Alex Christofi - Dostoevsky in Love

by the same author

Glass

Let Us Be True

Contents

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to those who helped to make this book possible. First and foremost, to my editor, Jamie Birkett, for trusting me to apply a creative method to a serious biography, and to my agent, Jonny Pegg, and his counterpart Doug Stewart, for helping a novelist sneak onto the non-fiction shelves. A huge thanks also to Richard Mason, Jude Drake, Rosie Parnham, and everyone else who has worked on the book at Bloomsbury.

Im grateful to my academic readers for their invaluable feedback on early drafts of the manuscript. I am a storyteller, not a specialist, and recognise that a scholar might have balked at the idea of writing this book in this way. Any remaining errors are of course my own. To Professor Konstantin Barsht at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), for entertaining my suggestion of using spectrophotometry on the portions of Dostoevskys letters that had been inked out by Anna, though they remain a tantalising mystery for now. To Ilona Chavasse for helping me capture the nuances of the correspondence, and for our fascinating conversations about untranslatable Russian words.

Thanks to Louis Brooke, Alex Lawrence-Archer and Rosa Rankin-Gee for letting me hole up elsewhere when I needed to write uninterrupted, and to Samira Shackle and Cal Flyn for moral support when fatigue set in. To Anthony Rowland for accompanying me as I retraced Fyodors footsteps through St Petersburg (though Im still recovering from the Russian policy that drinking vodka without beer is throwing money to the wind). To my family, Chris, Jan, Antony, Mel, Olympia, Adam, Kirsty and Thea. And to Bernadette, who hadnt asked to live with Dostoevsky, and who was almost as patient as Anna.

Such an autobiography as yours might serve as material for a future work of art, for a future picture of a lawless bygone age. When the angry strife of the day has passed, and the future has come, then a future artist will discover beautiful forms for depicting past lawlessness and chaos... They will preserve at any rate some faithful traits by which one may guess what may have lain hidden in the heart of some raw youth of that troubled time.

The Adolescent

The dates in this book are in the Julian old style, which was 12 days behind the Gregorian new style calendar used by western Europe at the time. I have indicated the Gregorian date in parentheses, in references to letters sent from Europe.

Why bother writing a book about Dostoevsky? In most portraits, he looks like a grumpy Saint Nicholas (and incidentally, he did spend one Christmas night riding across Russia in an open sleigh). He was such a contrarian that members of both the liberal left and the reactionary right were forever convinced that he was working for the enemy. Unlike many modern readers, he was a deeply committed Orthodox Christian, though he was famously eloquent about spiritual doubt. I know some people find the length of his four best-known novels imposing; perhaps others accept that he was a great philosopher, but dont have the patience for his insistent style, with its repetitions and digressions. He himself admitted, just as he was completing the first of his four great novels: I have been painfully aware for twenty years now that my literary vice is prolixity , but I cant seem to shake it off. All in all, he could be an exasperating man, and yet it seems to me that many of his ideas remain disconcertingly relevant today: the importance of understanding that autonomy and dignity are more precious to us than the rational self-interest of economists; that more people are killed by bad ideas than by honest feeling; that a society with no grand narrative is vulnerable to political extremism. He took great pains to understand the angry young men who were threatening to topple Russia and the rest of Europe in his lifetime, perhaps because he remembered what it was like to be one of them. More than anything else, Dostoevsky was a deeply moral writer, and he refused to turn a blind eye to the suffering he saw among the slaves (for that is effectively what serfs were), the outcasts, the prostitutes, the humiliated, the sick and the silenced of his day. He was fiercely devoted to raising up the downtrodden and giving them a voice. And so, although I will be writing about Dostoevsky as a lover and a husband, I will also be writing about a broader, more inclusive kind of love, which he believed was the only possible answer to suffering in this world.