At first the spa held no charm for Dostoevsky. He knew the resorts of Germany and Switzerland, where he had sought remedies for his epilepsy over the past decade. He found Staraya Russa society vulgar and pretentious, vainly aspiring to the glamour of the European beau monde. The women looked coarse and trashy in their extravagant couture, there were not enough cake shops in the town, the park was unimpressive, everyone spoke bad French, and the waters were wretched. The only thing he valued was his subscription to the spa’s library, where he was often seen in the afternoons, reading newspapers and journals.
Dostoevsky was sceptical about doctors, insisting that a modest German was usually superior to the grandest Russian physician. The Brothers Karamazov is full of jokes, burlesque and riddles about doctors and the latest enigmas of physiological science. The town doctor, who claims to understand epilepsy and uselessly medicates the dying child Ilyusha, is named Herzenstube, ‘room of the heart’. The expensive Moscow physician, who heartlessly advises Ilyusha’s indigent father to send the boy to Syracuse for climate, is a figure of bitter satire. In prison, Mitya Karamazov caricatures the behaviourist ideas of the famous French physiologist Claude Bernard, who died in the year that Dostoevsky conceived the novel. Dostoevsky’s own most beloved physician, Stepan Yanovsky, described the writer as ‘an insatiable analyst of moral chemistry’, perceiving the kinship between his writing and contemporary scientific exploration of the relationship between the mind and body. Yanovsky’s wife, the comic actress Alexandra Shubert, called the writer a serdtseved, a ‘scholar of the heart’.
‘I am not a doctor … I know nothing of medicine’, the novel’s narrator says, as Satan appears, or appears to appear, to Ivan Karamazov. The narrator promises that he will give some account of Ivan’s ‘brain disorder’. Instead he lets the reader eavesdrop on a dialogue between Ivan and Satan, who may or may not be a symptom of Ivan’s nervous breakdown. ‘Never for one minute have I taken you for reality,’ Ivan shouts at the seedy gentleman who appears on the sofa opposite him. ‘You are a lie, you are my illness … You are the incarnation of myself, but only of one side of me.’ Then Satan says things that have never entered Ivan’s head, remarking on the enigma of dreams, ‘from indigestion or anything’, in which the most ordinary people see artistic visions ‘woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Lev Tolstoy could not create’. The visitor is characterised in teasing detail. He likes to steam himself with merchants and priests at the public banya, and complains that, much as he likes ‘being doctored’, he can find no cure for his colds. Satan, whom the narrator calls the ‘visitor’ or the ‘voice’, is nothing like Ivan, yet he knows the innermost workings of Ivan’s mind. He mocks Ivan’s philosophical writings, but has no answers of his own to the metaphysical and political questions they pose. Whether a supernatural being or the symptom of a brain disorder, the devil has no idea whether God exists or what history means. He too looks forward, he tells Ivan, to the end of all things, when the ‘secret is revealed’.
*
A signpost under the trees pointed in four directions: to the library and entertainment complex, the main gates, the drinking gallery, the hydrotherapy pools. A tatty notice on the warped metal door of the pool building reminded bathers to present their dermatological, gynaecological, venereological and fluorographical certificates to the attendant on duty. Another advised swimmers to make ‘subjective evaluations’ of the health of their hearts. A list of eight possible physiological reactions to the waters ranged from ‘a nice pleasurable feeling of tiredness’ to acute fatigue, pain, dizziness, headache and nausea.
Pavlov advocated bromide and prolonged sleep for every variety of psychological stress or disorder. In 1921, Lenin signed a decree setting up a special state committee assigned with creating favourable conditions for Pavlov’s work. Pavlov’s materialist explanations of human behaviour were congenial to the ideologues of Bolshevism. (Later Pavlov would fearlessly denounce Lenin and Stalin, calling the Soviet government ‘shit’, and telling Molotov to his face that collectivisation would never work because it contradicted the psychology of the Russian peasant.) In the same year, Lenin commissioned a detailed report on the state and utility of the Staraya Russa spa. Four years later, it became the first health resort in Russia to work through the winter. In the late 1920s, when Lenin Corners were appearing in nationalised public buildings all over Staraya Russa, Dostoevsky was regarded as a potentially dangerous writer. Just as bromide and sleep inhibited the breakdown of the human machine, Dostoevsky’s writings, which, as he once said, aimed to ‘light up the dark sides of the human soul that art does not like to approach’, threatened to excite internal disorder in Soviet man. The critic Vyacheslav Polonsky was involved in debates about the anti-revolutionary power of Demons, a novel which was never published as a separate volume in the Soviet period. People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharsky cautioned that Dostoevsky was a ‘powerfully active substance which should not simply be placed in the hands of just anybody, especially the younger generation’. Dostoevsky contained too many riddles about the body and the soul, whose relationship the Bolshevik intellectuals were hoping would soon be reduced to a simple materialist formula. Among Molotov’s books (bearing the stamp of a Communist Party Workers’ Club and carefully recatalogued into his private library) is Lunacharsky’s Art as an Aspect of Human Behaviour, published by the State Medical Publisher in 1930. Marked in the margin are the sentences ‘Comrades, I think it very probable that in the very near future we will grasp the human soul and discover what it is. Why, indeed, is it so surprisingly mysterious?’ Molotov admired Dostoevsky, despite the mysteries, and wondered why Lenin had hated the novelist. ‘He was a man of genius, without question, that Dostoevsky,’ he told Felix Chuev, adding that, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky got things wrong, because the two nineteenth-century writers were stuck in a bourgeois point of view: ‘We have risen above their level.’
*
It was getting colder as we walked out on to Mineral Street. Lights were coming on, easing the shadows of an early dusk among trees and buildings. We decided to take a long way round to Dostoevsky’s villa on the banks of the Porusya, making a detour up to the corner of Engels Street, where our map indicated a big hotel called the Polist in one direction and the Sadko Cafe in the other. We cut into the small park set around the war memorial. We could see a cluster of bright lights at the end of the park, and imagined a cosy hotel dining room.
On the monument to the Glory of the Heroes of the Great Patriotic War there were effigies of soldiers, partisans and guns. Staraya Russa may have suffered more torture and destruction during the three-year German occupation than any town in Russia. ‘We have all become landowners,’ one Nazi lieutenant wrote home from here; ‘we have acquired Slavic slaves, and we do with them whatever we like.’ Before the guns had stopped firing, the heir to the once German-owned ‘Luther’ plywood factory hurried to Staraya Russa to re-establish the family business. Expropriated after 1917, the factory on the edge of town had been renamed Proletariat.
Adolescent boys and girls joined the partisans in their ‘forest republic’, fortifying the swamps, living among the fat roots of prehistoric pine trees. Camouflaged in white, they blew up bridges and set fire to woodpiles bound for Germany. They stole into town at night to paste copies of their newspaper on walls and doors over Nazi commands, boasting of their victories: the ambush of a supply train, the detonation of a German car, or the shooting of a ‘fascist dog’ on the highway. The town photographer collaborated with the Nazis, handing over negatives of active partisans. Locals suspected of helping them were hanged from the balcony of the House of the Peasant. When the Nazis evacuated, there were only 165 locals left, and four buildings standing. The spa had been turned into a cemetery. One German soldier sent a photograph of the ruins home as a postcard, captioned ‘a town that will never be reborn’.