The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (10 page)

During his last day, journalists, relatives, and visitors crowded their home. “My dear husband died in the presence of a multitude, some of them deeply attached to him but others entirely indifferent both to him and to the inconsolable sorrow of our orphaned family.”
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Upon his death, a stream of visitors poured through their apartment for two and a half days, and the rooms were so packed that Anna had a hard time pushing through the crowd to stand near the coffin in Dostoevskys’ study. “At times the air grew so thick, there was so little oxygen left, that the icon-lamp and the tall tapers surrounding the catafalque would go out. There were strangers in our house not only during the day but even through the night.”

Anna shut herself in a separate room occupied by her mother but would not be left alone: delegations knocked on her door to read addresses about Dostoevskys’ importance as a national writer. She heard them in silence, suppressing every show of emotion, “out of fear that some idle reporter would write a preposterous description of my grief the next day.”

After three days of listening to the many speeches of condolence, I finally became desperate and said to myself, “My God, how they torture me! What is it to me, ‘what Russia has lost’? What do I care about Russia now? Can’t you understand what
I’ve
lost? I’ve lost the best person in the world, the joy and pride and happiness of my life, my sun, my god! Take pity on me, take pity on me as a person, and don’t tell me at this time about Russia’s loss!”

A messenger on behalf of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra came to offer a place in one of their cemeteries without charge, an honor to the writer who advocated the Orthodox faith. As she had promised Dostoevsky, Anna inquired about a plot near the poet Zhukovsky’s grave and it turned out that the site was available.

Thirty thousand people attended the funeral, but Anna and Lyuba, eleven, left their tickets at home and were stopped at the monastery gate, nearly missing the requiem. They told Anna that
there were “plenty of Dostoevskys’ widows here who have gone inside already, and some of them are with children, too.” There were fifteen hundred mourners in the Church of the Holy Spirit, and Anna and her daughter only managed to get in when an acquaintance confirmed their identity. Walking directly behind the coffin to the cemetery, Anna could not see the huge procession, stretching for almost a mile, with banners and wreaths bearing Dostoevskys’ name, titles of his works, and his quotations; she would only later learn this from illustrations and articles. When the procession entered the cemetery, already packed, fans had to climb trees and cling to fences. More than seventy wreaths were brought to Dostoevskys’ grave, taken away at the end of the ceremony for souvenirs.

Anna refused the offer from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to pay for the funeral, believing it was her responsibility. Another offer was to educate her children at state expense in the most prestigious institutions. She could enroll Fedya at the Imperial Page Corps, which educated aristocratic elite, being Russia’s equivalent of Eton, and send Lyuba to the Smolny Institute, the best school for daughters of the nobility. But she was determined to raise her children on the proceeds from publishing Dostoevskys’ works, by the labor of their father and mother, as he himself would have done, so she would send them to other schools.

When the Minister of Finance sent a letter saying that the Emperor had granted her an annual pension of two thousand rubles, Anna rushed to Dostoevskys’ study to share the news, which would undoubtedly make him happy,
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but upon entering his room realized he was no longer in this world. Her forgetfulness lasted several months after Dostoevskys’ death: Anna would hurry home so as not to keep him waiting for dinner, bought his favorite sweets, and would want to share some news with him right away.

Although Anna was only thirty-five when Dostoevsky died and survived him by thirty-seven years, she never considered remarrying. “I was clearly aware of one thing only: that from that moment on, my personal life … was finished, and that I was
orphaned in my heart forever.” Later, she would remark with a typical irony, “But whom could one marry after Dostoevsky? Tolstoy only!”
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During the decades that followed, Anna carried on her mission as before: she felt strongly that her task was to disseminate Dostoevskys’ ideas and works.

Contemplating the fourteen years of their marriage, which she said gave her “the greatest happiness possible,” she wrote that theirs was a union of two different personalities with “dissimilar views.” She didn’t echo Dostoevskys’ political views, nor did she try to meddle with his soul, and he “prized my non-interference in his spiritual and intellectual life. And therefore he would sometimes say to me, ‘You are the only woman who ever understood me!’ … He looked on me as a rock on which he felt he could lean, or rather, rest. ‘And it won’t let you fall, and it gives warmth.’”
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The only person Dostoevsky trusted completely, Anna became his ambassador after his death. This role required her to eventually liquidate her prosperous book business,
F.M. Dostoevsky, Bookseller (To the Provinces Only)
. Offered fifteen hundred rubles to sell it, she refused, feeling responsible for the integrity of the firm, established under her husband’s name. It was inexpensive to run and had the potential to develop into a major book firm, which had happened to similar small services she knew about. But she gave up this attractive idea, closed her firm rather than sell it, and undertook publishing Dostoevskys’ collected works.

Beginning in 1883, Anna issued seven editions of Dostoevskys’ works, with a success she did not anticipate. The first edition in fourteen volumes included, aside from Dostoevskys’ fiction, his letters, notebooks, and material for his first biography. These were mostly reminiscences about Dostoevsky, which friends and family contributed at Anna’s urging. Later, to satisfy the demand, she also issued separate volumes of Dostoevskys’ prose at affordable prices.

Her financial success left her with mixed feelings because Dostoevsky could not enjoy it. He used to worry that after his death his family would become impoverished and there would be no money for his children’s education. Anna also witnessed his artistic despair
when he wrote hurriedly without time to revise his great novels. He worked under tight deadlines, his memory clouded by epileptic attacks, with no time to recover: he had to rush to dispatch his manuscripts to get paid. Anna would remind Dostoevskys’ critics of this when reading their remarks that his prose was less polished than Tolstoy’s.

For decades, Anna collected everything associated with Dostoevskys’ memory. When the Moscow Historical Museum gave her a separate space for storage, a bright eight-cornered room to keep Dostoevskys’ archive, she donated his manuscripts, notebooks, letters, portraits, busts, library, autographs, and numerous other artifacts—4,230 items in all. In addition, Anna produced a detailed four-hundred-page index of these items, including information about books Dostoevsky read, buildings associated with his memory, etc. When her index was published in 1906, it was described as “a unique achievement in Russian literary bibliography.”
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With proceeds from her publishing she established a parochial boarding school in Dostoevskys’ name for peasant children in Staraya Russa, both boys and girls. Becoming the school’s administrator, she raised funds at charitable concerts she organized. Before 1917, over a thousand girls graduated from Dostoevskys’ school, becoming rural teachers. Her other dream was to establish a Dostoevsky literary museum in their Staraya Russa house, which she purchased after his death. According to her will, the house would go to their son Fyodor, who had to maintain it as a museum.
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In her letter to philosopher and Dostoevsky scholar Vasily Rosanov, who left a prominent work about
The Brothers Karamazov
, Anna wrote, “If I did something for the memory of my dear husband, I did it out of gratitude for … the hours of highly artistic enjoyment I experienced reading his works.”
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(Rosanov was fascinated with Dostoevsky, whom he never met; this interest led him to marry Dostoevskys’ former mistress, Apollinaria Suslova.)

In 1906, Anna sold the copyright to Dostoevskys’ collected works to the rich publisher Alfred Marx, who issued them with a
circulation of 120,000 copies, exceeding Anna’s publications more than twenty times over. Although she shared proceeds with her children, the public speculated about her immense wealth. Anna wrote to Rosanov in October 1907, “I am amused when they call me ‘rich.’ I have no wealth. I have invested and keep investing my earnings in a school in Staraya Russa, the Museum, and my publications [of Dostoevskys’ separate works], and as for myself I live very modestly.”
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Although Anna worked to preserve Russia’s cultural heritage, in pre-revolutionary years she was seen as “a tight-fisted and shrewd businesswoman.” Dostoevskys’ biographer Leonid Grossman, who interviewed her in winter 1916–17, summarizes contemporary criticism of her:

During her lifetime Anna Grigorievna earned a reputation as a business person, practical, resourceful, but at times going too far in her efficiency. She achieved brilliant results in a complex publishing business, which she learned on her own.… Anna Grigorievna’s efficiency inspired many accusations and in the end cast a … shadow on her reputation, obscuring the true achievements of this remarkably hard-working woman.…
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In her sixties, Anna was regularly seen in public libraries, where, in Grossman’s words, she worked with “all the stamina and verve of a young student.”
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She was working on her
Reminiscences
, she told Grossman, and her mission was far from over. In 1909, she became a member of the newly established Russian Stenographical Society. Anna revisited Europe, the cities where she and Dostoevsky had lived; in the Dresden gallery and in Basel she stood in front of the paintings that had impressed him. She dined in the “Italian Village” overlooking the Elbe, writing her daughter Lyuba, “The memories overwhelmed me.”
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In 1910, upon learning that a talented director, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, was staging
The Brothers Karamazov
at the Moscow Art Theater, Anna wrote him saying she wanted to see
the play. Two years later, during its premiere in Petersburg, she met with the actor
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who played the role of Dmitry Karamazov. He would later describe how during an intermission, Anna (then sixty-five) approached him, saying excitedly, “How wonderful, that’s precisely what Fyodor Mikhailovich had in mind. Oh, if only he were alive, if only he were alive!” Their ten-minute conversation was more valuable to the actor than “a hundred biographies about Dostoevsky … I sensed his breath beside me.”
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Anna too recalled that premiere with elation: “I was sitting in my box-seat and praying to God, so that He would grant me the ultimate happiness by sending me death right here, this very minute. My sacred dream came true—I saw my
Brothers Karamazov
. To die with theater glasses in my hands, which Fyodor Mikhailovich presented to me—what a good death that would be!”
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In 1917, Sergei Prokofiev, who had recently composed the opera
The Gambler
, also wanted to meet Anna. He said he was anxious to meet the woman to whom Dostoevsky had dictated this novel. When they parted, the composer asked Anna to make an inscription about the sun in his guest journal. He expected she would write something about slanting rays of the evening sun, since it was Dostoevskys’ celebrated imagery, but Anna wrote: “The sun of my life—Fyodor Dostoevsky.”
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She met the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution in a sanatorium near Petersburg, working on some unfinished projects and annotating Dostoevskys’ letters, which she was preparing for publication. As she remarked in 1916, his letters to her were still the source of her greatest joy and pride. In her temporary home she was surrounded, as usual, with Dostoevskys’ portraits, manuscripts, and books. Soon after the March uprising in 1917,
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a crowd of armed workers came to the resort, searching for a tsarist minister. “The crowd moved directly to our hotel, and in a few minutes we heard from downstairs the slamming of doors and tramping of feet … I locked myself here, in this room, thinking with horror that these things, so precious to me, all these portraits, piles of manuscripts, letters, and books were doomed to perish.”
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The revolutionaries
did not search her room, saying they knew who she was. Their contemporary events did not interest her: as she told Grossman, she remained fully immersed in the past, somewhere around the 1870s, amidst the society of Dostoevskys’ friends, the circle that was no more. “I feel that everyone who studies Dostoevskys’ life and works becomes my family.”
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In May 1917, she traveled to the Caucasus, joining her son’s family at her dacha near the Black Sea. Part of a small estate, it consisted of a cottage and an apple orchard she herself had planted; she loved the place, naming it “Otrada” (bliss). Dostoevsky felt his family should have an estate, and she wanted their son to inherit it.

That summer, malaria became widespread when construction of a railroad between Adler and Tuapse disturbed swamps. Anna and her family caught the disease and had to urgently leave their place in August. Arriving in Tuapse exhausted, she was unable to continue to Petersburg with the others and stayed to recuperate. Later, she proceeded alone to Yalta in the Crimea and settled in a hotel called “France.” In this room, in addition to fighting malaria, she suffered a series of mini-strokes.

She spent days in bed, shivering underneath a heap of blankets and her coat, speaking with occasional visitors about Dostoevsky. A woman physician, Zinaida Kovrigina, who visited Anna recalls that Dostoevsky constituted “the goal of her existence, the air she breathed till her last days.”
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According to her visitors and her grandson Andrei Dostoevsky, Anna had several baskets with Dostoevskys’ manuscripts, but the fate of these papers is unknown.
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