On the windless night of his father’s murder, Mitya Karamazov approaches the house from the lane at the back. He creeps past the banya to the elder and white hazel bushes under the window of Fyodor Pavlovich’s bedroom. The old man leans out, beckoning lasciviously to his ‘angel’ Grushenka, gazing to left and right: the ‘profile that Mitya loathed so, his pendent Adam’s apple, his hooked nose, his lips that smiled in greedy expectation, were all brightly lit up by the slanting lamplight falling to the left from the room’.
In the last two years of his life, as emphysema choked him, Dostoevsky reimagined his home in Staraya Russa as the setting for scandal and murder within the ‘accidental’ Karamazov family. Local events served as material. Near the salt factory, a man called Peter Nazarov murdered his father. In a nearby street was the house of the debauched Major General von Sohn, one of a line of corrupt spa directors, who had been brutally murdered by a criminal gang not long before Dostoevsky’s first visit, and lives on in local memory as a prototype for Fyodor Pavlovich. Likhachev loved the authenticity in Dostoevsky’s novels, their truth to time and place. The writer’s genius was not ‘to structure a reality’, he observed, ‘but to structure his novels around reality’. He would ‘catch hold of a fact, a place, a chance meeting or a newspaper report, and give it a continuation. He would populate the streets, open the doors into apartments, go down into cellars, make up biographies for the people he passed in the streets.’
Dostoevsky’s house was made of narrow dark green clapboards, which were arranged in a zigzag pattern between the first and second floors. A sign saying ‘Writer’s Street’ had been fixed to one wall. During the Khrushchev ‘thaw’, the embankment was renamed for Dostoevsky, and the decision was made to restore the house and rebuild the banya and the summer house. This was the refuge of Dostoevsky’s last years, a time of ‘hard labour’ that he found more exhausting than his prison term in Omsk. ‘What a fantastic and devious old man!’ his friend Elena Shtakenshneider remarked of him then. ‘Dostoevsky is himself a magical tale, with its miracles, unexpected surprises, transformations, with its enormous terrors and trifles.’
I had a picture of life in the interior from the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s daughter, Lyuba. The house was small, ‘in the German taste of the Baltic provinces’, she recalled, ‘full of unexpected surprises, secret wall cupboards, sliding doors leading to dark, dusty, spiral staircases’. In its narrow rooms, furnished in the empire style, mirrors with a greenish patina gave off frightening reflections. On the walls were pictures of ‘monstrous Chinese women with nails two feet long and tiny feet’. Lyuba remembered long rainy days spent playing Chinese billiards in a closed verandah at the side of the house. Her father rose late, did gymnastics, sang when his mood was good, washed fastidiously and dressed in clean fine linen and starched collars. After his prayers, he drank two glasses of strong tea and took a third into his study, where everything was laid out on his desk in pedantic order. He rolled cigarettes and smoked heavily throughout the day. After lunch he dictated to his wife, who made a fair copy of what he had written during the previous night, and treated the children to sweetmeats from his desk drawer: figs, dates and nuts from Plotnikov’s, a small shop in town that appears under its own name in The Brothers Karamazov. Then he read, often from the lives of holy men, before his afternoon walk. In the evenings, he ate early with the children, telling them fairy tales, or reading aloud from Lermontov, Gogol and Schiller, and said his favourite prayer over them: ‘All my hope in Thee do I repose, O Mother of God, shelter me beneath Thy veil.’ Late at night, as his son and daughter coughed in their sleep, he wrote, listening to the gale outside breaking hundred-year-old trees, testing how far he could go in the literary portrayal of child abuse. What kind of God allows children to be sadistically killed, Ivan Karamazov challenges the devout Alyosha.
We pushed open the gate into the back garden. Small piles of thin, fresh planks, lightly covered by the falling snow, lay scattered among the white-skinned birches. I had a handwritten scrap of paper, given to me by my Slavophile friend in St Petersburg, with the names on it of three curators of the house-museum: Vera Ivanovna, Natalya Dmitrievna, Natalya Anatolievna. He had assured me that the mention of his name would ensure us a warm welcome and an informative visit. The leather-clad door was locked. A sign said the museum was open. We rang, waited, and rang again. Last light was draining out of the day. The garden felt desolate. Should we go and sit in the summer house, where Alyosha waited for his brother Mitya, and found instead his sinister probable half-brother, the epileptic household cook, Smerdyakov? ‘I may be only a soup maker,’ Alyosha heard Smerdyakov say, ‘but with luck I could open a cafe on Petrovka Street, in Moscow, for my cookery is something special, and there’s no one in Moscow, except the foreigners, whose cookery is anything special.’
I rang again, sensing movement inside the house at last, the sound of a door closing, footsteps. A tiny woman with nervous eyes looked out. I said my friend’s name. Very pleased, very pleased, she nodded round the leather door. Yes, she was Natalya Anatolievna, no, we could not come in, no, the museum was under remont, there was nothing to see, all the rooms were locked up, everything put away.
We sat in the silent garden where Dostoevsky imagined Smerdyakov crooning to the strum of his guitar. The windows were dark, like an ice-hole. Not every place will reveal its secret. A light came on in an upstairs room. Stacked high against the windowpane was a loose pile of old books. Balanced on top of the books was a white porcelain soup tureen.
EIGHT
Rostov-on-Don
‘We both looked on the world as a meadow in May, a meadow across which women and horses moved.’ ISAAC BABEL, ‘The Story of a Horse’
In the tumbledown backstreets that tip towards the Don, evening had begun to unfold. Down here, 750 miles south of Moscow, the spring was weeks ahead. Pop music and football commentary spilled from radios and televisions inside small brick houses, all built, said the brass fittings on their doors, in the 1870s. Doorways lay open, revealing shadowed passages, bare and cool, with blue tin letterboxes fixed to the walls. On wrought-iron balconies above the pavement, laundry and gutted fish hung on lines above a disarray of birdcages and broken furniture. A man with tattooed legs sat smoking in a dirty armchair, watching us pass. ‘Keep your money in a savings bank’, advised a new plastic sign on a grimy shopfront. Below Stanislavsky Street, the buildings were smaller, some no more than tin sheds. The road disintegrated into rubble and dirt. Inside a derelict-looking nineteenth-century factory building, men shouted over the grind and shriek of a machine tool. Irises grew in clumps on a patch of waste ground, still folded into tight green spears, lipped with petals of urgent purple. A dog nosed the garbage sliding down the hill to the waterfront, where the cherry trees were already in blossom.
A young woman in a belted black vinyl coat stepped out of a corner door. She wore a wide choker and stilettoes strapped across the ankle. An old man passed, leaning heavily on a squeaking baby carriage filled with tightly-stuffed plastic bags. Catching her long hair in one hand, the young woman drew it across her shoulder, dropped a diamanté cellphone into her bag, glanced at the little boys scuffing up dust in the gutter, and turned away from the Don, up towards the centre of the town, her tread graceful and swift, despite her heels and the pocks in the asphalt.