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In my free time from researching the drama of Florence’s centuries-long repentance for having exiled their greatest poet in 1302, I raced through The Miraculous Years, the fourth volume of Joseph Frank’s five-volume life of Dostoevsky.
I learned that forty-six-year-old Dostoevsky had gone abroad shortly after his marriage in 1867 to Anna Snitkina, the twenty-one-year-old stenographer who had helped him meet the deadline for The Gambler. The couple left Russia partly because Dostoevsky believed that the European climate was better for his epilepsy, and partly to escape the creditors, relatives, and hangers-on who were making Anna’s home life a misery. Ironically, considering the text that brought them together, Dostoevsky was seized anew in Dresden by his pathological obsession with roulette. He made a three-day trip to the famous casino of Homburg, which in fact dragged on for ten days, during which he lost not only all his money but also his watch, so that afterward, he and his wife never knew what time it was.
When the newlyweds decided to move to Switzerland that summer, Dostoevsky was unable to resist the lure of a stop in Baden-Baden. In between epileptic fits, he lost most of Anna’s jewelry and managed to cement a lifelong animus against longtime Baden resident Ivan Turgenev. The contretemps was precipitated by a chance meeting with Ivan Goncharov, author of Oblomov, who told Dostoevsky that Turgenev had seen him on the street but had decided not to say anything, “knowing how gamblers do not like to be spoken to.” Because he happened at that time to owe Turgenev fifty rubles, Dostoevsky couldn’t be seen to be avoiding him (which he was). At their subsequent meeting, Turgenev said such terrible things about Russia that Dostoevsky finally suggested he buy a telescope. “What for?” Turgenev asked. Dostoevsky said the telescope would help Turgenev see Russia better, so he would know what he was talking about. Turgenev became “horribly angry.” Dostoevsky had taken up his hat and was preparing to leave when he “somehow, absolutely without intention,” ended up disburdening himself of everything that had “accumulated in [his] soul about the Germans in three months.” Nothing good, it turned out, had accumulated in his soul about the Germans, whom Turgenev, by contrast, admired deeply. The two writers parted, vowing never again to set eyes upon one another.
The Dostoevskys were by this point desperate to leave Baden-Baden, but Fyodor Mikhailovich had gambled away the necessary funds. Finally Anna’s mother sent them a money order. On the day of their departure for Geneva, Dostoevsky was unable to restrain himself and lost fifty francs and a pair of Anna’s earrings at roulette. One of Anna’s rings had to be pawned. An hour and a half before their train was scheduled to leave, Dostoevsky rushed back to the casino and lost twenty more francs.
The next year, in Switzerland, Dostoevsky worked on The Idiot, and Anna gave birth to a little girl. Three-month-old Sonya died of pneumonia that spring. The devastated parents resumed their travels, crossing the Alps to Italy late that summer and eventually settling in Florence. “In my opinion,” wrote Dostoevsky in a letter to his niece, “it is worse than deportation to Siberia. I’m speaking seriously and without exaggeration . . . If here in Florence one finds such a sun and sky, and if there are marvels of art, quite literally unheard-of and indescribable, nonetheless in Siberia, when I left the penal colony, there were other advantages, which here are lacking.” Having to write “without continuous and firsthand Russian impressions” was a particular torment for Dostoevsky, who spent long hours in the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G. P. Vieusseux, poring over the Russian periodicals to which he was addicted.
Dostoevsky didn’t have an easy time finishing The Idiot. “I wrote the final chapters day and night in anguish and terrible uncertainty,” he reported to his niece. “I had two epileptic attacks, and I was ten days over deadline.” The last installments of the novel appeared in the journal Russian Messenger early in 1869.
Because of a delayed payment from his publishers, Dostoevsky ran out of money that spring. He and his wife (who took to calling each other Mr. and Mrs. Micawber) left the Via Guicciardini apartment and relocated to a single room overlooking the Mercato Vecchio, later described by Dostoevsky as “a market-square with arcades and splendid granite pillars [and] . . . a municipal fountain in the form of a gigantic bronze boar from whose throat the water flowed (it is a classic masterpiece of rare beauty).”
I, too, had been struck by that fountain, which is for some reason known as Il Porcellino: “the piglet.” It was quite jarring to come into the square for the first time and see, not the piglet one had been expecting, but a huge disaffected-looking boar. Gazing upon the Porcellino, I found myself recalling a line from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” in which a police officer is knocked off his feet by “an ordinary adult piglet which came tearing out of a private house.” This sentence is sometimes cited as an example of Gogol’s absurd use of language: If it’s an adult, then how is it a piglet? Apparently, the same absurd use of language was made by the Florentines when naming their gigantic bronze boar fountain.
In the apartment overlooking the Porcellino, Dostoevsky and his wife caught two tarantulas. On the night of the first tarantula, Dostoevsky lay awake for hours, remembering a certain Cossack of his acquaintance who had died of a tarantula bite fifteen years earlier in Semipalatinsk. Only by repeatedly “reciting aloud Kozma Prutkov’s didactic fable ‘The Conductor and the Tarantula’ ”* did he finally calm himself enough to drift into uneasy dreams.
From Florence, the Dostoevskys returned to Dresden. Over the next twenty months, Dostoevsky wrote “The Eternal Husband” and the first section of the novel that would eventually become Demons.
Arguably Dostoevsky’s most enigmatic novel, sprawling, ideologically overpopulated, generically ambiguous, Demons—formerly translated as The Possessed—haunts me like a prophetic dream. The title comes from the novel’s epigraph: the verses Luke 8:32–36, in which demons leave the man whom they have possessed and enter a herd of swine; the swine rush down a steep bank into a lake and are drowned.
Demons is the story of certain “very strange events” unfolding in a provincial Russian town, a place “hitherto not remarkable for anything.” The narrator—whose eccentric, discursive chronicle includes scenes at which he himself can’t possibly have been present—is a friend of one of the key characters in the noveclass="underline" an aging pedagogue, poet, and lapsed scholar named Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, whose academic distinction consists of having once “managed to defend a brilliant thesis on the nearly emerged civic and Hanseatic importance of the German town of Hanau, in the period between 1413 and 1418, together with the peculiar and vague reasons why that importance never took place.” Twenty-two years before the events narrated in Demons, Stepan Trofimovich is appointed as tutor to the only son of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, a wealthy local landowner. He becomes very close with his ten-year-old pupil, frequently waking him up at night “to pour out his injured feelings in tears before him”; the two then “throw themselves into each other’s embrace and weep.”