[The letter ends with a request for a loan and a further description of Dostoevsky’s desperate situation.]
XXXV. To his Niece, Sofia Alexandrovna
GENEVA,
September 29 [October 11], 1867.
Good-day, my dear friend Sonetchka. Don’t be cross with me for my far too long silence — nor with Anna Grigorovna. A. G. has had a letter to you ready for a week and more, but she will not send it with this, for she wants to add something to it. Frankly, I want to entice an answer from you. We are so frightfully bored here in Geneva that every letter you write to us will be reckoned as a good deed to you in Heaven. Moreover, you know yourself how very much I love you, and how deeply interested I am in everything that happens in your life. We arranged our trip very stupidly. We ought to have had more money, so that we could change our place of abode as often as we wished. We have had to turn our travels into a stay abroad, instead of a tour through Europe.
Life abroad, wherever it may be, is very tiresome. As it was very expensive and very dusty in Paris, and as the summer in Italy was very hot, and cholera was cropping up there, we have spent this summer in different parts of Germany, which we chose according to the beauty of the scenery and the goodness of the air. Everywhere it was tiresome, everywhere the scenery was fine, and everywhere I had fairly good health. I was most particularly glad that Anna Grigorovna did not feel bored at all, though I am not an over-agreeable companion, and we have lived six months at a time together without friends or acquaintance.
In that time we refreshed many of our old memories, and I swear to you that we would have enjoyed ourselves ten times better if we had spent the summer, not in foreign lands, but at Lublin, near you. Anna Grigorovna has developed a great talent for travelling; wherever we went, she discovered everything that was worth seeing, and at once wrote down her impressions; she has filled countless little notebooks and so on with her hieroglyphics; unfortunately she did not see half enough, even so. At last the autumn arrived. Our money no longer sufficed for a trip to Italy, and there were other hindrances besides. We thought of Paris, and later regretted much that we had not gone there, instead of to Geneva.
I had already, it is true, been three times at Geneva, but had never stayed there long, and so knew nothing of the climate of the town: the weather changes at least three times a day, and I have had my attacks again, just as in Petersburg. Nevertheless I must work, and must stop at least five months at Geneva. I am very seriously attacking a novel (which I shall give myself the pleasure of dedicating to you, that is, Sonetchka, Sofia Alexandrovna Ivanovna, as I long since decided); I am going to publish it in the Roussky Viestnik.
I don’t know whether I shall bring it off; my God, if it weren’t for my poverty, I should never have made up my mind to publish it now — that is, in these days of ours. The sky is so overcast. Napoleon has declared that already he perceives several black marks on his horizon. To settle the Mexican, the Italian, and, chiefest of all, the German questions, he will have to divert public attention by a war, and win the French to himself by the old method — a successful campaign.
But though the French of to-day are probably not thus to be beguiled, a war is nevertheless very likely. You will already have seen this yourself (do you, by the way, read some newspapers? For God’s sake, do! Nowadays they must be read, not only because it is the mode, but so as to trace the ever more decisively and strikingly evident connection of great and small events). But if war does break out, artistic wares will fall considerably in price.
This is a very important contingency, which of itself makes me thoughtful. With us in Russia, indeed, there has lately been apparent, even without war, a great indifference to artistic things. Most of all I dread mediocrity: a work should either be very good or very bad, but, for its life, not mediocre. Mediocrity that takes up thirty printed sheets is something quite unpardonable.
I beg you, dear, to write me as fully as possible about everything that has happened to you and yours in these six months. What have you — I mean you, yourself — been doing, and what are your plans? We shall have to make ours very much the same. My passport is good only for six months, but I shall have to stay here six months longer, or perhaps even more. It depends on purely business matters. And yet I should like to get back to Russia, and that for many reasons. In the first place, I should then have a fixed place of abode. Moreover, after my return, I should decidedly like to edit something in the shape of a paper. (I think I have spoken before to you of this; the form and scope of the undertaking I now see quite clearly in my mind’s eye.) Now for that, I must be at home, where I can hear everything with my own ears and see it with my own eyes. For the rest, I’m glad that I now have some work on hand; if I hadn’t, I should die of ennui; whether, when the novel is finished (which it may not be for a long time), I shall begin anything else in these foreign lands, I really don’t know. I simply can’t understand the Russian “tourists,” who often stay here three years. A trip abroad may be useful, and even enjoyable, if it lasts about six months, and if one stays nowhere longer than a fortnight and keeps continually on the go. And one might really get well on such a trip. But there are people who live here long with their families, educate their children here, forget the Russian language, and finally, when they are at the end of their resources, return home, and set up to instruct us, instead of learning from us. Yes; here they stay mouldering, and then need a whole year to get used to things at home and fall into the right groove again. In particular a writer (unless he’s a scholar or a specialist) can’t possibly stay Jong. In our craft, truth is the chief thing; but here one can see only Swiss truth.
Geneva lies on the Lake of Geneva. The lake is wonderful, its shores are picturesque, but Geneva itself is the essence of tedium. It is an old Protestant town, and yet one sees countless drunken people everywhere. When I arrived here, the Peace Congress was just beginning, to which Garibaldi himself came. He went away immediately afterwards. It was really incredible how these socialist and revolutionary gentlemen whom hitherto I had known only from books, sat and flung down lies from the platform to their audience of five thousand! It’s quite indescribable.
One can hardly realize, even for one’s self, the absurdity, feebleness, futility, disunion, and the depth of essential contradictoriness. And it is this rabble which is stirring up the whole unfortunate working-class! It’s too deplorable. That they may attain to peace on earth, they want to root out the Christian faith, annihilate the Great Powers and cut them up into a lot of small ones, abolish capital, declare that all property is common to all, and so forth. And all this is affirmed with no logical demonstration whatever; what they learnt twenty years ago, they are still babbling to-day. Only when fire and sword have exterminated everything, can, in their belief, eternal peace ensue. But enough of this. I shall most certainly answer your letters, dear, by return of post.
Your very loving
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY.
XXXVI. To Apollon Nikolayevitch Maikov
GENEVA,
October 9 [21], 1867.
[At first he talks of his want of money.]
As far as I personally am concerned, I don’t care at all where I spend the next five months, for I intend to work for at least that time. But though t that is so, Geneva is nevertheless detestable, and I deceived myself grossly in regard to it. My attacks recur every week here; and also I sometimes have a peculiar, very troublesome fluttering of the heart. It isrt a horrible town, like Cayenne. There are storms that last for days, and even on the most normal days the weather changes three and four times.
And this I have to endure — I, with my haemorrhoids and epilepsy! And then, it’s so gloomy, so depressing! And the people are so selfsatisfied and boastful! It is the mark of quite peculiar stupidity to be so self-satisfied. Everything is ugly here, utterly rotten, and expensive. The people are always drunk! Even in London there are not so many rowdies and “drunks.” Every single thing, every post in the street, they regard as beautiful and majestic. “Where is such-and-such a street?” one asks. “Voyez, monsieur, vous irez tout droit, et quand vous passerez près de cette majestueuse et élégante fontaine en bronze, vous prendrez,” etc.
The “majestueuse et élégante fontaine” is
