her some alms. When she began to laugh, he grew offended. `How could you play a trick like that on me!` he said bitterly. `And in the presence of your child, too!”`
Kjetsaa also has a fine sense of the enlivening detail; for example that Dostoyevsky always kept sweets in his desk drawer.
For an even more intimate sense of the writer`s life, the ”Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky” are indispensable. Unlike most literary men, Dostoyevsky wrote ordinary, non-literary letters, often in haste. He was obsessed nearly all his life with money matters: ”You have no idea of all the expenses I have!” ”My poverty forces me to hurry and to write for money, which unfailingly leads to my spoiling my work.” He did not write often about literature in a general way, though he was a great literary gossip, nor about himself as an artist, though his remarks on the subject are worthy of note:
”When one is young, ideas just pour out of one`s head, but that is no reason to catch every one of them in flight and use it right away, in a hurry. It is better to wait a bit longer until they crystallize-think more and wait until many small things exprssing one particular thought combine into one great whole, into one large, three-dimensional image, and it is only then that the thought should be given expression.”
One letter in particular stands out from the rest: his famous letters to his brother Mikhail, just after his last-second pardon from execution and just before setting out to Siberia.
”Brother, I have not lost courage and I do not feel dispirited. Life is life is within ourselves and not in externals. There will be people around me, and to be a man among men, to remain so forever and not to lose hope and give up, however hard things may be-that is what life is, that is its purpose.”
He didn`t always write on such exalted subjects. After another losing bout at the casinos he wrote to his wife, ”To be sure, we are faced with the appalling necessity of pawning things again, which you find so odious! But his is the last time, the very last time!”
Through both the biography and the selected letters, one comes at last to have a sense of Dostoyevsky the man, gloomy and earnest, always worrying, full of flaws and high ideals. The miracle is not that the author of ”Crime and Punishment” and ”The Brothers Karamazov” was an ordinary human being, but that an ordinary human being was capable of writing such glorious books.
