By Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé
Part Three.
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Dostoevsky, 1872, by W.G. Perow.
FREEDOM INDEED, BUT ONLY relative. Dostoyevsky was placed in the ranks of a Siberian regiment. Two years later, in 1856, the change of reign brought him his pardon. Promoted to his former rank as an officer, and reappointed to all civil rights, he was shortly after authorized to send in his papers, but that was as yet far from receiving permission to return to Europe, and above all from obtaining leave to publish his writings, without which life to an author was as nought. At last, in 1859, after ten years of exile, he recrossed the Ural Mountains and entered a New Russia, in which everything seemed changed, everything, so to speak, “aired,” trembling with impatience and hope on the eve of the Great Emancipation.
He brought a wife with him, the widow of a late comrade in the Petrachevsky conspiracy, whom he met in Siberia, loved, and married. As with everything that concerned his life, this bit of romance during his exile brought him unhappiness, to be ennobled by self-abnegation. The young woman loved somebody else better, and it did not take long before she went over to the other man. For a whole year, so his letters show us, Dotoyevsky did all he could to further the happiness of the woman he loved, and of the man his rival, even to writing to St. Petersburg that all obstacles in the way of their union might be removed. “As for myself,” he writes at the end of one of those letters, “by God! I shall drown myself or take to drink.” This incident of his private life is reproduced in his Humbled and Outraged [published in English as The Insulted and Injured
