One The Dead Leaves The boy's peculiarities bewildered the officers and the other cadets. They noticed his awkwardness during drills and his refusal to join in on pranks. His gray eyes were deep set and penetrating. At night, the noisy cadets would scramble back to their quarters while a drummer would make his rounds and beat the cadence for lights-out, and Dostoevsky would be off somewhere else, bending over his notebook at a desk by a cold window embrasure in one of the castle's quieter corner chambers. The drum taps would echo off the imitation marble walls. The original statuary was gone. The carpets were gone. The old rosewood and mahogany floors had been pulled up and replaced with parquet after the imperial family fled. The castle was originally intended to be a refuge. In 1797, Tsar Paul I, inspired by premonitions, ordered five thousand men to construct a safe residence for himself and his family, only to be strangled by his former Guards officers in his bedroom forty days after moving in. The walls were still wet. The tsar's suite was sealed up, the moats filled in, and the maps of secret vaults burned by the architect. The castle decayed for twenty years before it was renovated to house St. Petersburg's Academy of Engineers. What remained was an architectural jumble-Renaissance, Corinthian, Baroque-on jasper brick foundation stones. Ionic columns and arched windows, obelisks and niches, a dormant throne room, and ghost stories after lights-out. Sometimes, after pretending to go to sleep, Fyodor Mikhailovich would sneak back to the embrasure in his undergarments, a blanket over his shoulders, and write stories by a small, warm lamp. Dostoevsky's mother had died of tuberculosis when he was fifteen. Her health deteriorated until she no longer had the strength to comb her hair. After she died, his father began drinking and carrying on full conversations with his wife's ghost-"my little dove," he called her. Moy golubchik. She was affectionate. "The greatest pleasure in my life is when you're with me," she once wrote to her husband. She must've been the only one to call him an angel. Fyodor had spent childhood summers with his mother in Darovoe, the family's small estate south of Moscow. He loved the wild berries, the birds and hedgehogs, and the smell of dead leaves. He spent so much time in one forest area that they called it "Fedya's Grove." Those summers with his mother were a refuge from his tempestuous father. Fyodor wrote her a letter when he was thirteen: "When you left, dear Mama, I started to miss you terribly, and when I think of you now, dear Mama, I am overcome by such sadness that it's impossible to drive it away, if you only knew how much I would like to see you and I can hardly wait for that joyous moment." Dostoevsky arrived at the engineering castle about a year after his mother's death. "I can't say anything good about my comrades," he wrote to his father. Three years later he wrote to Mikhail, his older brother, with his opinion unchanged. "I've grown very sad being all alone, my dear brother. There's no one to talk to." He despised the hierarchies and hazing rituals. The senior students poured buckets of water down the newbies' collars. They'd force mama's boys to shout obscenities and mock their embarrassment. They'd pour ink on someone's paper and force him to lick it up. They replicated the commanders' corporal punishment in after-hours punches, kicks, and whippings. If you went to the infirmary, you were told to say you fell from a ladder. The academy's cruelty seemed exacerbated by careerism. Dostoevsky was irritated that boys of fourteen were plotting out their entire lives-scheming about how to ascend the ranks and make the most money. He, meanwhile, was indifferent to rank, squeamish about violence, outraged by bullying, pensive and sensitive and shy. He was the least soldierly cadet in the company. He executed drills awkwardly and disliked standing at attention. His shako-a tall, cylindrical military hat-did not impress. His dress coat with epaulets and high collar was ill fitting. His rifle and knapsack, according to one company member, seemed to weigh him down like fetters. After all the drills, lectures, and exams he had hardly any time for himself, hardly any time to read and write. "They're squeezing the life out of us," he told Mikhail. Dostoevsky had little aptitude for the subjects that mattered most, like geometry, trigonometry, and algebra ("I can't stand mathematics") or artillery theory (he borrowed someone else's notes) or fortifications ("such nonsense"). Ten rooms in the castle displayed meticulous clay and wood models of fortresses from Riga to Siberia that sat next to local soil samples and their corresponding bricks. This was meant to inspire. Dostoevsky spent countless hours drawing plans for bastions and guard towers, and yet, he confessed to his father, "I don't draw well." He excelled at the subjects that mattered least, the "intellectual subjects," he called them: history and catechism, Russian literature, French and German. He read Goethe's Faust and everything by E. T. A. Hoffmann. The few friendships he had were built around discussions of literature. One cadet remembered Dostoevsky pursuing his best friend down a hallway and shouting out one final point about Schiller. The academy's French instructor introduced him to Racine, Corneille, and Pascal as well as contemporary French literature. He read French novelists whenever he could. He tore through most of Victor Hugo and everything from Balzac he could find. He wrote to his father that it was "absolutely essential" that he subscribe to a French reading library, ostensibly to read the great French "military geniuses." "I'm passionately fond of military science," he assured his father. Finding ways to please his father became second nature. Dr. Dostoevsky was self-righteous, demanding, and quick to condemn his children's inadequacies. He had recently acquired hereditary nobility for his service as a medical doctor, and he groomed his two oldest sons to be military engineers despite their wishes because state service provided the best opportunity for upward social mobility. The plan quickly faltered. Mikhail Mikhailovich was rejected from the Academy of Engineers for health reasons, and five months after Fyodor declared his great fondness for military science, he informed his father that he had failed to be promoted. He listed his examination scores but neglected to mention his dreadful performance in formation drill. He had to repeat his first year at the academy-all those lonely days counted for nothing. He confessed to Mikhail the shame he felt as well as his anger. "I'd like to crush the entire world at a single stroke." Mikhail was all Dostoevsky had. Fyodor was only twelve when Dr. Dostoevsky sent his two oldest sons away to an exclusive Moscow boarding school. Mikhail was one year older with dark blue eyes and hair covering his ears. He was reserved, like his brother, but he was calmer, more optimistic, and almost never angry. He adjusted more easily to life away from home-the other boarders used to mock Fyodor for lagging behind Mikhail academically. The brothers were inseparable until Mikhail, following his rejection, was sent to another academy in Revel (now Tallinn, Estonia). Fyodor suffered the academy alone. "Dear Brother," Fyodor wrote after explaining his lack of promotion, "it's sad to live without hope . . . I look ahead, and the future horrifies me." Both brothers dreamed of being writers. They discussed literature and philosophy. Mikhail sent Fyodor poems, often about their childhood-"The Walk," "Vision of Mother," "The Rose." Fyodor sent voluble, neatly written letters featuring rapturous flights and painful despairs. When he ran out of space on the page, he wrote lines vertically in the margins. The brothers cataloged their after-hours reading. Fyodor shared his thoughts about Byron and Pushkin, Shakespeare and Homer. He admired Homer's "unshakable certainty in his calling." Sometimes there were long silences between his letters, but Fyodor reassured his brother, "I was never indifferent to you; I loved you for your poems, for the poetry of your life." Dostoevsky needed someone to hear his midnight-embrasure ideas. "It seems to me that our world is a purgatory of heavenly spirits bedimmed by sinful thought," he wrote to Mikhail. To be human is to be trapped somewhere between heaven and earth and to struggle to merge the two. "But to see only the cruel covering under which the universe languishes, to know that a single explosion of will is enough to smash it and merge with eternity, to know and to be like the last creature . . . is awful!" In June 1839, Dostoevsky received the news that his father had been murdered by his own serfs. It happened near their Darovoe estate, and the details were murky. Rumors circulated that one of the peasants lured him into the neighboring serf village by pretending to be sick, at which point twelve to fifteen men finished him off. His body had been dumped in a roadside field. The motive was also unclear, but it was easy to imagine. The previous year's harvest had been so bad that the peasants used their own straw roofs to feed their livestock, and conditions deteriorated from there. A severe winter had given way to a drought, and Dr. Dostoevsky was so frequently drunk that he was barely capable of managing himself, let alone an estate. It's unlikely he stored enough grain for an emergency, and his distrustful, irascible nature probably frayed tensions. Tales of peasants revolting against their masters circulated widely throughout Russia, and memories of full-scale rebellions were vivid. The image of murderous serfs always hovered on the edge of the Russian landowning consciousness. The two doctors who examined the body claimed that Dr. Dostoevsky had died of apoplexy, but rumors of murder spread from the neighbors to Dostoevsky's grandmother and then to the rest of the family. While the details were kept from the younger children, the oldest boys knew. Fyodor found out first, and he broke the news to Mikhail in a letter. The local officials who investigated, however, found no evidence of murder. The family saw this as a cover-up. It didn't take much to pay off the right people. The official cause of death might have encouraged the suspicions because "apoplexy" could refer to a heart attack, a stroke, or a cerebral hemorrhage as well as to traumatic apoplexy-the effusion of blood when something cracks your skull-or apoplexia suffocata, when you are hanged, drowned, or strangled. And if there were a murder, a cover-up would have been better for everyone. A murder like this-a crime against serfdom-would have meant that any serf involved, even tangentially, would have been exiled to Siberia, diminishing the estate's value for the seven Dostoevsky children, who were now without parents. Whatever happened in Darovoe, it made Dostoevsky an orphan at seventeen. He hadn't seen his father since the doctor had consigned him to the academy two years earlier. His letters home revolved around urgent monetary requests: for new boots, for a new shako (everyone had his own shako, but his was academy issued), for brushes and paint, for pens and ink, for more books ("how will I spend time without books?"), for a trunk (everyone had his own trunk). He was in debt to various people. He borrowed money to mail his father a letter requesting more money. "Send me something right away. You'll extract me from hell. Oh, it's awful to be in extremity!" At one point he itemized his expenses in a postscript: his necessities cost thirty-six to forty rubles. He insisted that he needed twenty-five by June 1. That was his last letter to his father. If there were some mercy to the family's tragedy, it is that it liberated Dostoevsky from the academy's nettling smallnesses. Two months after their father's death, Fyodor wrote to Mikhail that he was studying human nature in earnest. "Humanity is a mystery. It needs to be unraveled, and if you spend your whole life unraveling it, don't say that you've wasted time." Death spurred the young man to reckon with larger things. "I'm studying that mystery," he wrote, "because I want to be a human being." Dostoevsky graduated from the Academy of Engineers in August 1843 and entered active service as a second lieutenant in the Drafting Room of the St. Petersburg Engineering Corps. A year later, he announced that he was retiring, citing 'family reasons.' He sent a formal notification to his family regarding his late father's estate: 'I renounce my entire allotment . . . for 1000 silver rubles.' Dostoevsky wanted half of the money immediately and half in monthly installments. He threatened legal recourse if it came to that. The fact that he was demanding a somewhat modest sum-not much more than the average bureaucrat's annual salary-might have emboldened him. He renounced his estate in a letter to his brother-in-law, Peter Karepin, who had begun managing the family's affairs. Dostoevsky considered him mercenary, vain, and "stupid as an ox." He informed Karepin that he needed the money to pay off mounting debts-the interest payments alone were onerous. The twelve hundred rubles he claimed he owed in August 1844 climbed to fifteen hundred in September. But retiring from the Engineering Corps to pay off debt made no sense to Karepin. State servitors were protected from creditors during their service, so retiring would only empower his lenders. Dostoevsky was adamant: "Although the two ideas don't square, that's the way it is." He told only Mikhail his real reason for leaving the Engineering Corps. "I'm finishing a novel," he wrote, and it is "rather original." His job had become meaningless. Sometimes he hired clerks to do his work, ensconced himself in his room, and wrote for hours, smoking his pipe. He developed a cough and a hoarse voice. He stopped responding to his flatmate's questions. It didn't seem healthy. His desk was covered in scraps of writing and full manuscript pages. "Letters spilled from his pen like gems, precisely rendered," his flatmate recalled. Dostoevsky called his novel Poor Folk. Telling Mikhail about it made it real. "I'm extraordinarily pleased with my novel," Dostoevsky wrote. "I can't get over it. I'll surely get money from it." He had reasons to be optimistic. The success of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls made it clear that Russians wanted stories about the lives of those around them, and Gogol's characters were so delightfully disturbing. "It will be a long time before we will be able to cope with them," Dostoevsky wrote years later. Surely his own novels could make money as well. But getting started as a writer proved difficult. He tried writing a few plays, none of which survive. To earn money, he devised various translation schemes to serve Russia's interest in western fiction. Mikhail translated German texts, and Fyodor translated French. He believed translations were a sure path to fortune. "Why is Strugovshchikov already famous?" he asked Mikhail. All of his calculations had optimistic bottom lines-sometimes several thousand rubles. "Just wait and see, they'll come flying at us in swarms when they see the translations in our hands. There will be plenty of offers from booksellers and publishers. They're dogs." Excerpted from The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
