AT THIS TIME ESPECIALLY, during the memorable years of the emancipation, their ideas, affected by the long years of restraint, had become foolish. The metel had arisen – that furious wind which at times whips up the snow-fields, darkens the air with their frozen flakes, effaces the tracks and hides the view. In this semi-darkness a train comes along with its engine smothered in its own dense vapour, propelled by imprisoned forces which make it tremble with impatience, and dashes at full speed into the unknown. Such was Russia in those days.
The Memoirs of M. Strakhoff, a fellow worker of Dostoyevsky at this time, contains a passage which deserves notice, for nothing can be more instructive as regards the state of affairs and the men at that period:
“These are the circumstances in which one of our editors, Ivan Dolgomostyeff, a most worthy and sensible young man, went suddenly mad under my very eyes. He died shortly after. He lived by himself in a furnished apartment. In the beginning of December, when the extreme cold began, he one day appeared before me, and begged me, with tears in his eyes, to save him from the persecutions and annoyances to which, he said, he was subjected in his rooms. I suggested his remaining with me at my house. A few days later, on returning home after midnight, I found him still awake. From the room where he slept he began to talk in what struck me as an incoherent manner……. I begged him to stop talking and to go to sleep. I then slumbered an hour or two later I was awakened by the sound of a voice. I listened in the dark. It was my guest, who was talking to himself. His voice became louder and louder, and he sat up in his bed. I soon realized that he was raving mad. What was to be done? It was too late to fetch a doctor or to go to a hospital. I awaited the dawn. For five or six hours I listened to his ravings. As I happened to know all his ideas, and the phrases in which my friend always expressed them, I was able to disentangle, if I may say so, the ‘secret foolishness’ of this madness. It was a chain of ideas and phrases I was long familiar with. It was ass if this unfortunate Dolgomostyeff’s whole soul and all his thoughts and sentiments had been pulverized into minute atoms, and that these had reunited anyhow. To most people the same thing happens on suddenly awakening, when thoughts and words which fill our brain condense into quaint, often insensate, imaginings…. There was one underlying thought which in a measure connected his ramblings. It was the ever-recurring wish to find a new line of action for our political party to adopt. It was with sorrow and fear that in my friend’s delirious wanderings I recognized the discussions and themes which occupied our columns as well as our literary debating clubs night and day the last few years.”
In this same way some of these brains actually burst from too inflated hopes; others became void through disappointed hope. Into these empty spaces Nihilism flowed freely and took possession. It was a fatal, logical sequence of shattered enthusiasms. This was the time of Dostoyevsky’s advent, and from this moment he absorbed romance and politics. Abandoning the purely artistic idea, he separated from Gogol’s influence, and consecrated himself entirely to the “new spirit.”
In 1865 began a series of miserable years for our author. His second journal, like a literary charger, was killed under him and he lay crushed under its heavy weight of debt. He first lost his wife, then his brother Michael, who associated with him in his work. To escape his creditors he flew abroad, first to Germany, then to Italy, to lead a wretched existence. Unwell, and continually interrupted in his work by his epileptic fits, he returned to Russia, only to raise money in advance, from his publishers. His letters were full of expressions of despair with regard to the unfavourableness of his contracts, which almost strangled him. Europe made very little impression on him. What struck him most was an execution he witnessed in Lyons, which, recalling to mind the scenes of Semenovsky, made it a stock subject for his characters to relate in all his future novels. “And for all that,” he wrote at this time, “I have only begun to live. Funny, is it not? A real cat’s life!” But, as a matter of fact, during that anxious time between 1865 and 1871, he composed three great novels: Crime and Punishment
