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1860s in Russia, Dostoevsky lost his first wife. While writing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky was in great difficulty, winning at gambling only to fall into debt again. He had to write Crime and Punishment and The Gambler concurrently and hired Anna Grigorievna Snitkina to copy his work quickly. From October 4 to October 29, 1866, he dictated The Gambler to her as she transcribed it, and in 1867, he married her, having proposed on November 8: one week after finishing the book and one month after first meeting her. Ricardo Piglia remarked, "A very Dostoevskian speed (and a very Kafkaesque situation)."
Anna was as great as Sofia Tolstoy (who also transcribed Tolstoy's books). Twenty-five years his junior, she loved Fyodor Dostoevsky. After Dostoevsky passed away in 1881, Anna was only 35, but she vowed never to remarry.
The Years of Crime and Punishment - Pietro Citati
At the dawn of 1865, Dostoevsky beheld nothing around him but death, a trackless wilderness, and the spectral flitting of ghosts. On the 15th of April, 1864, his first wife had succumbed to tuberculosis after a lingering, agonizing decline. In those final months, while her husband, in the adjoining room, modulated the grotesque and furibund voice of the "man from the underground," Maria Dmitrievna was coughing up her life's blood. Death, a frequent visitor, soon returned. In July of that same year, his brother Mikhail vanished into the shadows - the most beloved companion, with whom he had navigated the turbulent waters of two journals, Vremya (The Time) and Epoja (Epoch). Dostoevsky was left shattered by this new bereavement.
"I was left, quite literally, with nothing to live for," he wrote later. "To forge new bonds, to conjure a new life! The mere thought was loathsome. And for the first time, I realized that there was nothing to replace them, that I loved only them in this world, and that one cannot have a new love, nor indeed should one. Everything about me was cold and desolate."
Upon his passing, Mikhail had left a legacy of debt amounting to fifteen thousand rubles. Dostoevsky, bound by a grim sense of duty, committed himself to discharging these debts and sustaining his brother’s widow and four children, his brother’s mistress and her child, another alcohol-soaked brother, and the son of his first wife, Pasha - an insolent and presumptuous youth with whom he shared his St. Petersburg quarters. Every month, every week, every day, these desperate, ravenous, and arrogant kin clamored for rubles. Dostoevsky stood alone, and it seemed to him that misfortune and the sudden lightning of epilepsy were devouring the procession of marvelous ideas - novels, tales, dreams, polemical and utopian articles - that nourished his feverish imagination. He might have shuttered himself in his room to salvage at least a fragment of this treasure. Yet, to his misfortune, he resolved to sustain the publication of his brother’s journal, Epoja (Epoch), which had led a brief and precarious existence. Throughout the autumn of 1864 and the winter of 1865, he labored like a galley slave. He dealt with authors, corrected manuscripts, pored over galley proofs, hunted for coin, settled old debts only to contract new ones, wrote to impatient subscribers, and haunted the offices of the censors. He worked until six in the morning, waking after five hours of restless, labored sleep. It was all in vain. Despite this frenzied toil, Dostoevsky was forced to shutter the journal, and new debts piled upon those of his brother, constructing that obsessive prison of paper that would immure him for the rest of his days.
He felt the air of St. Petersburg thickening, stifling him, and in July 1865, he managed to scrape together a few hundred rubles to flee to Germany. He settled in Wiesbaden, where he sought to tempt Providence at the gaming tables. He wished to play with a mind "like marble, inhumanly cold and vigilant, without the slightest tremor of excitement," and to win, in the frenzy of a single evening, an immense capital that would secure his peace for a lifetime. After five days, he had lost everything and pawned his watch. He had no funds to pay the hotel. The staff ceased to serve him meals, brought neither tea nor coffee, ignored his summons, refused to clean his boots or clothes, and denied him candles at night, treating him "with the most inexplicable and German contempt." He remained three days without sustenance: taking only a cup of tea in the morning and wandering out at three each afternoon, not returning until late at night "so as not to reveal that I was not dining." Then, he reached out to acquaintances and friends for aid. While awaiting a reply, famished and humiliated, during nights of insomnia or vacant days of wandering, his imagination continued to visit him with its peculiar gifts, as though extreme desolation were the soil most fertile for his labor as a writer. In the spring, he had read a newspaper account of a crime: a youth had murdered two elderly women with a sharp, short-handled axe; now, his mind expanded that dark chronicle into a novel that would soon bear the name Crimen y castigo (Crime and Punishment).
By October 1865, he was back in St. Petersburg. That winter, he bent his entire strength to the great novel, thinking of it "while eating, drinking, and even while speaking with others." Occasionally, he would appear in society, among men distracted, careless, and content. He walked with a slow, heavy gait, dragging his feet as though he still bore the irons that had bound him for four years in Siberia. He resembled a broken soldier or a patient escaped from a hospital where he had been confined for an unmentionable malady. His small, motionless, and lackluster eyes watched like two hostile points; his voice was low and shadowed, his lips bloodless, his cheeks hollowed, and his skin possessed a sallow, earthy pallor. A meticulous web of shadows, restless muscular tremors, nerves, and wrinkles incessantly traversed his face. It seemed as though each of those painful shadows existed to betray the secret tempests agitating him whenever his iron will turned his countenance opaque. It was as if he locked himself from within: not a movement, not a gesture, save for a nervous tic that shuddered across his thin lips.
At times, he arrived gloomier than the night itself. He greeted no one; if he offered his hand, it felt like a piece of dry, inanimate timber; and he sought to discover in every man the intent to provoke or offend him. Either the room was too brightly lit, or not enough. When served the strong tea he favored, he grumbled that they gave him beer; yet if served light, it was mere hot water. If someone attempted to distract him or coax a smile, he suspected they wished to mock him. For a time, he would remain silent, coiled within himself. Then, suddenly, the demon of aggression would seize his spirit. One might say he was preparing an assault, his head fixed, his eyes more deeply sunken than usual, his lower lip curled in a grimace. A malevolent and provocative glint flared in those small eyes; a sarcastic smile danced upon his mouth; he strove to lace every answer with a drop of gall, and his words, uttered in a voice increasingly chilled and ironic, sought to wound, to insult, to offend, to punish - as though all men, beginning with his friends and acquaintances, were mortal enemies.
Despite these tribulations, he clung to a desperate will to live, convinced that his true existence was yet to begin, that the gilded and inexhaustible kingdom of the future remained open to him. He yearned for a woman - such as he had never known - to love him, to care for him, to lay cool, young hands upon the shadows of his broken face. In those two years, he proposed marriage to four women, almost without discrimination, as if any one of them might incarnate his desire. In the winter of 1865, he met a young woman barely twenty years of age, Anna Korvin-Krukovskaia, whose two stories he had published in Epoja (Epoch). When he saw her a second time, the young writer was alone at home with her fifteen-year-old sister, Sonia. Dostoevsky took Anna’s hand, sat beside her on the pan, and they began to speak like two old friends. The sister watched in silence, a look of adoration in her eyes.
Soon, Dostoevsky took command of the conversation. He was a marvelous talker and loathed polyphonic dialogues. He cherished only the monologue, provided others listened with rapt attention. He began in a low, broken voice, almost a whisper, as though entrusting his soul to a thread of sound, to a barely audible murmur. When he grew impassioned, his voice rose with fervor, a sweet and seductive light kindled his expression, and he spoke with a restrained fever, with mounting exaltation, his eyes brilliant and inspired, caressing all the things of the world, which seemed revived and resurrected by his breath. At times he jested, recounting comic tales, reliving the literary memories of his youth, and he seemed rejuvenated - the boy who had written Pobres gentes (Poor Folk). At other times, he recited the poetry of Pushkin or Lermontov: beginning with the same contained emotion with which he confided, and soon the voice would swell into a tide of high, deep sounds, accompanied by a rhythmic gesture of the hand, tracing the shadows of the verse in the air. One day, he told the two young women of what he believed were the final moments of his life. While standing in Semenovskaia Square awaiting the firing squad, the sun broke through the clouds, the gilded dome of a church flashed brilliantly, and he stared with terrible obstinacy at that dome and the rays it radiated; he could not avert his eyes from those rays; it seemed to him they were his new nature and that in three minutes he would merge with them.
Another day, if we are to believe Sonia’s account, he spoke to the young sisters of his first epileptic seizure. He had just emerged from prison and was living in confinement in Siberia when a dear friend visited him. Although it was the eve of Easter, the joy of their reunion made them forget the most significant religious feast of the year. They spent the entire night talking, untiring, heedless of the hour, intoxicating themselves with their own words. Dostoevsky’s friend was an atheist. Dostoevsky was a believer (or rather, he strove with all his will and desperation to be one). "God exists, God exists!" he cried in the height of his exaltation. At that very instant, the bells of the neighboring church began to peal, vibrating through the opaque night air. "I felt the heavens descend to earth and swallow me," Dostoevsky told the silent, attentive girls. "It was as if I found myself in the presence of God; He entered into the deepest recesses of my soul. God exists, I cried once more, and after that, I remember no more... You, you who are well," he continued, raising his voice, "you do not know what happiness is - that happiness which floods the epileptic an instant before the crisis. I cannot say if it lasts seconds, hours, or months, but believe me, I would not trade it for all the joys of the world." Dostoevsky uttered these last words by lowering his voice until it returned to a passionate, broken whisper. The two young women were hypnotized and enchanted. He drew them in and repelled them, terrified them and seduced them, sowing a painful unrest in their hearts.
Visit after visit, conversation after conversation, Dostoevsky fell in love with Anna Korvin-Krukovskaia, while little Sonia, who had listened to those whispered or shouted confessions, fell in love with him. She played the piano, and when he praised her excessively, telling her she possessed an extraordinary sensitivity, she resolved to learn Beethoven’s Pathetique, which Dostoevsky preferred above all other music on earth. After three months of labor, she played it respectably. One night, Dostoevsky went to visit the two sisters; he was nervous, yet sweet and almost tender. Sonia sat at the piano. "The difficulty of the score, the required attention, the fear of error absorbed her to such a degree that she saw nothing and no one around her." She reached the end of the Pathetique and, still gripped by melodic intoxication, waited for the praise she felt she deserved. Not a word was heard in the room. Sonia turned and realized she was alone. Not understanding what had transpired, but vaguely sensing some disaster, she moved to the adjacent room. That, too, was empty. She lifted the heavy curtain concealing the drawing-room door. Dostoevsky and Anna were seated together on the sofa. A lamp dimly illuminated the chamber. Sonia could barely discern her sister’s face, but she saw Dostoevsky’s clearly - pale and altered. He held Anna’s hand in his and spoke to her, leaning close. His exalted, broken whisper barely tore the silence of the room. "Anna Vassilievna, my dear, listen to me: I have loved you from the very moment I saw you, and perhaps before... Mine is not friendship, but a passion that possesses me entirely..." Sonia’s vision blurred, the blood rushed to her head, she dropped the curtain and fled. She heard the sound of an overturned chair...
In October 1866, Dostoevsky met Anna Grigorevna Snitkina for the first time. She was a young woman of twenty, the daughter of a minor official. She was studying stenography, and her professor proposed that she take down by dictation a novel that Dostoevsky had to deliver to the publisher Stellovski before the 31st of October, interrupting the writing of Crimen y castigo (Crime and Punishment). On the 4th of October, at half-past eleven, the diligent and scrupulous stenographer crossed the threshold of Dostoevsky’s house. It was a vast building, teeming with a multitude of small dwellings inhabited by traders and craftsmen, much like the house where Raskolnikov lived. When she saw the writer, the girl was startled by his eyes: one was brown, while the pupil of the other, immeasurably dilated, overspread the iris. The maid served them two cups of tea, and Anna began to sip hers slowly. Meanwhile, Dostoevsky paced the study, sat at his desk, rose again, smoking without pause, extinguishing one cigarette only to light another. He appeared ill, exhausted, and spoke nervously and restlessly, constantly shifting the subject. He asked her name, forgot it, and asked again. At times he seemed to ignore her. She remained silent, fearing to interrupt his reflections. Finally, Dostoevsky declared that he would not manage to dictate that morning and asked her to return at eight in the evening.
By evening, the restless and oppressive atmosphere of the morning had been transformed. Dostoevsky spoke with great energy and fluency, appearing as though he wished to communicate with someone he felt was sympathetic and a friend. He asked Anna Grigorevna about her family, where she had studied, what had driven her to learn stenography... Then he told her, too, of his failed execution. "I see myself again," he said, "in Semenovskaia Square, in the midst of my condemned companions. It is true I had but a few minutes of life remaining, but these minutes were like years, like decades of years. I had a long life before me. My God, how I wished to live! How precious life seemed to me! I saw my entire past again: not all of it was beautiful. I experienced a violent desire to begin anew, to live much, much longer..." Finally, he began to dictate El jugador (The Gambler), pacing the room and smoking incessantly. Their collaborative work continued the following day and proceeded daily, from twelve in the morning until four in the afternoon, until the 30th of October. While they took tea, Dostoevsky recounted the turns of his life to the naive and scrupulous stenographer. All these confidences were sad, bitter, and painful. Once, Anna Grigorevna said to him: "Why do you remember only your days of misfortune? Speak to me a little of a happy period of your life." "Happy..." he repeated. "I have never been happy, or at least, not as I had dreamed of becoming. That happiness I am still awaiting. Not long ago, I wrote to a friend that, despite all the vicissitudes I have endured, I have never renounced the idea of one day having a happy life..."
The days of work sped by as the pages of El jugador (The Gambler) grew; the 31st of October approached, and Dostoevsky and Anna wondered what would become of them. The final part of Crimen y castigo (Crime and Punishment) would bring them together again, but their relations were no longer those of a writer and a stenographer, nor the fatherly-filial bond that might unite a mature man and a girl. In those weeks of collaboration, all of Anna Grigorevna’s former interests had been forgotten. She no longer attended her stenography classes, rarely saw her acquaintances; her previous occupations seemed hollow and futile; she was bored at home, living only for the next encounter with Dostoevsky, and headed to work with diligent enthusiasm. When asked how she had fallen in love with a man who could have been her father, she replied smiling: "But he was young, far more alive and interesting than the youths of my age, who wore spectacles and looked like old, boring professors of zoology." Her love was nourished by pity. For the first time in her life, she had seen a man so wretched and offended, and she felt a profound compassion for him. As for Dostoevsky, we do not know if he loved the young stenographer; he must have felt drawn by her silent adoration and by that mixture of childlike joy and punctilious seriousness that characterized her. He wished to make a wager, like those that never went well for him at the gaming tables: to bet his entire life, past and future, hopes and despair, upon that gray-eyed girl and await the outcome.
On the 8th of November, Anna Grigorevna went to Dostoevsky’s house to begin writing the final part of Crimen y castigo (Crime and Punishment). She arrived half an hour late, and Dostoevsky rushed to open the door, helping her remove her hat and coat. He seemed moved. Anna Grigorevna saw with astonishment that a strange exaltation rejuvenated his features. "How happy I am to see you!" he said. "I was afraid you had forgotten your promise." She asked him why he was so happy. "Tonight I had a very beautiful dream," Dostoevsky replied. "Is that all?" she remarked. "Oh! Do not laugh, please. For me, dreams are prophetic. When I dream of my brother Mikhail, and especially of my father, I know a danger threatens me. Tonight, in my dream, I was sitting before a rosewood box where I keep manuscripts, letters, and the most cherished memories. I was searching through my letters when, suddenly, I saw a kind of star shining. While I continued searching through the papers, that light never stopped moving from one side to another. Finally, I found a small diamond that sparkled in a thousand facets. I do not remember what I did with it. I have had other dreams and I do not know what happened to my diamond... But it doesn't matter, it was a wonderful dream."
Then, Dostoevsky began to recount the plot of a novel. The protagonist was an unsuccessful painter, a man of his age, prematurely aged, sad, suffering, burdened with debts, sensitive, incapable of expressing his own feelings. The painter meets a young woman of twenty - sweet, good, kind, not very beautiful but not plain either - and becomes convinced she could make him happy. But this dream seems unattainable. What could an old and anguished man offer a girl full of the joy of living? Dostoevsky broke off his narrative at this point. He turned to Anna Grigorevna and asked anxiously: "Is it possible that such a young girl could return this love? Is it not improbable?" "Why improbable?" she responded with fervor. Dostoevsky did not take his eyes off her. "Then do you truly believe she could love him all her life?" he continued. After a moment of silence, he proceeded in his hoarse, veiled voice: "Imagine that this painter were I, that I had made a declaration of love and asked you to be my wife. What would you answer me?" His expression was heavy and vacillating. Anna Grigorevna said: "I would answer that I love you and that I will love you all my life." When an hour later Dostoevsky accompanied her to the door of the house, he said: "Anna Grigorevna, now I know what has happened to my little diamond..." "Have you remembered the end of your dream?" "Oh, no! But finally I have found the diamond I wish to keep until the end of my days." "Fiodor Mikhailovich, you are totally deceived," Anna Grigorevna replied, laughing. "You have only found some ordinary pebble."
II
As we traverse again and again the streets of Crimen y castigo (Crime and Punishment), as we seek ourselves in this "fantastic, somber history, in this event of our time, in which the human heart has grown clouded," we ask ourselves who Raskolnikov is. The first impression is clear. Raskolnikov is a romantic hero, an idealist in the style of Schiller, a pale angel: "beautiful, with magnificent dark eyes, chestnut hair, tall, slender, agile." Like every romantic hero, he is solitary, proud, and haughty; he always seems to hide something within himself, and others have the impression that he looks down upon them from a fantastic pedestal. A dark and gloomy Luciferian atmosphere envelops his figure. While all of us allow ourselves to be seduced by life’s occasions, there is in him an intangible purity, a stony and inflexible core, proud and desperate, that no flattery manages to corrupt. Life does not suffice for him: existence alone is too little; he had always wanted more. He had been "a thousand times ready to give his life for an idea, for a hope, even for a dream."
This world, limited and concrete, does not satisfy him, and he wishes to reach where other men cannot follow him, with a terrifying hardness, with a tenacity capable of overcoming any obstacle. If we ask him where he wishes to go, Raskolnikov knows not how to answer. He possesses an audacious mind, enamored of extremes, tempted by every temerity, which devises theories and tremendous goals; but these theories and goals, as also happened to Dostoevsky, are in a way alien to himself - abstract and gratuitous elaborations, born of the void, the burning transport of the pure mind. He constructs a theory of murder and, with the same necessity, with the same unsatisfied religious impulse, he could have constructed a theory of the soul’s mystical ascent, a theory of pain and repentance, a theory of the Russian "earth."
If we look behind these indeterminate passions, we discover in his heart a lake of apathy and indifference. While he contemplates the appearances of our earth, his fixed eyes see nothing, or see only the specter hidden behind every created form; while he acts or speaks, he feigns a participation he does not possess and seems to "recite a lesson learned by heart." He remains a stranger to everything: the past is as distant from him as a star, and "the things that happen around him are as if they did not happen there, but a thousand miles away." Raskolnikov is the Stranger, who experiences a dark and stormy sense of detachment from things: a stranger to other men, to the vicissitudes of their lives, to the turns of this world and other worlds. He is a dead man, and all reality is dead to him.
On certain occasions, Raskolnikov wakes suddenly from this lethargy. If someone approaches him, he suffers a disagreeable feeling of repulsion: he looks at them with piercing eyes that flash with hatred, assails them with a voice trembling with rage in which the pleasure of offending is perceived. While walking the streets, amidst the vagrant and goalless crowd of St. Petersburg, he is "sickened by all the passers-by; their faces, their gaits, their movements disgust him." "How disgusting men are! What garbage men are!" are phrases that rise from the depths of his heart. In those moments, he feels an obstinate and terrifying disgust for all humanity, much like that which made Dostoevsky’s eyes flare.
“El Mal Absoluto” (Pietro Citati)
Những tác phẩm của Fyodor Dostoyevsky hiện có tại InBook:
